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Newt and the Social Conservatives (A twice-divorced candidate seeks Evangelical acceptance)
National Review ^ | 11/18/2011 | Katrina Trinko

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.


TOPICS: Constitution/Conservatism; Culture/Society; Editorial; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: circularfiringsquad; gingrich; influencepeddler; newt; newtcare; nro4romney; nrovsamerica; nrovsconservatives; porkbarrel; rino; rinonro
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To: Syncro

The only minor thing I would quibble with around the edges is that I think his conservative successes are more important than his liberal dalliances - but I would not dismiss either.

And I would not argue that he failed to maximize the 94 election results and I was as disappointed as any over that. However - what caused that was a fear of the media and a fear of how he was viewed by the other side. He certainly seems to have gotten over that lately. I think that is why I took him off my “dead to me” list and put him back on the list of maybes.

And I can only assume that others have done the same thing for the same reasons. I don’t think anyone is ignoring his down side. He’s 68, done a lot, of good and not so good.


81 posted on 11/19/2011 10:18:31 AM PST by C. Edmund Wright (Moderator of Florida Tea Party Convention Presidential Debate)
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To: RIghtwardHo
>> So if you forgive the pedophile and you don’t let him into your home with your kids is that wrong?<<

If he says he has repented to God and I can see signs in his life that he has? You bet it would be wrong. Besides, I trust God to protect my kids in that circumstance. BTW vote for who you will. It's no skin off my nose.

82 posted on 11/19/2011 10:20:13 AM PST by CynicalBear
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To: Moorings

obviously it does.....since it was a “throw away line” and yet you made a point out of it.


83 posted on 11/19/2011 10:20:13 AM PST by C. Edmund Wright (Moderator of Florida Tea Party Convention Presidential Debate)
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To: Moorings

You have a sovereign vote, for now. Use it as you see fit, but don’t try to use the left’s accusation to herd conservatives into shutting up and letting the left run the show just because they ‘claim’ hypocrisy. I claim forgiveness ... and my God is bigger than the father of lies who is the accuser of the brethren. Inviting people to wallow in self-righteousness is not a winning strategy, IMHO.


84 posted on 11/19/2011 10:20:55 AM PST by MHGinTN (Some, believing they cannot be deceived, it's impossible to convince them when they're deceived.)
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To: huldah1776; SeekAndFind

Can get tricky when you mix Old and New Testament principles and personal and national judgements as well. Just sayin......


85 posted on 11/19/2011 10:24:33 AM PST by C. Edmund Wright (Moderator of Florida Tea Party Convention Presidential Debate)
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To: C. Edmund Wright
Mine was a "throw away line" too... a friendly, helpful suggestion. Obviously you want to carry on a conversation about it. There is not much to discuss.
86 posted on 11/19/2011 10:25:27 AM PST by Moorings
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To: apillar

"If a conservative having been divorced is such a problem for evangelicals, they better stop listening to Rush Limbaugh, he’s on marriage #4 and Ronald Reagan was divorced as well. While, it certainly would be nice if a candidate married his high school sweetheart and was faithful his entire life, for me at least, a divorce isn’t a deal breaker. I voting for the best leader, not husband of the year..."

Agree. (Especially when the Dem opponent went to a "church" for twenty years where the "reverend" spewed out anti-Semitic hate speech in his "preachings").

87 posted on 11/19/2011 10:32:40 AM PST by Qbert ("The best defense against usurpatory government is an assertive citizenry" - William F. Buckley, Jr.)
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To: RIghtwardHo

>> Your equivalence is a fault one. And I still will never vote for Gingrich. >>

Well, at least one of his ex wives will. How’s that for a real equivalence?


88 posted on 11/19/2011 10:33:21 AM PST by C. Edmund Wright (Moderator of Florida Tea Party Convention Presidential Debate)
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To: C. Edmund Wright

That’s interesting. Which one? I’ll bet Callista will vote for him, too, so that make two out fo three will be voting for the eeevil scoundrel.


89 posted on 11/19/2011 10:34:49 AM PST by MHGinTN (Some, believing they cannot be deceived, it's impossible to convince them when they're deceived.)
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To: MHGinTN

Apparently the one who he supposedly left on her death bed (neither which was correct, since she was leaving him and she is still alive) is still a supporter of his - and so is the child they had together.

So, if you want to hold that against him more than his victims, you are free to do so. I am not condoning it, but it you will take Clinton and Obama and Mitt because they are still married, knock yourself out.

Frankly, I want a government that leaves me free to live my life and whatever they do in their lives is between THEM and God.


90 posted on 11/19/2011 10:43:06 AM PST by C. Edmund Wright (Moderator of Florida Tea Party Convention Presidential Debate)
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To: SeekAndFind
“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.

