Looking past the Iowa caucus, Newt Gingrich announced that he is going to start hitting Mitt Romney ?every day.? For most of the campaign, however, Gingrich?s famous asset, his hyperactive verbal imagination, has been limited to solipsistic fantasy. Gingrich never unloaded on his Republican rivals, and now it may be too late.
But before Gingrich completes another media metamorphosis ? from caterpillar pundit to butterfly candidate and, inevitably, back into the weeds as pundit again ? let?s run through a few of the classics and see if we can learn anything.
Continue ReadingWhen Gingrich?s senior advisers resigned en masse last spring, Gingrich cast the ensuing negative coverage as a misreading of his historic bid for the presidency.
?It?s going to take a while for the news media to realize that you?re covering something that happens once or twice in a century,? the former speaker said, ?a genuine grass-roots campaign of very big ideas. I expect it to take a while for it to sink in.?
Each Gingrich setback, it seems, has been a historic event. Remember when his campaign compared its failure to qualify for the Virginia ballot to the Pearl Harbor attack? An analogy that will live in infamy. Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post columnist and Gingrich?s former Fox News colleague, joked that the better comparison was the Battle of Hastings in 1066. More seriously, Krauthammer argued that Gingrich?s line revealed the ridiculous scale of ?the way [Gingrich] imagines himself.?
But you don?t have to interpret Gingrich?s political poetry to speculate on his self-image. He is an open book.
Take his recurring assurances that he is in all this for himself.
?It?s not altruism!? Gingrich once told The Washington Post, reflecting on what drew him to public service. ?I have an enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the entire planet.? This is just the beginning of a 20-or-30-year movement.?
Gingrich has long thought in these grand terms. As he once explained, ?I found a way to immerse my insecurities in a cause large enough to justify whatever I wanted it to.?
That cathartic urge might help explain this bizarre claim from 1994: ?People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz. I see evil all around me every day.?
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