Following one of the most bizarre twenty-four hour periods in American politics I can remember, Newt “Lazarus” Gingrich is seemingly heading for a stunning triumph in tomorrow’s South Carolina primary—a victory that could well upend the race for the Republican nomination. Until a couple of days ago, Mitt Romney was on the verge of a quick victory, or at least that is what virtually every pundit in the country was saying. Now it looks like the contest could turn into a long, drawn-out slugfest between Mitt and Newt, with Ron Paul sitting in the peanut gallery.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The big news last night was Newt, at the very opening of the debate, throwing a carefully prepared tantrum aimed not just at moderator John King but also at CNN and the rest of the mainstream media for their having the temerity to ask about his ex-wife Marianne Gingrich’s claim that, shortly before they split up, he asked her to partake in an “open marriage.”
It was the question on everybody’s mind, a question that Gingrich had most certainly been preparing for, and King opened the debate by turning to him and asking it straight out: Would he like to respond to his ex-wife’s statements to ABC News?
“No, but I will,” Gingrich snapped with the menacing stare of an aging gunfighter called upon to dispatch one more young foolish hood who thought he was faster to the draw. “I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder govern this country. I am appalled that you would begin a Presidential debate on a topic like that…. To take an ex-wife and make it two days before the primary a significant question for a Presidential campaign is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine.”
For Gingrich, blasting away at the media is his standard routine when facing scrutiny. Anybody who has covered him knows that this is how he behaves. He did it during previous debates, although not with this kind of venom, and he did it throughout the nineteen-nineties. But King and his producers seemed stunned by Newt’s fusillade. Rather than standing up to Gingrich and pressing him about his ex-wife’s allegations, which included the affirmation that he doesn’t have the moral character to be President, King allowed him to dismiss them as unfounded (“Every personal friend in this period knows it was false”) and get in a few more shots at CNN and the rest of the “élite media” for “defending Barack Obama by attacking Republicans.”
With the crowd on its feet hooting and hollering like it was a football match, King once again passed up the obvious questions—“Are you calling your ex-wife a liar, Speaker Gingrich?” “How would your friends know what you said to her in a private conversation?” “If you are so concerned about privacy, why, during the Monica Lewinsky affair, did you insist on holding President Clinton to account for his personal life?”—King simply moved on to the other candidates, who also seemed too intimidated by the crowd reaction to put Newt on the grill. (Romney: “John, lets get onto the real issues, is all I’ve got to say.”)
After that, the rest of the debate was a bit beside the point. Mitt got flustered, once again, by questions about his taxes. Rick Santorum scored some points on substance over Romney and Gingrich, reminding people that the latter, after four years as Speaker, “was thrown out by conservatives—there was a coup against him.” Gingrich, veteran pol that he is, leavened his “grandiose thoughts”—his own description—with talk of more prosaic local matters, such as the need to upgrade Charleston’s harbor. Paul quipped that he hadn’t released his taxes yet because he was embarrassed by how poor he was compared to his rivals.
But none of that mattered very much compared to what had happened earlier. John King and CNN hadn’t won the primary for Gingrich, but by giving him the stage unimpeded—a moment Jeff Greenfield, via Twitter, instantly compared to Ronald Reagan’s famous statement during his 1980 debate with George H. W. Bush: “I am paying for this microphone!”—they had helped him not to lose it.
Even before the debate, even before Rick Perry’s dramatic decision earlier in the day to bow out and endorse Newt, three different polls—from Rasmussen, Insider Advantage, and Public Policy Polling—had showed the former Speaker surging past Mitt. The first survey showed him leading by two points, the second by three points, and the third by six points. Most of the questioning for these polls had been carried out on Wednesday.
Evidently, Newt’s pontificating and use of racially coded language during Monday’s debate, Romney’s problems with his taxes, or some combination of the two, impressed Republicans in the Palmetto State. The Rasmussen poll showed Gingrich going from fourteen points behind Mitt before Monday’s debate to two points ahead of him on Wednesday. “Newt has all the momentum in South Carolina now,” Dean Debman, the president of Public Policy Polling, said before last night’s debate. “The big question now is whether ABC’s interview with his ex-wife will stop it.”
As of early this morning, it hadn’t. At Intrade, an online-betting site where people can speculate about the outcomes of political races, Newt had moved past Mitt to become the firm favorite. At 2 A.M., Intrade was putting the probability of Newt winning South Carolina at sixty-six per cent and the probability of Mitt winning at thirty-four per cent. (A few days ago, the weight of money was saying Romney’s odds of winning were over ninety per cent.)
Some Republican strategists are already looking ahead, beyond Saturday, to a race transformed. “If Newt surge continues, you have 3 diff winners in IA, NH, and SC, which has never happened before,” Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, tweeted yesterday. “Wow.”
Wow is right.
If there is a message in all this, it is this: don’t listen to the pundits, don’t count your chickens, and don’t underestimate Newt. He might be a blowhard, a man of questionable morals, a corporate tool, and a race baiter, but he can handle himself in a street fight and he knows how to rile up the G.O.P base, especially in the South. He’s been doing it, as he frequently reminds us, for almost forty years.
AFP Photo/Emmanuel Dunand.