This attention whore has no concept for how Judeo-Christian forgiveness is supposed to work according to the Torah. It is only to be granted after full repentance AND restitution.

I haven't seen either from Newt.

91 posted on 11/19/2011 10:46:46 AM PST by Carry_Okie (In the GOP, desperation is the mother of convention.)
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To: C. Edmund Wright

um, “you” ... I’m a Newt Gingrich supporter. But I agree with your reasoning.


92 posted on 11/19/2011 10:50:41 AM PST by MHGinTN (Some, believing they cannot be deceived, it's impossible to convince them when they're deceived.)
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To: Carry_Okie
I missed the part where it says God is required to show you the heart of the repentent ones. Many make the mistake of conflating 'discernment' and 'judging'. I discern Newt is repentent. Your mileage may vary ... or you might have different credits to run on.
93 posted on 11/19/2011 10:53:20 AM PST by MHGinTN (Some, believing they cannot be deceived, it's impossible to convince them when they're deceived.)
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To: SeekAndFind; All
Devil's advocate link:

Is Newt Gingrich a Conservative? You decide

November 18, 2011 By

Editors Note: The following list was sent to me last night by conservative researcher Steve Baldwin. It is sure to spark controversy, and I wanted to bring it to your attention. Please read, follow sources, and comment below with what you think and share with your friends using Facebook, Twitter, and Linked-In to get their input. If you have a blog, please link here so we can get the discussion going in the conservative movement. This is a very serious question as Gingrich is pulling into the top tier for the nomination. –Floyd Brown

 


94 posted on 11/19/2011 10:56:32 AM PST by Syncro (Sarah Palin, the unofficial Tea Party candidate for president--Virtual Jerusalem)
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To: MHGinTN

sorry, misdirected post. oops.


95 posted on 11/19/2011 10:57:39 AM PST by C. Edmund Wright (Moderator of Florida Tea Party Convention Presidential Debate)
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To: C. Edmund Wright; Syncro
From a Biblical perspective, you could make both cases.

No, it is a misunderstanding of Jesus' teachings that leads to that conclusion because He often didn't specify restitution be made upon forgiveness because it was presumed under Torah. He NEVER contradicted Torah. Accordingly, repentance must be followed by payment or restitution. That is where Syncro's examples apply: David paid, Moshe paid, Samson paid. According to Torah, the thief must return his booty plus 20%.

I have never seen Newt repent of his infidelities, much less seek to make them right with the women he wronged. Yet here we are, considering elevating him to our principal leadership? Look at how he has whirled from issue to issue, Global Warming, Carbon Trading, Mandated Health Insurance... and he claims to be a conservative? You believe that? What did he claim to his prior wives? Is he truly believable now?

There was a reason for a death penalty for infidelity for the damage it does to succeeding generations. It leads to standards of acceptance that divide families and raise children fatherless and faithless, a process that necessarily spirals a society into the abyss.

As we have seen.

96 posted on 11/19/2011 11:03:40 AM PST by Carry_Okie (In the GOP, desperation is the mother of convention.)
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To: C. Edmund Wright
Frankly, I want a government that leaves me free to live my life

So do I. However, I do not see in Newt a man who stops to contemplate the 10th Amendment as he proposes federal agenda after federal agenda. In a way, Newt's affairs are indicative of someone who simply does not feel bound by constraints, be they marital or federalist.

97 posted on 11/19/2011 11:05:16 AM PST by dirtboy
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To: RIghtwardHo

Now you’re comparing Newt to a pedophile? Noobie troll power is strong with you.


98 posted on 11/19/2011 11:06:13 AM PST by death2tyrants
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To: MHGinTN
I missed the part where it says God is required to show you the heart of the repentent ones.

Well then you weren't looking very hard:

Matthew 5:24 Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift. Reconciliation was expected before the Day of Atonement. That is why we have Yom Teruah to remind us and give time for preparation.
99 posted on 11/19/2011 11:08:31 AM PST by Carry_Okie (In the GOP, desperation is the mother of convention.)
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To: Carry_Okie

You made one case, but that does not preclude the other. You also mixed up personal redemption and God’s use of very flawed and sometimes even non believers (Nebudchadnezzar) for national causes.

I agree, your case can be made. Where you and I differ is that I have the humility to understand the other case can also be made.

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. 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. If it’s good enough for them, why not you? Just sayin....

All of which is still potentially irrelevant, because you are mixing personal and national situations IMO anyway.

Of course, I’m sure you’re happy with Mitt or Barack or Bill Clinton because they are not divorced. Knock yourself out. Now, never mind that they will all want a government that will infringe on your right to live your life and your faith the way you want — but hey — they are not divorced.

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.


100 posted on 11/19/2011 11:12:07 AM PST by C. Edmund Wright (Moderator of Florida Tea Party Convention Presidential Debate)
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