Journalism! Journalists! ... 
Posted on 11/18/2011 8:04:29 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Three marriages. Two divorces. Add up the numbers, and Newt Gingrich is an improbable candidate to win over the influential social-conservative bloc in the GOP.
But in this unconventional cycle, both national and early-primary-state evangelical and social-conservative leaders are signaling that Gingrich’s personal history is no insurmountable obstacle, although some would like to see him further address his past decisions.
“In general, I think people who have experienced the ultimate form of forgiveness themselves are willing to extend mercy and extend forgiveness to others,” says Ralph Reed, founder and chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition.
“In Newt’s case, he’s been very transparent and open about saying that he made mistakes in the past and that he’s found forgiveness and peace through faith in God,” Reed adds. “He’s got a strong marriage, and he’s close to his daughters and the rest of his family, and just based on what we’re seeing in Iowa and nationally, I think he addressed this, and I tend to think it’s a largely settled issue.”
Richard Land, director of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, is more skeptical, saying that Gingrich’s candidacy will be a “hard sell” for many voters. Land has been doing informal focus groups among Southern Baptists for the past two years on Gingrich’s candidacy, as he expected Gingrich to run and be a serious contender. He found that women are especially wary of Gingrich.
“He’s got a gender problem,” Land says. “His toughest audience is going to be evangelical women. Evangelical men, depending on what Newt does and says, are more likely to give him the benefit of the doubt.” Women, on the other hand, have told Land that they would vote for Gingrich “under no circumstances.” If the general election comes down to Gingrich and Obama, they say, they may just not vote.
Land thinks Gingrich should “find a pro-family venue” and deliver a speech akin to John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 speech on Catholicism.
“He needs to make the speech of his life, and in his mind, his target has got to be 40- to 60-year-old evangelical women,” Land advises. “And he’s got to convince them that he’s sorry, he regrets it, he would do anything he could to undo the pain and the hurt that he’s caused, he understands the pain and the hurt that he’s caused, and he has learned his lesson. That he has thrown himself on the grace of Jesus, and that if they elect him president, he will not let them down — that there will be no moral scandal in a Gingrich White House.”
One key move Gingrich made in 2007 was doing an interview with influential social conservative James Dobson, then chairman of the board at the prominent evangelical organization Focus on the Family. Gingrich’s candid and contrite answers may have helped make significant inroads in reconciling social conservatives to him. Speaking about former misdeeds, Gingrich said, “I look back on those as periods of weakness and periods that I’m not only not proud of, but that I would deeply urge my children and grandchildren not to follow in my footsteps.”
“Somebody once said that when you’re young you want justice and that when you get older you want mercy,” Gingrich mused later in the interview. “I also believe that there are things in my own life that I have turned to God and have gotten on my knees and prayed about and sought God’s forgiveness.”
Penny Nance, president and CEO of Concerned Women for America, praises Gingrich for being “very transparent” in that interview and for showing a willingness “to discuss some of the mistakes he’s made in his life.” Nance wasn’t the only one listening; many Iowans also likely tuned in, according to Bob Vander Plaats, Mike Huckabee’s 2008 Iowa campaign chairman and currently president of the social-conservative group The Family Leader, who extols Gingrich for being “very upfront, very transparent, very humble and repentful” in his conversation with Dobson.
Another advantage to Gingrich’s fessing up in 2007, Vander Plaats notes, is that it avoids the appearance of a sudden change of heart. “It wasn’t what I would call a presidential conversion. There are times when we talk about Paul having the ‘road to Damascus’ conversion. We sometimes in Iowa say some of these candidates have had a ‘road to Des Moines’ conversion,” he chuckles.
Unlike Land, Vander Plaats doesn’t think women are necessarily opposed to a Gingrich candidacy. “I really thought some of the soccer moms would really have an issue,” he muses. So when he heard that a soccer mom was supporting Gingrich, he asked her about it. “She put it in kind of a unique way,” Vander Plaats said of the woman’s answer. “She said, ‘I believe his childish ways are behind him.’”
This Saturday, Gingrich (along with the other presidential candidates, minus Mitt Romney and Jon Huntsman) is slated to attend Vander Plaats’s forum, featuring Frank Luntz as moderator, which should give him another opportunity to make his case to Iowa social conservatives.
Ann Trimble-Ray, a Republican Central Committee county chairwoman in Iowa who considers herself socially conservative, thinks that Gingrich’s “past issues with marital infidelity” may have “kept folks from jumping on a Gingrich bandwagon.” But as Hawkeye voters have whipped through other candidates, a narrowing field has forced them to reconsider. Furthermore, while social conservatives want a candidate who has promised “to vote right” on the issues they care about, Trimble-Ray says, they also want someone who is “best positioned to go up against Barack Obama in the general election.”
