Always remember that Newt is a guy who left his first two wives when they were desperately ill (the first with cancer and the second with MS) for his mistresses, yet continues to have the balls to rail about the assault on the American family and cultural decay. He made his name saying that Democrats were essentially responsible for Susan Smith drowning her children, but that didn't stop him from complaining about the meanness of politics when Mitt Romney blasted him directly into hell.
Newt isn't just the worst person in American politics, he might be the worst person alive today. Not only was it a foregone conclusion that Romney was going to rain almost sexual levels of humiliation down on him, Joseph Kony probably would have, too. God knows, Kony probably has higher personal favourability numbers and is a demonstrably better Christian.
It's been said that Gingrich will have ten ideas at any given time. One of them will be brilliant, three will be balls-out crazy, and the last six will be built on intellectually faulty foundations, if not completely wrong.
But on Meet the Press this morning, Gingrich said something that desperately needs to be said;
Newt Gingrich told David Gregory on Sunday’s Meet The Press “the Republican party of today is incapable of competing” with a 2016 presidential run by Hillary Clinton. Gingrich thinks “every Republican” should be focused on 2016 because of the severity of their defeat in 2012. Gingrich said that if Clinton were to run in four years, “supported by Bill Clinton and presumably a still relatively popular President Barack Obama, trying to win that will be, truly, the Super Bowl.”And the GOP is almost certain to get their asses kicked, especially if Hillary is the Democratic nominee.
Rightly or wrongly, American voters now look back fondly on the Clinton years of relative peace and prosperity. The almost manic levels of criminal narcissism that both Clintons embodied have been forgotten. And Hillary's once impressive personal negatives have evaporated because of her better than expected performance in the non-political position of secretary of state.
While it's true that she ran the greatest clusterfuck of a presidential campaign in recent memory in 2008, both Clintons are formidably smart and have long histories of learning from her mistakes. The odds of her staffing a potential run with lobbyist assholes who are more interested in beating each other than winning the nomination are nil. Hillary learned four years ago that caucuses and small state primaries can bring as many (or more) convention delegates as big state primaries. Clinton's tactical mistakes were drilled into her by an incredibly disciplined Barack Obama and taught her lessons that are not likely to need repeating.
Anyone who thinks otherwise just doesn't know the history of the Clinton family. Say what you will about them (and I could go on all day about Bill and Hillary,) but they do not make the same mistakes twice.
On the other hand, I don't think Hillary is going to run. I think she wants to, but history is going to stop her.
All you have to do is look at Joe Biden and you can see how badly he wants the nomination. This will be Biden's fifth (and presumably final ) national campaign and the single best shot at the nomination that he's ever going to have.
Here's some important history for you good people. The last sitting vice president that was denied the nomination of either party was Alben Barkley. At 74, Barkley remains the oldest serious candidate for the presidency. He was nearly blind and he had recently been dignosed with heart issues. Furthermore, Truman's job approval rating in the spring of '52 was just 24%, which hurt Barkley considerably. His campaign lasted just two months.
The only three incumbent VPs who sought the nomination - Nixon, Bush 41 and Gore - all won it. More importantly, they were the only vice presidents in a two-term administration since FDR. With the exceptions of Nixon and Bush 43, two-term presidents since Truman tend to leave office with high job approval ratings, which, historically at least, sets Biden up nicely.The deeply unpopular Lyndon Johnson\s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, came within less than a point of winning the presidency in 1968
Both Nixon and Mondale were nominated as former vice presidents, leaving Dan Quayle as the only one to run and lose. And Quayle didn't survive longe enough to contest a single caucus or primary.
The Democrats of today are just smarter than the Republicans are. There were any number of reasons that Obama could have faced a primary challenge this year, but they knew that one would have sealed his fate and Romney would have won. Presuming that Biden goes for it - and I have no reason to believe that he won't - I can't see the party engaging in their historic practice of killing the frontrunner and risk giving the White House to a Republican.
The GOP, on the other hand, is new to that practice. Before this year, they avoided damaging their frontrunners so badly that it impacted his ability to win the general election. Even John McCain wasn't so bloodied that he was implausible before the Lehman Brothers collapse. McCain might very well have won a foreign policy referendum election, but he was the last guy who could have prevailed in the midst of an economic collapse.
The right-wing of the party changed that this year. They pushed Romney into positions that practically guaranteed that he couldn't beat an incumbent president that wasn't challenged in the primaries or facing a third party.
And if you look around, even today, you'll see that those Tea Party assholes haven't lost their appetite for launching primary challenges against perfectly electable incumbents. If they come anywhere close to beating Saxby Chambliss in the 2014 Georgia senate primary, I personally guarantee you that the 2016 Republican presidential nomination fight is going to be an indescribable bloodbath.
The Tea Party is not going to give up until they're handed a Goldwater-sized ass-kicking with one of their own at the top of the ticket. I was not-so-secretly hoping that the Republicans would have gotten this out of their system this year and nominated Sarah Palin, who Obama would annihilated before the Republican convention was even over.
