Filibuster CartoonsTitle: 20111124 (click to view)
Date: November 24, 2011
Long before I knew anything about politics, I remember enjoying Gary Trudeau's depiction of Newt Gingrich in the Sunday comics. Newt was still Speaker of the House in those days, and in Doonesbury he was always depicted as this immaculately polished cartoon bomb, usually yelling at people through an improbably held office phone or belittling reporters as his sparkling fuse filled the room with smoke. It was all very entertaining to my 12-year-old self, and, from the perspective of the Newt 2012 presidential campaign, probably a desirable level of familiarity with their candidate's background.
The Gingrich strategy to win the White House seems to be based around a fascinating brand of cynicism that presumes America will forget, remember, revise, and accept premises about Newt in exactly the right ratio to craft a impenetrable narrative around him. The specific arithmetic goes something like this: as indifference to Newt's flaws increases, so too must a compensating willingness to believe in his positives. There must be boredom, but it must be a very specific sort. And there must be memories, but they have to be vague and pliable.
It's a testament to the surprising success of his campaign's weird political alchemy that it's now near-impossible to discuss Gingrich in the year 2011 without noting that although he obviously has a sordid past of scandal and disgrace, so too is it equally obvious that he is by far the most brilliant and thoughtful man in the GOP field. Like the blind guy with a great sense of hearing, it's taken for granted that Newt has developed almost super-human skills to make up for his most inescapable handicaps — which we increasingly don't really remember or care about in the first place.
If you haven't boned up on the official PR ahead of time, watching Gingrich participate in a GOP debate can easily trigger the uncomfortable sensation of trying to comprehend some elaborate in-joke no one told you about. Gingrich is surly, snarky, and openly rude to the moderators, and delivers snippy, incomplete, and vigorously lackadaisical replies with great amounts of stagey pride. Much more time is spent explaining why other people's ideas, or the media, or the "Warsh-ington" elites are stupid and small-minded (frequently in those exact words) than offering any coherent alternative. Yet, like clockwork, the next day, the conservatives talking heads will all be gushing about how Newt was clearly "the smartest guy on the stage," and "actually talking about ideas." (Newt's official Twitter account does little other than endlessly RT such statements).
The contrast between Newt mythology and the real Newt hidden somewhere within becomes even sharper in those rare moments when the candidate actually bothers to articulate a policy position. Right now, of course, everyone's in a bit of a tizzy over Tuesday night's jarring revelation that Gingrich favors solving America's illegal immigrant crisis with the same basic "path to citizenship" scheme previously championed by unfashionable Republican moderates like John McCain and George W. Bush. Such mask-slipping has the potential to make people remember Newt's other vast assortment of conservative heresies — including his denunciation of Paul Ryan's Social Security proposals as "right-wing social engineering," his support of an Obamacare-style individual mandate, his paid collusion with Freddie Mac, and a string of bipartisan "get tough on climate change ads" in which he costarred alongside one Nancy Pelosi — at a time when he's been working so hard trying to cast himself as the golden boy of Tea Party populists.
Judged on his long history of stated views, philosophical principles, and general policy disposition, Gingrich is every bit the Beltway-moderate-establishment hack Mitt Romney is, and would almost certainly govern like one as president. But of course that's exactly the opposite of what he's being judged on. Didn't you hear? Newt 2.0 is his party's genius-conservative elder statesman, a guy who is obviously brilliant because only a brilliant man would act so cocksure and irritable in the face of lessers, and obviously ultraconservative because all that aforementioned brilliance is just the thing to guarantee ideological consistency. It's a series of fantastic premises that can only survive in a delicate climate where the media is just bored enough, the public is just ignorant enough, and the Republican base is just desperate enough to let him get away with it. And here we are.
This is not necessarily to discredit Newt as a viable presidential contender. He is certainly more qualified, experienced, thoughtful, and mature than many of his primary opponents, and, having gotten this far, has demonstrated a particular kind of strategic cleverness that may surprise us still (as it already has). But when 99% of that cleverness is based around an incredibly implausible marketing campaign that seeks to maintain the illusion that Gingrich is something he is fundamentally not — namely an ideologically hard line, conservative populist whose expert debate skills and incontestable mastery of the facts will allow him to easily crush President Obama through sheer intellectual force — then there are still many legitimate questions to be asked.
Gary Trudeau's bomb metaphor remains as apt as ever. How long until the explosion?
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