In evangelical stronghold South Carolina, there is similar openness to Gingrich’s being the nominee. Oran P. Smith, president and CEO of the Palmetto Family Council, notes that most evangelicals have at some moment in their lives “turned away from their bad ways and moved forward toward a Christian worldview” and may thus be sympathetic to Gingrich’s journey.
“The way Newt Gingrich has handled his past, he has been very direct about the fact that he thought that his former ways were sinful ways, and I think generally, because of the experience of the average evangelical, evangelical Christians tend to be pretty quick to forgive,” Smith observes.
Nor does he see any need for Gingrich to deliberately address the matter again in a prominent way. Instead, he thinks that a low-key approach and a willingness to take questions on the topic will best serve Gingrich. “He doesn’t need to be doing any mea culpa press conferences, I don’t think. But when he is talking to private groups and informally, I think he needs to address it,” he says.
A boon for Gingrich is his daughter Jackie Gingrich Cushman’s decision to pen a column in May addressing the oft-repeated lie that Gingrich served her mother Jackie Battley Gingrich with divorce papers as she was dying of cancer. That, Cushman emphasized in her column, was not what happened. While Gingrich did take Cushman and her sister to the hospital to visit their mother, his first wife, after she had had a benign tumor removed in surgery, the divorce process had been initiated prior to the visit by Jackie Battley Gingrich (who is still alive).
Beyond his marital history, another potential sticking point for Gingrich when courting evangelical voters is his conversion to Catholicism two years ago. (Gingrich was previously Southern Baptist.) Land estimates that at most “a tiny sliver” of evangelicals, primarily older people, will reject Gingrich on that ground, noting that conversion hasn’t much dented evangelical support for former Florida governor Jeb Bush or current Kansas governor Sam Brownback, both Catholic converts from Protestant backgrounds. Smith agrees. “We have a heritage in South Carolina that’s mostly Protestant, clearly,” he says, “but I don’t really think most evangelicals when they are choosing who to vote for are thinking in those terms, to parse the differences between the professing Christian denominations.”
Ultimately, for Gingrich, the key to winning over dubious social conservatives is consistently showing both that he understands why his past troubles them and that he is no longer the man he used to be.
“Character counts and it should count, and we want to see leaders who have the right moral compass,” Concerned Women for America’s Nance reflects, but she notes that there is also “room for redemption.”
“It’s important for people to own their mistakes,” she adds, “and the more that Newt Gingrich does that, the better it will be for him.”
— Katrina Trinko is an NRO reporter.
Your point is well taken, and that’s why there are seeds of doubt. He is a government tinkerer and that does bother me.
His divorces less so, because if that’s the standard, then we must all love Clinton and Obama and Mitt. And sorry, I do not.
We3 will have a few agitprops who will altch onto this 'refined scatology' and repeat it over and over at FR, in the name of informing the circular firing squad no doubt.
Let me save some of you agents a few minutes: Newt Gingrich is definitely not Sarah Palin. He is not as conservative as Sarah Palin. But he has a more detailed plan to save this nation and has posted the particulars on the Internet for the whole world to read it. He has also stayed in the fight at our darkest hour. Yes, it may be that he's stayed in because he doesn't have the family Sarah has to protect from the scum and villainy 'trained' by the source of this hit piece, but he has stayed in this one, this time.
Sorry Carry, you didn’t answer the charge very well. You are not his brother and you don’t see all the altars all the time. And you still are not separating personal and general issues very well. You are like those liberals who claimed that “turn the other cheek” means war is never justified.
When you mix up your Testaments and pull quotes out of perspective, you are on thin thin ice.
Journalism! Journalists! ...
Newt’s affairs to me are the bigger issue than his divorces. As I noted, they dovetail with his continual pushing of new fedgov agendas as indicative of someone who does not consider constraints to apply to him.
Are you Jewish? ... Jesus paid ‘restitution’ in Christian calculus.
No, you are doing that. I didn't cite that case. In any event, Israel paid, particularly for not keeping the Sabbath for the land as designed (not as currently understood).
Where you and I differ is that I have the humility to understand the other case can also be made.
Show me.
You also seem to think that YOUR seeing of personal repentence - as if he would come to you personally - is some kind of litmus on whether he has or not.
I said I hadn't seen it. For me to support him in any respect would require that I had. That is up to him.
In addition to being incredibly arrogant on your part, you are ignoring the fact that at least one of his ex wives has apparently forgiven him and supports his run as does the child they had.
Equine feces. If he wants my support, he'd best meet my standards. If you want to set your standards somewhere else, that's your business.
All of which is still potentially irrelevant, because you are mixing personal and national situations IMO anyway.
Indeed I am, as his personal behavior is quite indicative of his national behavior. Indeed, the two correlate quite nicely.
Of course, I’m sure you’re happy with Mitt or Barack or Bill Clinton because they are not divorced.
What a pathetic projection, and inaccurate too because of Clinton's serial adultery.
— they are not divorced.
Confused are you? A divorce is not a crime according to Torah; adultery is.
