The next to last post in which he tears up the Bush administration on a Sunday talk show demonstrates that, if Newt gets the Republican National Committee he would not shrink from dressing down the Rinos.
Finally, this post from just the other day is included to demonstrate that we are not unmindful of Newt's biography.
Here are the posts:
The problem I think is that Newt will never get a nod from George Bush and therefore he will not be named chairman of the RNC which is a very great pity. I have long thought that Bush, instead of mediocrities like Governor Ridge and his successor, should have made Gingrich czar of Homeland security. Had Bush done so, we almost certainly would have avoided the catastrophic aftermath of Katrina and its consequences at the polls in November.
But Gingrich is not Bush's kind of man. Gingrich is not button-down. Gingrich is a team leader more than a team player and Bush, if nothing else, wants conformity on his team. Maybe this is what led us to the disaster in Iraq. In any event, Bush will not tolerate Gingrich in any position where he can make policy. So in order to have influence, Newt is left with making a run at the White House in 08. In this respect the Republican establishment's attitude towards Gingrich resembles that of British Conservatives toward Churchill between the wars. Indeed, in many ways including his intellectual candlepower, his prodigious output of writings, and his incendiary tendency to piss off friend and foe alike, Gingrich resembles Churchill. How nice it would be if the Republican Party could send out a message to its ships at sea, "Newt is back." If the nation finds itself in a fix resembling that of Britain in 1939, after a strike on the homeland for example, such a message might have to be sent.
Meanwhile, we really need Newt to play a bad cop to Bush's good cop for the next two years. Newt can attack, attack, attack, and unmask the lunacy of the coming Pillosi/Reed Congress. Any hope that Bush will even attempt to do this is forlorn.
The really depressing thought is that the only ball carrier we have on our team now is George Bush. We need somebody in some pulpit, bully or otherwise, who can at least fashion a coherent sentence if we are not to be swamped in 08.
And here:
While Bush is preoccupied with his historical legacy which is all wrapped up with and the war in Iraq, the Republican Party must be concerned, literally, with its own survival as a viable national party. In the 2008 election the odds are against us: the 2006 election demonstrated that the Democrats are capable of raiding deep into our territory and we can make no gains anywhere in the blue states. We will be conducting a national election after having held office for eight years. The demographics are increasingly against us as unchecked immigration changes the coloration of America and in America all politics are racial, not local. From the top of the ticket on down, Republicans will face a relentless media tsunami which will require a whole new set of tactics to counter. Finally the war in Iraq is a political disaster which may shatter our election hopes across-the-board and leave the party holding not much more than the old Confederacy. The last election demonstrated that the Republican hold on Missouri, Tennessee, Virginia (gasp, the Old Dominion!), Ohio, and even Florida are in grave jeopardy and with the loss of almost any one of these states we cannot have the presidency.
Enter Newt Gingrich who I believe sees the handwriting on the wall in the general terms which I have just set down. Newt knows the only possible chance Republicans have is to revert to conservative principles and to do so while changing the subject away from Iraq, away from health care, in short, away from the entire "progressive" Democrat agenda and onto a whole new way of seeing the world. We simply cannot win the election if it is fought over Iraq and healthcare as the establishment media will try to achieve as it sets the agenda. Gingrich is possessed of the kind of mind which can change the whole agenda but he is not the right messenger.
And finally, along the same lines, here:
Gingrich has nearly as much downside as Hillary but 10 times the upside. Historically, our closest article to Winston Churchill was probably Theodore Roosevelt. But among the current crop of politicians in America, the closest to Winston Churchill is clearly Newt Gingrich. He has not been utilized by the Bush administration for the same reasons that Winston Churchill was not utilized during the years of appeasement in Great Britain-neither one was a team player, both were brilliant, and both had a pyrotechnic ability to piss people off.
The Bush administration never embraced Gingrich, not because he is radioactive, but because he is not button-down. Can you imagine the last election if Newt Gingrich had been chairman of the Republican National Committee? Can you imagine the aftermath of Katrina if Newt Gingrich had been ram rodding Homeland Security? We might still have the House and Senate.
