Salon: When a party flirts with suicide [View all]

[City Lights]

Monday, Jan 23, 2012 12:50 PM UTC

The last time GOP elites lost control of their nominating process, they got Barry Goldwater – and an epic landslide
By Steve Kornacki

Everything about Newt Gingrich screams “general election disaster.” He is burdened with far too much personal and ethical baggage, is far too prone to needlessly inflammatory and polarizing antics, and turns off far too many voters with his arrogance and unconcealed contempt for his opponents.

The three most recent national polls all show his unfavorable rating at or near 60 percent — more than double his favorable score.This mirrors what happened the last time Gingrich played such a prominent role on the national stage, when he claimed the House speakership after the 1994 election and promptly established himself as the country’s most despised public figure — the star of an estimated 75,000 Democratic attack ads in the 1996 campaign cycle. The more most people see of him, the less they like him.

So while it’s theoretically possible that Gingrich would somehow defy his reputation and overcome his worst tendencies in a fall campaign, George Will was probably on solid ground when he said in the wake of Gingrich’s South Carolina triumph: “All across the country this morning people are waking up who are running for office as Republicans, from dog catcher to the Senate, and they’re saying, ‘Good God, Newt Gingrich might be at the top of this ticket.’’

The good news for Will, who recently wrote that Gingrich “embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive,” and other worried Republicans is that the former speaker’s breakthrough isn’t exactly unprecedented. Candidates widely seen as unelectable by their party’s elites have emerged during past primary seasons as threats to win the nomination, and the elites have generally managed to stop them. The question is whether they’re still capable of doing it in 2012 — or if the tricks they’ve mastered in the past few decades simply don’t work anymore.

Read the entire piece at Salon.com