Maybe pick a President on what he or she will do to you, NOT what they have or have not done within their own family. That’s between them and God.
Aside from your appalling ignorance of what G_d actually said, there are plenty of indications in the Tanakh that the righteousness of national leadership is critical to national survival, which is among the reasons why we should pray for them. It is when WE CHOOSE our leaders that such matters then become metrics against which said choice is made. At that point, a candidate's personal behavior is no longer between the candidate and the Lord alone, but is also on me as a matter of stewardship and accountability for my choices, as to whether or not I accept such behavior to be of no consequence.
I prefer to make said choices taking into account whether a candidate has a demonstrated record of operating according to his word. Newt has failed that on multiple counts as is coincident with his personal behavior. It is indeed a valid indicator just as we saw with "character doesn't count" Clinton.
As a Jew, you quote Jesus speaking in Matthew’s Gospel, but you have missed entirely the essence of how Jesus taught repentence is a closet affair rather than a street corner proclamation. You also have tried to conflate the state of human-to-God reality prior to the crucifixion with the state of God-to-humans after the resurrection. Jesus made the necessary atonement because there is no payment you could make in life to equal the debt of a sinner before the Righteousness of God.
Probably by birth, but not by upbringing. I have made a multi-year study of Judaism and recommend it highly to Christians who want to understand what our Jewish Messiah was saying in proper context.
... Jesus paid ‘restitution’ in Christian calculus.
Oh really? Mr. 'not a jot or tittle' Himself "changed" ALL of his teachings when he atoned for sin? So that frees you to do whatever you wish as long as you're sorry??? I suggest you go read Matthew 16:27 again before trying to sell me that kind of 'we are saved by grace alone' garbage. I suggest you find the origins of the Hebrew term for grace (found first in Genesis 6) to understand that it is based upon t'shuvah, turning to G_d in penitence. ALL of Christ's teachings were founded there. Yet once one makes repentance, then what does a G_dly person do? Why, wouldn't you think such a penitent fellow would consult the Word Christ lived by all His sinless life?
The arguments re "the Law has been fulfilled" as therefore inapplicable is a replacement theology that was a post-reformation invention.
First, could you at least spell "repentance" correctly? Second, the first repentance in the closet is to the Lord alone. Thereafter we go fix it with our brother. There is no inconsistency.
You also have tried to conflate the state of human-to-God reality prior to the crucifixion with the state of God-to-humans after the resurrection. Jesus made the necessary atonement because there is no payment you could make in life to equal the debt of a sinner before the Righteousness of God.
You mouth your teaching well. It just happens to be wrong. Nor am I in for taking you all the way through why it is wrong when others have already done an excellent job of it.
I suggest you start with any of Mark Nanos' excellent books on Rav Shaul's teachings (that would be "Paul" to you). They are both scholarly and comprehensive.
Are the affairs of Newt just an accusation of the left? I don't think even Newt will say that.
Nobody is wallowing in self righteousness. Newt is running for the Presidency of the U.S. Folks are not judging him on whether he is acceptable before God. That is between God and Newt.
As he is running to be our President, we are evaluating him based on all the information available to us, including his character. It is the lack of this type of evaluation that gives us a lewinsky type situation in the oval office.
Content of character is very important for a President. Low self control is a warning bell as to how true he/she will be to this country, its constitution, our freedom and liberty.
We’ll see, eh?
How did I know someone would misdirect my comment. NO. I am NOT. It’s called arguing by analogy. Of course I used an extreme analogy so as to take the point away from the magnitude of the “sin” to the issue of forgiveness and then voting for that person not being related.
I did no such thing. It was not my point. And you know that.
There are two people running for the GOP nomination for whom I would never, ever vote. It’s RINO Romney and Newt. I stand by that. It has ZERO to do with my Christian forgiveness of them.
It is said ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’, what I am interested in is not hype, but truth. Facts are facts opinion is subjective. Newt has character issues. Because he is a candidate for being the Republican candidate for President: his character is important. He is a moderate, he is not conservative, he is an internationalist/one world order supporter. Look at his voting record while being in Congress, he is disingenuous, and actually supported the global warming fake. He is very intelligent, a good teacher, excellent communicator.
Fair and balanced ... you decide. I do not want him for President of the United States. He is close to Obama in his ideology. MO.
Have nice day
You deign to correct my typo yet you spittle the following childish absurdity of the undistributed middle? ... “So that frees you to do whatever you wish as long as you’re sorry?” Is you arrogance the result of having written a book or two, or is it just a defense mechanism?
Again FORGIVENESS has NOTHING to do with it. He didn’t sin against me, he did against the Lord and his wife. Only the Lord knows his heart.
My issue is TRUST. He’s shown time and time again to be UNTRUSTWORTHY.
The issue is TRUST. I don’t TRUST Newt.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qi6n_-wB154&feature=player_embedded
You are a fool.
I was not taking sides in your discussion with SeekAndFind — just adding a thought.
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