There was wide scope to let play the genius of Newt Gingrich in this administration but the country club Republicans would not have it. Karl Rove would rather pretend to be a real conservative than to actually set one loose inside the harem.
Newt Gingrich cannot be our nominee, we all know that, but he can save the party.
WASHINGTON - The following is a partial transcript of the June 3, 2007, edition of "FOX News Sunday With Chris Wallace":
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WALLACE: Let's start with your interview in The New Yorker magazine this week. And I want to quote from it at length. Let's put it up. "Newt Gingrich is one of those who fear that Republicans have been branded with the label of incompetence. He says that the Bush administration has become a Republican version of the Jimmy Carter presidency when nothing seemed to go right."
And later, there's this. "Not since Watergate," Gingrich said, "has the Republican Party been in such desperate shape. Let me be clear: 28 percent approval of the president, losing every closely contested Senate seat except one, every one that involved an incumbent - that's a collapse."
Jimmy Carter? Watergate? Collapse? Are things really that bad?
GINGRICH: Well, let me say, first of all, nothing that I said in The New Yorker disagrees with things I said as early as December of '03 when I talked about having gone off the cliff in Iraq, things I said all through '04 in trying to get the Bush campaign team to shift from attacking Kerry personally to forcing a genuine choice over values and policies, to concerns I raised in December of '04, January and February of '05, about how they were approaching Social Security reform, through what happened at Katrina.
I mean, so what I said in The New Yorker may be compressed, but in fact, it is things that for the last three years I've talked - I've warned all last year that I suspected we were drifting into a catastrophic defeat. I don't see any other way to read '06 except it was a defeat.
And if we don't have a serious, open discussion of where we are, I don't see how we're going to change.
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You go through this list. You say to yourself this government - I mean, not just the president. This is not about the presidency. The government is not functioning. It's not getting the job done.
WALLACE: But you compare George W. Bush to Jimmy Carter, which, as you well know, is fighting words among Republicans.
GINGRICH: Look, the functional effect in public opinion is about the same. Now, Republicans need to confront this reality.
If you were at 28 percent, 29 percent, 30 percent approval, and if things aren't working, and now you have a fight which splits your own party - and this immigration fight goes to the core of where we are.
If you read Peggy Noonan's column last Friday, which was devastating - and I think it resonates with where the base of this party is right now. The base of this party is looking up going, "What are we in the middle of - why are we ramming through an omnibus Teddy Kennedy bill, and attacking Republicans who criticize it, and calling us," for example, as one senator did, "bigots, when all we're saying is this government couldn't possibly implement this bill?"
There's no evidence at all that this government is capable of executing this.
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In 1988, no one running for president on the Republican nomination tried to differentiate themselves from Ronald Reagan.
There's a lesson there. Ronald Reagan was enormously popular. The fact is that - forget presidential politics. We as a country over the next 1.5 years have to do dramatically better.
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WALLACE: Basically, what do you think is wrong with George W. Bush?
GINGRICH: Look, I think that he means very, very well. I think he's very, very sincere. But I don't think that he drives implementation and looks at the reality in which he's trying to implement things.
And I think that's why you ended up with, "Brownie, you're doing a great job," when it was obvious to the entire country at Katrina that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had collapsed and was not capable of doing any job at that point.
And I think as a result, the administration has very, very high goals - Democracy throughout the Middle East - and very weak bureaucratic support for those goals, and the result is an enormous mismatch in just sheer implementation.
And this is, in the end, a practical country. Americans want their government to work.
WALLACE: You say that this president doesn't solve anything.
GINGRICH: He doesn't methodically insist on changing things. I mean, again, take the example last week. If somebody with tuberculosis, who is actually in the computer system, can't be stopped at the border; if you have three terrorists in New Jersey who have been here illegally for 23 years - and the Senate, by the way, voted to sanction cities and counties not asking if you're illegal, an amendment to this - what I think is an absolute disaster of immigration legislation - you have to look at that and say, "We're not serious."
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GINGRICH: Well, the bill explicitly grandfathers in somewhere between 10 million and 20 million people. We don't know the number because the government has no idea how many there are - again, an example of incompetence.
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And it's simply, I think, disingenuous. I'm assuming that the president and his staff understand what this bill does. And if they do, what the president said is disingenuous.
