[GeneV]

Both of these candidates have strengths and weaknesses. Polls have generally shown Gingrich very weak with independents, especially moderates, with very high negatives. Independents a Problem for Gingrich, Polls Find - NYTimes.com Romney does better against President Obama than Gingrich among independents as well. If progressives are happier with Gingrich as a candidate, it is probably because of this kind of polling. The other aspect is that Romney has the reputation as a moderate and Gingrich as a conservative, which leads some progressives to think that Romney might peel off more voters who might vote Dem.

[séamuis]

(Wasn't Cain supposed to be out by now though?)

those were likely the votes given to Stephen Colbert.

[stanleyk]

Both of these candidates have strengths and weaknesses. Polls have generally shown Gingrich very weak with independents, especially moderates, with very high negatives. Independents a Problem for Gingrich, Polls Find - NYTimes.com Romney does better against President Obama than Gingrich among independents as well. If progressives are happier with Gingrich as a candidate, it is probably because of this kind of polling. The other aspect is that Romney has the reputation as a moderate and Gingrich as a conservative, which leads some progressives to think that Romney might peel off more voters who might vote Dem.

Personally I can't see either one of them winning, Romney just wouldn't lose as bad. Gingrich would lose badly probably worse than McCain did. He's not only an idiot but he's a hot head and a hypocrite. When you get down to it these presidential contests are like beauty pageants. It's one contestant against the other. Obama will just look like the better choice to most voters. That will just be amplified if Gingrich is the candidate. Remember those political rallies McCain and Palin had. They were like a cross between a Monster Truck Rally and a KKK meeting. I think that scared a lot of people.

I still think Romney will get the nod for the Republicans. Gingrich doesn't have enough money right now. He has to win Florida. You need a lot of money to campaign in Florida. I expect him continue to be outrageous so he get's free air time. Romney will carry S. Florida where the money Republicans are. The folks in Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach could care less about family values. They are the money Republicans. Gingrich will win the Jacksonville area, it's poorer like the rest of the South (isn't it weird that the poorest states vote Republican and the rich ones vote Democratic). The key will the corridor between Tampa and Daytona. That's a mix of money Republicans and the Holy Rollers. Should be interesting.

[johnmflores]

I'm curious why so many progressives seem to wish for a Gingrich nomination over Romney (an honest question). To me Romney appears like fluff and a panderer, not someone to put in charge of a country with deep serious problems, in a world with deep serious problems. I think that will become evermore clear if he runs against Obama.

Gingrich might be mean and dishonest, but he is serious, and to me that better suits the state of the world than Romney's lightweight mentality. Gingrich might keep his act together throughout the campaign (assuming he's the Republican nominee), and he has even shown a little compassion toward immigrants and health care in the past. He has experience, he'll debate Obama better, he might be smart enough not to go negative in the general election (since Obama likely won't) and he'd have serious conservative support. Worse yet, what if he truly has repented some of his snake-like ways (as can happen as one reaches grandfather age)?

I don't know but to me he seems the candidate to be more worried about, or am I missing something?

I saw him speak once and he's very articulate. Comes across as serious (like you say) and intelligent, even if you don't believe what's coming out of his mouth. And the way he handled the first question about his personal life was sheer political genius. He may be more capable than Romney in the ways you've mentioned, but he's an automatic Get Out the Vote drive for any Democrat or left-leaning independent that lived through the Nineties.

[hut234]

Gingrich stands out in the field, especially if you count all those who dropped out, because he's so far beyond them in being able to handle the intellectual rigors and reams of info. And he knows how to do it far better than his rivals. He's a dishonest hypocrite, and anyone around during the end of his last time in DC remembers it ended embarrasingly for him. But what a relief to hear a candidate speak this year who wouldn't be manhandled by a Jr High debate team alternate. I'm just amazed at the whole parade of trolls who want to run this country and don't even have the faintest idea of what our foreign policies are (until they were very expensively coached and even then...Newt's a mesmerizing character, and that he can pass himself off as a Beltway outsider when he's the ultimate insider is more a testament to his skill set than the simplemindedness of his followers, which is more than one can say about almost any of the other candidates stumping around during the fall.

All in all it's a bad time to be either a lifelong Republican or a lifelong Democrat this time around. All smoke and mirrors, no one's talking about anything that matters, and the most capable one out there is the one with the most hopelessly broken moral and ethical compass.

[johnmflores]

...the one with the most hopelessly broken moral and ethical compass.

That really doesn't filter out a lot of politicians, you know?

[GeneV]

I think Newt has a good shot at Fla. The panhandle is not all that different from S. Carolina, and the GOP is not all that moderate. I'll defer to our Florida participants, though. I wonder how much strength Gingrich has outside of the South, though, and I also wonder how well he would do in Fla. in the general election.

Chris Christie just called him an embarrassment to the party, and both he and Romney are emphasizing that Gingrich was run out as Speaker in an ethics scandal. If his wives were his only problem, he'd be in fairly good shape. They are not. Ethics and lobbying for Freddie Mac could be huge.

[jogiba]

Intrade - Markets

[les3547]

An editorial this morning by David Frum, a well-known conservative I sometimes find myself agreeing with:

Editor's note: David Frum, a CNN contributor, was a special assistant to President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2002. He is the author of six books, including "Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again."


"Why liberals oppose a strong American presence in space."

That was the title of the very first speech by Newt Gingrich I ever attended, all the way back in the winter of 1983. The event was the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. The speech hit the two great themes that have characterized Gingrich's career to this day: enthusiasm for grandiose ideas -- wrapped in rancor, division and name-calling. A classic display of the Gingrich method was the memo he circulated to elite Republicans in the fall of 2004. (Gingrich is about as much a Washington "outsider" as the maitre d' at Cafe Milano.)

