This week belongs to Newt Gingrich.
He drew tremendous crowds campaigning in Florida last week and a new poll showed him at the top of the Republican heap there, with 41 percent of the registered voters. Mitt Romney was a distant second at 17 percent.
This is the same Gingrich who was widely written off when his campaign staff resigned en masse earlier in the year; the same Gingrich not given much of a chance by pundits because of his adventurous sex life, his messy divorces and his performance as Speaker, when he shut down the government and cost the Republicans control of the House in the next election.
Never mind all that, Floridians say they like him a lot.
It is a reasonable bet that his image will begin to melt under the heat of the spotlight. When people begin to open all the baggage he carries and poke around in the putrid stuff inside, they’ll remember. Gingrich is the guy who doesn’t believe in child labor laws; he’s the one who would rather shut down the government than give an inch to the opposition; he’s the egomaniac who compares himself to Charles de Gaulle and believes he is destined to change history; the one who took huge fees from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lobby for them in the midst of the mortgage crisis — and then turned on them and said they were guilty of feeding that fire.
NEWT GINGRICH would be dangerous as president. The term loose cannon fits him to a T. He makes decisions impetuously. He attacks opponents viciously. He is careless with the truth. These are qualities that can give politicians a temporary advantage on a debate stage or even on the floor of Congress. But they quickly weaken and then ruin a president.
How then explain Gingrich’s surge in Florida? What does it mean when he wins more than double the support given to Mitt Romney, who still leads (or did a day ago) in the national polls?
I think it means that the entire Republican cadre of candidates is weak. When a guy like Gingrich, with such a spectacularly awful personal history, marches to the top of the line just five weeks ahead of the first voting, that says more about the rest of the bunch than it does about him.
The winnowing begins Jan. 3 when Iowa holds its caucus. January primaries follow in New Hampshire, South Carolina and in Florida, itself, on Jan. 31.
Let’s start a pool and bet on who will be left standing come February first.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