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GINGRICH: No, I don't think you need to run - in fact, I don't think you should run against President Bush. I think most of his major decisions have been very sincere, and most of them are decisions the average American actually would endorse.
I think what you do have to do is run in favor of radically changing Washington and radically changing government. And I think that all you have to do is look at the examples I've given you today where the government simply fails.
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http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,277454,00.html
GOP's conservatives strain for leadership
Posted by nathanbedford to freemike; Mad_Tom_Rackham; Wombat101
On News/Activism 02/04/2007 12:00:31 AM PST • 27 of 92
"We have to act independently of the White House. You do not serve the president, you serve with the president," Mr. Gingrich said, according to a Republican present at the dinner, which was closed to the press.
"Newt blew the group away," said another Republican who attended the dinner. "He is on such a different intellectual plane. He warned that the conference moves too slow and the RSC should be outmaneuvering the conference. He also said that the Republicans should neither blame nor support President Bush on issues that divide the Republicans from their base."
Gingrich is merely recognizing the reality of the 2004 election. That's right, the 2004 election in which sophisticated Republican legislators knew meant the beginning of the parting of the ways between them and George Bush. The 2006 election merely made plain to all that the Republican Party, if it is to survive, must publicly depart from George Bush and must wipe its fingerprints off Iraq.
This is not to say that an open breach with Bush is to be sought or even desired but it is to say that we ought to recognize that our interests diverge from those of the President. He is concentrating on a failed policy in Iraq which will entirely determine his historical legacy. Today he addressed the Democrat National Committee annual winter meeting! Bush will do whatever it takes to survive and that clearly means getting into bed with the Democrats. We already know he is eager to do so on the issue of immigration. We already know that he is quite willing to endorse any level of spending. Why do we not believe that we are witnessing the morphing of George Bush just as we have seen the morphing of Arnold Schwarzenegger after his rebuke at the polls?
While Bush is preoccupied with his historical legacy which is all wrapped up with and the war in Iraq, the Republican Party must be concerned, literally, with its own survival as a viable national party. In the 2008 election the odds are against us: the 2006 election demonstrated that the Democrats are capable of raiding deep into our territory and we can make no gains anywhere in the blue states. We will be conducting a national election after having held office for eight years. The demographics are increasingly against us as unchecked immigration changes the coloration of America and in America all politics are racial, not local. From the top of the ticket on down, Republicans will face a relentless media tsunami which will require a whole new set of tactics to counter. Finally the war in Iraq is a political disaster which may shatter our election hopes across-the-board and leave the party holding not much more than the old Confederacy. The last election demonstrated that the Republican hold on Missouri, Tennessee, Virginia (gasp, the Old Dominion!), Ohio, and even Florida are in grave jeopardy and with the loss of almost any one of these states we cannot have the presidency.
Enter Newt Gingrich who I believe sees the handwriting on the wall in the general terms which I have just set down. Newt knows the only possible chance Republicans have is to revert to conservative principles and to do so while changing the subject away from Iraq, away from health care, in short, away from the entire "progressive" Democrat agenda and onto a whole new way of seeing the world. We simply cannot win the election if it is fought over Iraq and healthcare as the establishment media will try to achieve as it sets the agenda. Gingrich is possessed of the kind of mind which can change the whole agenda but he is not the right messenger.
............................................................................................................................
And that figure is Newt Gingrich. However, he too has disqualified himself by virtue of his personal biography and he cannot get support of the rank and file for elected office. But he is a font of ideas at a time when the Republican Party is fresh out of any new ideas. We desperately need his intellectual energy. Do not forget that of all of the potential leaders of the party mentioned so far only one has demonstrated the capacity to organize a guerrilla against entrenched Democrat majorities and lead the party to victory and into majority status. Do not fail to remember that he did that in the teeth of resistance from the Rockefeller wing of the party. Gingrich can make a speech and he can marshal arguments and he can skewer Democrats without raising a sweat. Gingrich could also head the national party but I think there would be ill considered but widespread resistance to any move he might make in that direction. We must not be foolish and fail to somehow take advantage of Gingrich's political genius.
