PJ: Gingrich will say anything to earn cheers from his audience, whoever that audience may be. During the Reagan years he played to his audience by claiming that most of Reagan's policies were total failures (see post below). But listening to him today you would never know the facts for he claims that Reagan and he were BFFs leading the country shoulder to shoulder. Gingrich makes claims that he knows aren't true but if what he says can earn applause then the facts be damned.
He left the Speakership in disgrace with nearly 100 ethics violations cited and a $300,000 fine levied against him. He left his first two wives under appalling circumstances not only because he was having affairs but because he asked for a divorce as both wives were suffering from devastating illnesses.
There is a question of character about Newt Gingrich that people around the world can see. But as he flings red meat into the hungry partisan crowds in Florida, his cheering crowds prefer not see him for what he truly is.
Updated: As I wrote above, Gingrich will say anything regardless of its relation to the truth. Here is a video from CNN that shows Gingrich lying in a recent debate and again in a subsequent interview: http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/01/gingrich-admits-abc-claim-was-false-112344.html
The Guardian
Newt Gingrich fires up supporters with promise of conservative revolution
The former House speaker has been drawing thousands to his rallies in Florida, while rival Mitt Romney is falling flat. Gingrich is surging – and the Republican establishment is worried
By Chris McGreal
Newt Gingrich chose an aircraft hangar, Mitt Romney an empty warehouse.
Gingrich rolls into the bustling hangar in Sarasota in a dark blue campaign bus, his giant portrait grinning from the side as "Only in America" booms over the speakers.
There's a roar from the several-thousand strong crowd, flapping hundreds of handheld stars and stripes.
"Gingrich 2012" buttons are pinned to just about every shirt and some fans wave signs: "Don't believe the liberal media".
A ritual is followed. A prayer, the pledge of allegiance, the national anthem.
Then Gingrich steps forward and throws his audience the red meat they've been waiting for.
"If I win the Florida primary, I believe I will be the Republican nominee," he said.
The crowd believe it and erupt.
An hour's drive up the coast in Tampa, Romney – Gingrich's chief rival in next Tuesday's Republican primary in Florida – makes a presidential-like entrance to a vast empty warehouse. The site was chosen in order to make a point about firms put out of business by the recession, and to blame Barack Obama.
But only a few score of people show up. They are seated in chairs at one end of the cavernous building. The speech that follows is no less critical of Obama than anything Gingrich has to say, but Romney's supporters cheer without enthusiasm, and the flat atmosphere is compounded by the huge emptiness of the warehouse.
The audience may trust Romney as the best next president, but no one can say they are excited by the prospect.
Where Romney promises better administration, Gingrich pledges a conservative revolution.
That alarms the Republican party establishment, which sees Gingrich as unstable and volatile, and is fearful that if Gingrich were to win the nomination as the party's presidential candidate his campaign will eventually implode.
But what the establishment fears is also what has fuelled a surge in support for Gingrich that saw him trounce Romney in the South Carolina primary on Saturday, overturning a significant Romney lead in the opinion polls to win by 11 percentage points.
Now the opinion polls in Florida, which carries much more weight in deciding the nominee, are showing the same trend. A week ago, Romney was firmly ahead. Now he is firmly behind.
It's not hard to see why at the rally in the Sarasota aircraft hangar. Romney has supporters, Gingrich has believers.
"We are tired of presidents who promise to change things and don't," said Mark Stander, a 31-year-old property dealer. "They get in to power and they carry on the same, increasing spending and expanding government. Bush did it. Romney will do it. Newt will be good to his word. He will dismantle government as we know it and take us back to the days when this country was run by the people, for the people."
At the heart of Gingrich's campaign is his increasingly successful strategy to persuade large numbers of voters that he is the anti-establishment candidate even though he has spent more than three decades bound up with Washington politics, including a contentious four years as speaker of the House of Representatives and architect of the so-called "Contract with America", which originally proposed many of the policies he is still pushing, before he was convicted of ethics violations and dumped as leader by his own party.
Gingrich rails against the elites - liberal politicians, the media, secularists - as though he were not a multimillionaire who earned more than $3m in 2010 and had a credit line of hundreds of thousands of dollars at Tiffany to buy his wife jewellery.
He also conjures up a fantasy about the way the country is being run in which too much regulation of the banks caused the economic crisis and Obama is making it worse by trying to impose "European-style socialism". It is anti-American, he tells the Sarasota crowd.
"You always have to wonder when Obama speaks, which country he thinks he's talking about," said Gingrich, to shrieks of delight from the audience.
With Obama, though, it is different to any other president. The undercurrent is not only that Obama does not know his own country but that he is not a real American.
The attempts to claim that the president was not born in the US - led by bits of Fox News, right wing radio talk show hosts and an East European immigrant dentist in California - have largely been put to rest.
But the implication of otherness – that Obama is African American, and is also not really of America – is ever present at Gingrich rallies.
"By the time ex-president Obama lands in Chicago," he said, imagining the first day of a Gingrich presidency, "we will have dismantled about 40% of his administration".
In response, some in the crowd started chanting "Kenya, Kenya" - saying that Obama should go back to where his father, and some say he, was born.
Others took up the chant.
"I love this guy," said Morgandee Flannery, 35, a speech pathologist in her own "brain injury rehab" business. "He's very motivating. He seems like a very strong powerful leader. I think that's what we need in America. Someone who's strong, unapologetic for our country."
Gingrich thrives on the fired up crowd, sucking up the cheers and letting loose a fresh blast of invective. His dependency on the adulation came through at Monday night's Republican debate when the audience was barred from clapping or cheering. Gingrich turned in a relatively low key performance. The next day he said he would not attend another debate if the crowd is not allowed to cheer him.
