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muriel_volestrangler

(101,150 posts)
Mon Mar 5, 2012, 07:11 AM Mar 2012

Lazarus Fading: Welcome to the End of Newt Gingrich

ATLANTA — I live in Cobb County, Georgia, and once upon a time Newt Gingrich was my Congressman. He had an office a couple of miles from my house. Whenever I told friends from other parts of the county the name of my representative, they'd say, "Really?" It made me instantly colorful, instantly exotic. I was not ashamed to have Newt Gingrich as my Congressman, even when his behavior was shameful. So last week, I got up early one morning and went to see him make his last stand, at a speech in the ballroom of the Cobb Energy Centre, in front of the Cobb County Chamber of Commerce. His speech was hosted, or sponsored, by WellStar, a health-care chain headquartered in Georgia. His audience was comprised largely, or exclusively, of bankers, realtors, developers, executives, and local politicians and government officials. He had, in other words, the very definition of a home-field advantage, which is what made the event — and the final aching collapse of his campaign, with the national press treating Speaker Gingrich as just another variation on Congressman Paul — all the more poignant.

Yes, I know: "Newt" and the word "poignant" reside as comfortably in the same sentence as "Callista" and the word "relaxed." And the Cobb County bacon-and-egg breakfast was supposed to represent the beginning of yet another narrative of resurgence, yet another opportunity for Gingrich to demonstrate his resiliency and then, of course, the greater force of his genius. As the candidate announced as soon as he took the podium, the Nietzschean Narrative was loaded up and ready to go: That very morning, no less an authority than Matt Drudge had run a picture of Gingrich with the headline "Lazarus Rising," which no less an authority than Gingrich himself said "got it right." On Super Tuesday, he would take his home state of Georgia, whereupon voters in Mississippi, Alabama, and all other Southern battleground states to come would realize that he alone of all the candidates was One of Theirs, whereupon Republicans nationwide would come to understand that he alone of all the candidates could beat Barack Obama in a series of seven televised Lincoln-Douglas style debates.....

Pshaw. There was a problem at the Cobb County Chamber of Commerce breakfast, and it wasn't simply that a current of awkward skepticism ran through the room, as one "old friend" after another stood up to ask Gingrich about the reality of his chances. It was that the breakfast had a valedictory feel, and seemed more a homecoming than the start of something new. Over the course of his campaign — hell, his career — the one thing that has made Gingrich tolerable is that while he panders to the past as much as any politician, he stands alone among Republicans for not seeming terrified of the future. Although he made himself a figure of fun with his talk of putting a colony on the moon, at least he wasn't afraid of science and technology, and although he indulged in plenty of Christian cant, at least he didn't settle — at least he didn't build his campaign around it. If not quite "a visionary," as he shamelessly called himself, he was at least an optimist, and so the sense of nostalgia that hung over the breakfast was fatal. Newt Gingrich, at the Cobb County Chamber of Commerce breakfast, was nostalgic for Cobb County. He was nostalgic for his days as Congressman and for his time as Speaker. He was nostalgic for Ronald Reagan, of course, but he was also nostalgic for Bill Clinton, whom he portrayed not as an antagonist but almost as a comrade-in-arms, back in those days when they were balancing budgets, reforming welfare, and engaging in sexual congress with their staffers. He was even nostalgic for past Cobb County Chamber of Commerce breakfasts, mentioning one he attended in 1998, before he and Clinton fell from grace, and saying that now, on second thought, he wished he'd begun his presidential campaign here... which made him sound nostalgic for the campaign itself.

And it was here that Gingrich's nostalgia turned into something else — when it took on the proper Nixonian note of delusion and self-pity &mdasdh; for what Gingrich turns out to be really nostalgic about is the debates. He was still insisting that he could beat Obama in a debate and got one of his biggest rounds of applause, as well as one of his biggest laughs, when he said that "beating Obama will be easy." You see, he could always depend on the debates to turn things around for him, to change the momentum when the momentum was set against him. But his problem now was that there were no more debates, and so Newt Gingrich was reduced to telling the crowd about a debate he'd had with some guy who'd assailed him at the airport. Gingrich crowed that he let the man speak, then had taken him apart, point by point and piece by piece: "The guy got totally rattled — nobody had ever used his own words against him. He finally ran off, and it was a high point in my campaign."

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/newt-gingrich-super-tuesday-georgia-7099344#ixzz1oEv7OxBW
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