In a revealing portrait of Newt Gingrich, Matt Bai claims there's serious Presidential talk about Newt, but the ethos of the piece suggests otherwise.
Newt is a man who lives on ideas, but atrophies on the day-to-day. And running for President or being Commander-in-Chief is all about the day-to-day. You have to sell a budget before turning Americans onto that super neat idea about revitalizing American obesity in the 21st century.
And Newt's smart enough to recognize his limitations.
First, let's get one thing out of the way. Bai gives you a good idea of why we don't cover John Boehner or Mitch McConnell as 2012 candidates or rising stars.
Re: John Boehner
He’s a solid guy, the kind you could golf with or put on your board of directors, but nothing about him makes you want to charge toward a machine-gun battery to take a hill.
Re: Mitch McConnell:
Over on the Senate side, Mitch McConnell, an expert floor tactician, seems about as socially uncomfortable as a man can be and still reach the pinnacle of politics.
Why Gingrich is like the man who made and then felled him (Bill Clinton):
Gingrich told me he has identified about 100 ideas and positions that command anywhere from 62 percent to 93 percent support among such a cross-section of voters: giving out tax credits for installing alternative heating sources in your home (90 percent); awarding cash prizes to anyone who invents a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon (77 percent); keeping God in the Pledge of Allegiance (88 percent). Gingrich’s vision — much more Clintonian than Reaganite — is to use targeted initiatives to create a kind of mechanized compatibility with the masses.
Why Eric Cantor and his House are listening to Gingrich (triangulation alert):
But Cantor was suggesting that Republicans might not need to contrast themselves with Obama at all — that, in fact, by appearing to share Obama’s basically moderate impulse toward policy, they could instead contrast themselves with Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, with an eye toward picking up some seats in 2010.
In the weeks after my meeting with Cantor, Congressional Democrats began to discern the outlines of this strategy as well, complaining that Republicans were trying to drive a wedge between them and Obama by appearing to embrace the president while criticizing the ideological rigidity of his party.
And why other Republican mouthpieces -- from Rush Limbaugh to Sean Hannity -- should shut up with their rating-gambit rants (ea):
He [Gingrich] was telling them [Republicans] that if Obama was going to move far enough in their direction, their best play — and maybe their only play — was actually to team up with him on legislation if they could.
“I already told the House and Senate Republicans, if Obama decides to govern from the center, you have to work with him. He’s the president of the United States. If the president of the United States walks in with a rational, moderate proposal which has his left wing up in arms and you don’t help him, you look like you’re a nihilistic party of reactionary opposition.
I don’t actually build oppositions. I build the next governing majority. I have no interest in being an opposition party.”
But why that's not likely to happen:
"Most Republicans are not entrepreneurial. They’re corporatists. They like the security and the comfort of a well-thought-out, highly boring boardroom meeting in which they do a PowerPoint once. And it worries them to have ideas."
Grover Norquist on 2012 talk:
“If you were going to make a list of 10 potential Republican nominees, Newt would be on any list. He’s probably in most people’s Top 5.”
Twice during the course of reporting this article, I sat down in Washington restaurants only to hear the people next to me speculating about Gingrich’s prospective 2012 campaign.
Gingrich told me he would have to make a decision about the next election by the early weeks of 2011.
And finally, why Newt won't run in 2012:
Gingrich is a historian and a futurist; he’s comfortable looking backward or ahead, but he doesn’t actually do all that well with the present.
For Gingrich, it’s about the theories and the strategy and the ideas, and for a decade, nobody wanted to hear them. Now Bush is gone, Tom DeLay is staving off jail time, John McCain is playing out the string in the Senate and the leaders of a doleful party look to their last great thinker for some inspiration. For Gingrich, that might well be enough.