There's no such problem in the hangar.
Gingrich's brazeness is audacious. He rages against the millions of dollars behind Romney, which funded the attack adverts that did so much damage to Gingrich in the Iowa campaign.
"People power will beat money power," Gingrich declared.
Another roar from a crowd apparently oblivious or uncaring of the fact that an extremely wealthy casino baron, with close ties to Israel, pumped $5m in to attack adverts on Gingrich's behalf in South Carolina and his wife has given another $5m to back him in Florida.
It's not long before Gingrich has fallen back on his stock phrase "as a historian" – he has a PhD from Tulane University and taught at West Georgia College in the 1970s – as he launches in to the first of repeated references to Ronald Reagan.
In Gingrich's version of history, he helped put Reagan in to the White House, worked with him to oversee the 80's economic boom and even had a hand in bringing down the Soviet Union.
The crowd loves Reagan, the last true Republican president in their minds after the two Bush presidencies betrayed the core conservative ethos by expanding government and increasing spending. Reagan did too, but that's forgotten because he still talked the talk.
Gingrich's critics portray him as erratic and volatile, constantly throwing out ideas but rarely following through on them. He rages against government spending but then proposes vast projects such as establishing mines on the moon, which few can imagine possible without government money. But the torrent of ideas is appealing to Gingrich's supporters. It reinforces the perception that he is a revolutionary of a kind.
Gingrich has also said that as president he would defy supreme court rulings he doesn't agree with – particularly on legalising abortion and that accused foreign terrorists have rights. Such blatant disregard for America's constitutional separation of powers might damage some other candidate, but Gingrich's supporters lap it up.
All this has Romney's campaign so worried that one of his surrogates arrives at the rally to persuade reporters to take a closer look at Gingrich's record of his ethical violations in Congress and his lobbying on behalf of the mortgage lender, Freddie Mac, which had to be bailed out by the government. Left unspoken is Gingrich's marriage record, but it hovers over the question of his fitness to be the Republican candidate.
Gingrich is the only speaker of the House of Representatives convicted of ethics violations, over the use of political funds for private use and for misleading Congress about it. He was fined $300,000 and eventually pushed out as speaker by his own party.
At the time he was also leading the charge against Bill Clinton over his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. What wasn't public at the time was that Gingrich was having an affair with the woman who became his third wife.
Gingrich has since said that he was not pursuing Clinton over the morality of his behaviour but for lying under oath about Lewinsky. But behind the scenes at the time, Gingrich was railing against the president's behaviour as disgraceful.
In the end, the assault backfired on Gingrich after he tried to make Clinton's affair an issue in Congressional elections. But the voters were tired of it and the focus on Clinton's personal life called in to question Gingrich's judgement within his party.
Then there is Gingrich's own behaviour. Three marriages. At least two affairs. Allegations from one former wife that he asked for a divorce while she was seriously ill and from another that he wanted an open marriage so he could carry on an affair with the women who in the end became his third wife.
The Romney campaign believes all this should matter to the voters, and for some at the rally it does.
"We have some grave concerns about Newt," said John Hosford, who brought along four of his six young children. "This is Newt's third wife. We have a family where you try to teach values – if you get married, it's forever, for good or bad. It's not what his ex–wife said; more troubling is that he has an ex-wife, and he's on his third wife.
"That part of Newt in troublesome, because how can you go preach family values when you're cheating on your wife and getting divorced?"
Flannery says she is a "big values voter", but she is prepared to put aside Gingrich's long history of infidelities, serial marriages and ethical failings.
"I do believe in second chances. And I do believe in forgiveness. He has been very open about making mistakes. He's been very open about wanting to make it right," she said.
There's another factor.
"Mitt Romney's Mormon. I mean, I like Mormons. I have a lot of Mormon friends, actually. But I would rather see a Christian as a leader of the free world, leader of America," said Flannery.
But even where concerns about Gingrich's past strike home, they don't necessarily translate into support for Romney.
"From an establishment standpoint, this country needs drastic changes, said Hosford. "If Romney gets in, is he just going to stop the bleeding but not treat the ailments? I think Newt's going to make substantial changes. From a policy standpoint, we really don't like a lot of stuff Obama does so the candidate who says he's going to do just the opposite resonates with us."
That's all that matters to Bonnie Gauthier, an insurance agent from Connecticut who retired to Florida for the sun.
"I've watched Newt for years and years. For me, he has enough age, enough experience. He's got his vision. He's telling his story. And I really think it's going to resonate not just with Republicans but people that really are sick of what's happening to our country," she said.
"I think there's a big swing to Gingrich. When Sarah Palin said 'If I was a South Carolinian I'd vote for Newt Gingrich', it went past the roof. God bless Sarah Palin. She almost endorsed him. She's staying out of the fray but she's got more power than the liberal media every want to know. People listen to her."
Not everyone is so enthralled. Julie London has a stall at the back end of the hangar selling paintings and portraits. A painting imagining all the Republican presidents in history playing poker goes for $250.
London says she is a registered Democrat. She has a "Newt 2012" badge clipped to her waist but says she voted for Obama four years ago. She's not sure how she'll vote in November, but it won't be for Gingrich. She smiles rather than explain why.
Business is not so good, she says. No one has snapped up the pictures of the elder President Bush or President Franklin D Roosevelt.
But FDR was a Democrat, and a liberal, big-spending one at that.
London looks alarmed at the news.
"Really? My husband said he was a Republican," she said. "No wonder they haven't been buying."
At which point she snatched the picture and stuck it under the stall.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jan/25/newt-gingrich-conservative-revolution
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