UK: Newt's skeletons

PJ: Click on the link below for the cartoon that introduces this article--evidence that "a picture is worth a thousand words".

The Economist

Lexington
The trouble with Newt
After Mr Dopey and Mr (too) Friendly, Mr Grumpy gets his turn

CAN something inevitable also be highly improbable? That is the question raised by the arrival this week of Newt Gingrich at the front of the pack in the race for the Republican presidential nomination. It was inevitable, after the successive implosions of Rick Perry and Herman Cain, that Republican voters desperate to nominate anyone but Mitt Romney would cast their eyes down the list and alight on one of the last remaining contenders.

And what, after all, is so very wrong with Mr Gingrich? Unlike Mr Cain, the man has been a serious politician—Speaker of the House, no less, and architect of the Republican resurgence of the mid-1990s. Unlike Mr Perry, Mr Gingrich does not go blank in the middle of television debates. If anything he has during the recent debates been a bit of a star, albeit a dark one, sneering contemptuously at the “absurd” gotcha questions posed by the journalists. And although nobody can accuse him of wearing his learning lightly, he does at least have a goodly amount of it, darting apparently effortlessly in discussion from the minutiae of federal social policy to the grand sweep of world history.

And yet the rise of Mr Gingrich is also improbable. It is improbable, first, in that his campaign got off to such a terrible start that his resurrection at this late stage, just in time for the Iowa caucuses in January, is a minor psephological miracle. In June he suffered what should have been a devastating blow when much of his campaign staff resigned en masse, allegedly in protest at his decision to cruise the Greek islands with his third wife, Callista, instead of raising money and pressing the flesh in Iowa and New Hampshire. He put a brave face on this setback, claiming that he knew how to campaign in a new way, by generating ideas and raising big issues in the televised debates. Unlikely as it seemed at the time, this strategy has now been vindicated: chapeau!

There is, however, another way in which Mr Gingrich’s high standing in the polls is improbable. A whole regiment of skeletons has taken up residence in his closet. Once these rattle back into view, as they surely will, many of the Newtly enamoured Republican primary voters will surely drop their search for an alternative and reconcile themselves to the inevitable nomination of the less exciting but more electable Mr Romney.

A good place to start, since it is what did for Mr Cain, is character. The likeable former pizza mogul faded in the polls when it emerged that a succession of women had accused him of sexual harassment. No charge that grave is laid against the far less likeable Mr Gingrich. The former speaker is, however, a serial adulterer, who divorced his first wife when she was recovering from cancer, when he was already bedding Marianne, the mistress who became his second wife but was ditched in her turn for Callista, his present one. At the same time as he was conducting a secret affair of his own he was pressing for the impeachment of Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Should marital cheating be a disqualification? Not in the eyes of this column. But voters in socially conservative and early-voting Iowa and South Carolina may think so. It is bad luck for Mr Gingrich that one of his former wives has been so willing to disparage his fitness for the presidency. In an Esquire profile last year, Marianne said her former husband “was impressed easily by position, status, money” and believed “that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected”.

Even after allowing for the bitterness of a woman scorned, and for the forgiving propensity of conservative Christians, this is not a testimonial that will help at the polls. He will also have to explain again the $300,000 penalty the House of Representatives made him pay in 1997 for violating tax rules, the first time it had ever disciplined a Speaker for ethical wrongdoing. A new controversy has now flared over $1.6m or so he has earned in fees from Freddie Mac, the government-supported mortgage giant which has since been blamed for pumping up the housing market and helping to cause the financial collapse of 2008. Mr Gingrich claimed in a recent debate that he had been taken on as an “historian” and had warned the organisation that the housing market was a bubble and that its business model was “insane”. But a Bloomberg story this week avers that officials who worked at Freddie Mac at the time deny having received any such advice.

Isaiah versus the management consultant

Few people question Mr Gingrich’s energy or originality. He was the dynamo behind the Republicans’ Contract with America in 1994 and remains a pyrotechnician of ideas: a “21st-century” sequel to the Contract is under construction. The worry is that he lacks the wisdom to distinguish between his occasional good idea and the dozens of duff and sometimes dangerous ones. He offers an odd mixture of pragmatism (he once favoured compulsory health insurance) and demagoguery. It is as if he cannot decide whether he is Isaiah or a management consultant.

Over the past year the demagoguery has got the upper hand. Mr Gingrich prophesies the end of “America as we know it” under a president running a “corrupt, Chicago-style political machine” from the White House. In the summer of 2010 he reacted to plans to build a mosque in lower Manhattan by saying that American Muslims should not be allowed to do so until Saudi Arabia permitted the building of churches and synagogues. He claims that Islamic sharia law is taking over the American legal system by stealth and he wants to abolish the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit because its judges are too liberal. That such a flawed and divisive politician has come to be seen as the shrewd elder statesman of the Republican presidential field is testimony only to the paucity of the alternatives. Unless they are feeling particularly suicidal, the Republicans will reject him, just as they have rejected Mr Perry and Mr Cain.