If you assume that Democrats are sane, you have to assume that there's no reason for them fight a bitter primary when the GOP is going out of its way to make themselves as unelectable as they can.
I expect that Biden's incumbency will bigfoot Hillary out of the race, a process made easier by the personal regard both Clintons are known to have for him. If that doesn't work, Obama's control of the party machinery will do it for him. Lyndon Johnson gutted the DNC to avoid a rival power base that could later challenge him, something that I'm sure isn't lost on the current president.
There are other issues for Hillary to consider.
She has the same problem Jeb Bush does. In recent American history, there is a decided paucity of presidential campaigns that don't have candidates named Nixon, Dole, Bush or Clinton in them. The idea of Bushes or Clintons bookending other presidencies is going to be a powerful weapon against whoever runs against them.
Then there's Secretary Clinton's personal legacy. She's already lost to a nobody in Obama. If she goes on to lose against Biden, which she probably would, the family brand is damaged. If Chelsea decides that she ever wants to run for something, that could leave a mark, especially when it comes to raising money and building a campaign team.
I don't see a scenario where Hillary runs, or beats Biden if she does. Of course, I could be wrong about that, but it hardly matters. Newt Gingrich's point still stands.
The Tea Party faction of the GOP, which is still more powerful than you might think, given their ability to make a giant fucking mess of the primaries, still thinks that you can subtract from the electorate and win. That's about 80 different kinds of stupid, but those assholes believe it.
They think that if they just have a "Reagan figure," the turnout models and demographics that heavily favor Democrats won't matter. The truth is, that they may be right, but it still doesn't matter.
Americans, more than anyone else, respond to personalities more than positions. President Reagan ran more on what was possible tomorrow much more than he did on what was wrong today. You could see that, at the core of his being, Ronald Reagan really did believe in the American people. Reagan's individual policies were never as popular as he personally was, and there are decades of data that back that up.
Reagan understood that addition will always trump subtraction in politics. That's how he won the union vote. He knew that he had his base, but he also understood that the conservative Republican base was never going to enough to win the presidency. That's why you almost never saw Reagan deploy wedge issues that would only serve to keep voters coming to him.
That hasn't been true since Reagan. Republicans are so scared of themselves that they have to divide the electorate with nonsense so that they can keep their base. Clever deployment of wedge issues drew enough undecideds that they could win 50% plus 1, which was still enough to win, given the demographics through 2004.
Reagan at least looked like he liked you. Since 1994 - with the possible exception of George W. Bush in 2000 - that hasn't been true. Beginning with Gingrich, Republican candidates have built their platforms around just how disgusted they are with everybody except regular churchgoers in the outskirts of Birmingham, Alabama.
It's too cute by half that Newt blames the "cultural thing with our consultants."
And it’s part of this cultural thing with our consultants. I mean, if you start out thinking giving away 47 percent of the country, by the way, which included retirees, it included veterans. You know, it was an absurdity. And-- and I think this is-- this is much more than Mitt Romney. We didn’t blow it because of Mitt Romney. We blew it because of a party which has refused to engage the reality of American life and refused to take-- to think through what the average American needs for a better future.Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!
In large part, the "consultants" saw how well that model of politics worked for Newt Gingrich. Gingrich saw how well wedge issues worked for the late Lee Atwater and kicked it up several notches. Even as late as this year, Gingrich deployed the phrase "food stamp president" more than any other candidate, at least implying that that the problem was with those on food stamps as much as it was with the president who presided over the economy that made the food stamps necessary at all.
I have no doubt whatsoever that Mitt Romney believed his nonsense about the 47%. But it shouldn't be overlooked that it was Newt Gingrich, and people like him, that pushed him into saying it out loud in the first fucking place.
Consultants like Atwater pioneered tactics like this, but they were strategically used in ads that never once featured the candidate himself. Gingrich himself made it not only possible for candidates themselves to say these things out loud, but a tactical necessity. More than any other single politician, Newt Gingrich made it acceptable for candidates to declare their open contempt for half of the American people.
Reagan was seen as running for the American people. That progressed into Atwater, Pat Buchanan, Gingrich and Karl Rove, who ran against gradually larger segments of them.. By this year, Republicans were put into a position where if they didn't run against the American people, they were doomed beyond recognition.
And just like a good Republican, Gingrich isn't accepting a molecule of personal responsibility for any of it. To watch Newt Gingrich on Meet the Press this morning, you would think that the Newt Gingrich of just six weeks ago never existed.
Here's the thing; Newt is every bit the narcissistic monster that Bill Clinton was. He will run again. But unless he accepts his share of responsibility for American politics has become, Republicans will never right the course that they're on and they'll continue to lose. An optimist like Ronald Reagan will never flower in the garden of ruin that Newt Gingrich built.
Christianity teaches to "love the sinner, hate the sin." The GOP has embraced the latter at the expense of the later, at least rhetorically.
And if there's a single reason that you should get used to saying "President Biden," that's it.
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