Why Newt Gingrich Will Never Be President
by Michael Tomasky
The Daily Beast
He’s out to win the White House. But as Michael Tomasky explains, Newt’s campaign is merely comic relief.
I don’t know much in this life. I can’t tell you who’s going to win the NBA championship or when the Pakistani ISI will become a bulwark against extremism or what year Keith Richards’ lungs will finally cry uncle. But I do know this: Newt Gingrich will never be president of the United States.
It will of course be fun to watch him run. Following Gingrich is a form of entertainment—he’s an all-around vaudevillian of political theatre. Journalists have a soft spot for him, even avowedly liberal ones like me, because if nothing else he is sui generis. I met him in 1992 when I was down in Atlanta for that year’s vice-presidential debate, the one remembered if at all for Admiral James Stockdale’s amusing self-interrogation (“What am I doing here?”). Gingrich was in a pretty tough House race that year, but he took ample time out of an October afternoon to shoot the breeze with me, a reporter at the time for the Village Voice, of all disreputable things. He was trying to sell me on the idea that the Republican Party was going to compete seriously for the black vote over the next decade. I was young. He was, or seemed, sincere. I bought the whole package.
But since then, things have changed considerably. Far from having a serious chance of making it to the Oval Office, his actions (and inactions) have rendered himself less electable than Michele Bachmann—and for two main reasons.
The first is the one everyone writes about—his legendary lack of discipline, which shows up in far more than his tendency to launch rhetorical projectiles from his mouth at regular intervals. This, at any rate, is what I took from a conversation with Gingrich’s old and dear friend Matt Towery the other day. Towery is a sharp and likeable guy who runs an inside-Georgia-politics website and was a Gingrich adviser for many years.
(Original here.)
The Daily Beast
He’s out to win the White House. But as Michael Tomasky explains, Newt’s campaign is merely comic relief.
I don’t know much in this life. I can’t tell you who’s going to win the NBA championship or when the Pakistani ISI will become a bulwark against extremism or what year Keith Richards’ lungs will finally cry uncle. But I do know this: Newt Gingrich will never be president of the United States.
It will of course be fun to watch him run. Following Gingrich is a form of entertainment—he’s an all-around vaudevillian of political theatre. Journalists have a soft spot for him, even avowedly liberal ones like me, because if nothing else he is sui generis. I met him in 1992 when I was down in Atlanta for that year’s vice-presidential debate, the one remembered if at all for Admiral James Stockdale’s amusing self-interrogation (“What am I doing here?”). Gingrich was in a pretty tough House race that year, but he took ample time out of an October afternoon to shoot the breeze with me, a reporter at the time for the Village Voice, of all disreputable things. He was trying to sell me on the idea that the Republican Party was going to compete seriously for the black vote over the next decade. I was young. He was, or seemed, sincere. I bought the whole package.
But since then, things have changed considerably. Far from having a serious chance of making it to the Oval Office, his actions (and inactions) have rendered himself less electable than Michele Bachmann—and for two main reasons.
The first is the one everyone writes about—his legendary lack of discipline, which shows up in far more than his tendency to launch rhetorical projectiles from his mouth at regular intervals. This, at any rate, is what I took from a conversation with Gingrich’s old and dear friend Matt Towery the other day. Towery is a sharp and likeable guy who runs an inside-Georgia-politics website and was a Gingrich adviser for many years.
(Original here.)
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