"There is a temporary narrow partisan division among Americans, but there is no narrow values division. On a wide number of issues Americans average about four to one in favor of Center-Right values. In one set of 34 issues the American people averaged 77% on one side and 17% on the other side.

"Only the continued overwhelming bias of the news media (amounting to a culture of the left which simply cannot imagine any other value set being legitimate) and the deliberate deception and denial of the Democratic ticket combined with a Republican failure to focus the campaign on the big choices has allowed the myth of a narrowly divided country to survive."

To drive home the supposed values separation between the Kerry ticket and the nation, Gingrich urged the Bush ticket to focus attacks on a series of issues that highlighted that supposed 4:1 values divide, including:

"1. A work requirement for welfare: 87% of Americans say yes, 5% no. John Kerry and the Senate Democrats have blocked the bill for three years.
2. Government should help faith-based initiatives help the poor: 72% of Americans agree, 26% disagree; Kerry is with the 26%.
Over a political career of nearly 40 years, Gingrich has convinced virtually everybody who has ever worked closely with him that he cannot and should not be trusted with executive power.
3. U.S. interests are more important than international organizations: 73-24; Kerry's positions favor the 24%.
4. Violent attackers of pregnant women who kill the baby should be prosecuted for killing the baby: 84% of Americans say yes, 9% no. Kerry voted no.
5. Children should be allowed to pray at school: 78% of Americans agree; Kerry is against it."
Looking back on that Gingrich platform from the perspective of eight years later, it's striking how utterly irrelevant those five highlighted points were to the largest problems of the time.

It does not address the inflating housing bubble and the lax financial regulations that would wreak such disaster in the years ahead.
It does not address stagnating incomes or rising health costs.
It does not address Iraq or Iran or the war in Afghanistan.

That's not to say Gingrich did not have strong views on those questions. He did, of course. It's just that, to Gingrich, such substantive issues were not the stuff of campaign politics. Campaign politics was about finding ways to define your opponent as alien, hostile and dangerous. The definition need not correspond to any actual real-world problem.

Look at Gingrich tenet No. 4. Criminal law is a matter mostly for state policy, not federal. Nor was America in 2004 a country where there existed much risk that a violent attacker of a pregnant woman would escape punishment: the U.S. already had the most draconian criminal laws of any advanced democracy. To what practical question is tenet No. 4 the answer? Answer: zero.

You see the Gingrich method at work again in his famous comment to a reporter about his view of the Obama presidency:
"What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together" his actions? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior. This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president. I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating -- none of which was true. He was authentically dishonest."

Alien. Hostile. Dangerous.

But here's a problem with Gingrich-style politics. It does not long survive the encounter with real-world voter concerns. The pollsters who generate those 70% numbers are creating a statistical artifact, not a workable political majority. In his pursuit of a governing majority, Gingrich has chased phantoms: In that 1983 speech about liberals and space, for example, Gingrich actually cited the popularity of the "Star Wars" movies as evidence that space exploration could be a winning issue for Republicans. The person most deluded by Gingrich's politics of cultural division has always been Gingrich himself.

Which is how this politician, so brilliantly adept at manipulating the internal politics of the Republican Party, has fared so badly whenever he steps onto the national stage. For all the momentum supposedly unleashed by his win in the Republican South Carolina primary, Gingrich remains one of the very most disliked figures in national politics, as Josh Marshall reminds readers in this remarkable chart.
Nor is it only Democrats who disapprove. Over a political career of nearly 40 years, Gingrich has convinced almost everybody who has ever worked closely with him that he cannot and should not be trusted with executive power.

The reaction to Gingrich's poll surge in December was panic among senior Republicans, and the panic is only intensifying now. It's striking that almost none of Gingrich's former colleagues in the House has endorsed him for president. Striking that nobody associated with a past Republican presidential association has done so.

He is a candidate of talk-show hosts and local activists -- and of course of Rick Perry and Sarah Palin -- but not of those who know him best and have worked with him most closely. Gingrich may raise more money after his South Carolina win. But prediction: Romney will raise even more, among the great national network of Republicans who recognize that to nominate Gingrich is to commit party suicide.

[GeneV]

Conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin, today in the WP, writing of Gingrich:

It seems, gentlemen, it’s time to get off your . . . er . . . time to get off the bench and into the game. It is time to make the case for winning conservatism — a conservatism attractive to centrist voters that can be translated into a reform agenda. If conservatism becomes a movement of anti-media bashing and hyperbolic rhetoric, it will cease to be a force in American politics. And if it is led by an egomaniac whose personal advancement takes precedence over any principle, the GOP will be (correctly) mocked.

An open letter to Republican leaders - Right Turn - The Washington Post

Excuse me, but she thinks hyperbolic rhetoric and media bashing began with Newt? Where has she been?

[hut234]

Wow, I'd forgotten about NG's "Why liberals oppose a strong American presence in space" speech. I wasn't so well formed in my own post-college world sense at the time (I came from a liberal Democrat household but never paid much attention to the details). But Gingrich was my first exposure to someone who wasn't a buffoon yet twisted the facts so offensively (fact twisting by buffoons never seemed to bother me). He was probably a big reason I stopped paying close attention for so long. I would just throw up my hands in disgust. His Kerry rants were crazy, and I'm not even a Kerry fan. The only thing Kerry ever voted against regarding prayer in schools was a no vote for the bill that was basically his stand on separation of church and state (as in the constitution) as a celebration of our diversity and acceptance of others' beliefs, not the condemnation of them that Gingrich paraded it around as. He completely lied about Kerry's stand in his speeches. No big surprise, but he's a dangerous person, and the most self interested of this field by far.