Newt Gingrich: The Indispensable Republican

Newt Gingrich: The Indispensable Republican

In the twelve years since he resigned in defeat and disgrace, he has been carefully plotting his return to power. As 2012 approaches, he has raised as much money as all of his potential rivals combined and sits atop the polls for the Republican presidential nomination. But just who is Newton Leroy Gingrich, really? An epic and bizarre story of American power in an unsettled age.

By John H. Richardson

Published in the September issue of Esquire — on sale soon

She was married to Newt Gingrich for eighteen years, all through his spectacular rise and fall, and here she is in a pair of blue jeans and a paisley shirt, with warm eyes and a big laugh and the kind of chain-smoking habit where the cigarettes burn right down to the filter — but she's quitting, she swears, any day now.

We're having breakfast in a seaside restaurant in a Florida beach town, a place where people line up in sandals and shorts. This is the first time she's talked about what happened, and she has a case of the nerves but also an air of liberation about her. Since he was a teenager, Newt Gingrich has never been without a wife, and his bond with Marianne Gingrich during the most pivotal part of his career made her the most important advisor to one of the most important figures of the late twentieth century. Of their relationship, she says, "We started talking and we never quit until he asked me for a divorce."

She sounds proud, defiant, maybe a little wistful. You might be inclined to think of what she says as the lament of an abandoned wife, but that would be a mistake. There is shockingly little bitterness in her, and she often speaks with great kindness of her former husband. She still believes in his politics. She supports the Tea Parties. She still uses the name Marianne Gingrich instead of going back to Ginther, her maiden name.

But there was something strange and needy about him. "He was impressed easily by position, status, money," she says. "He grew up poor and always wanted to be somebody, to make a difference, to prove himself, you know. He has to be historic to justify his life."

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/features/newt-gingrich-0910#ixzz0wD6nS09x

be sweet. OTOH it would also be fun to see him actually get the nomination and lose by 40 states to Obama with the Hispanic vote swinging states like Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado to the Democrats and the resulting coattails resulting in big Dem gains in the House and Senate.

Good times

with not a very good chance at winning the Republican nomination.

Interestingly, if the Puke field narrows to fewer candidates, I don't think Newt's odds increase.

I think his quest is a doomed commitment.

There. I fixed your title.

Another stunted personality needing to be President to affirm his worth. Didn't we do this once before? (Hint - he had a "need" to pretend he was a Texas rancher so he wore cowboy clothing, bought a pig farm, and called it a "ranch").

And his return to power will be based on what--his defeat and disgrace?

On the other hand, if he's the best they've got, maybe we shouldn't discourage him.

:eyes:
rocktivity

He can't afford to buy friends, like W, either.

by a third, and so on. Gingrich is a serial polygamist who views women the same way he views cars or pairs of shoes, as possessions to be discarded and upgraded when they start to look a bit shabby, it's just a good business practice.

One imagines he sees himself as rising above all mundane things, a man who thinks in bumper sticker platitudes and is incapable of seeing their practical limitation.

It's no wonder that in a party that counts its main luminary as Sarah Palin, he'd be regarded as its intellectual savior. When he says things like "The underlying thematics are beginning to be universalizable in a way that has taken years of work," he will dazzle a lot of people who can't tell the difference between word salad mixed with neologisms and great intellect. Morons will remember the Contract with (on!) America and that "he got things done," although they were all the wrong things and the few right things, like GOP term limits, were immediately discarded by the corrupt men who rode the promise into office in 1994.

My own hope is that this mental midget of a man has outlived his time, that the country has moved on past the glitz of an ad man's conservatism and into the realization that none of their dogma ever works, but it's probably a hope that will not be realized.

Could he win against Obama in 2012? Somehow I doubt it, as his candidacy smacks of the same "well, it's his turn" thinking that gave it to McCain in 2008. However, to dismiss the man out of hand would be a grave error.

I hope Obama is up for a fight in 2012 and that the DLC is not running his campaign.

snip…


At first, she had no idea that the wife he was divorcing was actually his high school geometry teacher, or that he went to the hospital to present her with divorce terms while she was recovering from uterine cancer and then fought the case so hard, Jackie had to get a court order just to pay her utility bills. Gingrich told her the story a little at a time, trusting her with things that nobody else knew -- to this day, for example, the official story is that he started dating Jackie when he was eighteen and she was twenty-five. But he was really just sixteen, she says.