Newt Gingrich does not mince words:
Newt Gingrich is one of those who fear that Republicans have been branded with the label of incompetence. He says that the Bush Administration has become a Republican version of the Jimmy Carter Presidency, when nothing seemed to go right. “It’s just gotten steadily worse,” he said. “There was some point during the Iranian hostage crisis, the gasoline rationing, the malaise speech, the sweater, the rabbit” Gingrich was referring to Carter’s suggestion that Americans wear sweaters rather than turn up their thermostats, and to the “attack” on Carter by what cartoonists quickly portrayed as a “killer rabbit” during a fishing trip “that there was a morning where the average American went, ‘You know, this really worries me.’ ” He added, “You hire Presidents, at a minimum, to run the country well enough that you don’t have to think about it, and, at a maximum, to draw the country together to meet great challenges you can’t avoid thinking about.” Gingrich continued, “When you have the collapse of the Republican Party, you have an immediate turn toward the Democrats, not because the Democrats are offering anything better, but on a ‘not them’ basis. And if you end up in a 2008 campaign between ‘them’ and ‘not them,’ ‘not them’ is going to win.”
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Not since Watergate, Gingrich said, has the Republican Party been in such desperate shape. “Let me be clear: twenty-eight-per-cent approval of the President, losing every closely contested Senate seat except one, every one that involved an incumbent that’s a collapse. I mean, look at the Northeast. You can’t be a governing national party and write off entire regions.” For this disarray he blames not only Iraq and Hurricane Katrina but also Karl Rove’s “maniacally dumb” strategy in 2004, which left Bush with no political capital. “All he proved was that the anti-Kerry vote was bigger than the anti-Bush vote,” Gingrich said. He continued, “The Bush people deliberately could not bring themselves to wage a campaign of choice” of ideology, of suggesting that Kerry was “to the left of Ted Kennedy” and chose instead to attack Kerry’s war record.
The only way to keep the White House in G.O.P. hands, Gingrich said, would be to nominate someone who, in essence, runs against Bush, in the style of Nicolas Sarkozy, the center-right cabinet minister who just won the French Presidency by making his own President, Jacques Chirac, his virtual opponent. Sarkozy is a transforming figure in French politics, Gingrich said, and he suggested that the only Republican who shared Sarkozy’s “transformative” approach to governing was, at that moment, eating a bowl of oatmeal at the McLean Family Restaurant.
“What’s fascinating about Sarkozy is that you have an incumbent cabinet member of a very unpopular twelve-year Presidency, who over the last three years became the clear advocate of fundamental change, running against an attractive woman” the Socialist leader Ségolène Royal “who is the head of the opposition,” Gingrich went on. “In a country that wanted to say, ‘Not them,’ he managed to switch the identity of the ‘them.’ He said, ‘I’m different from Chirac, and she’s not. If you want more of the same, you should vote for her.’ It was a Lincoln-quality strategic decision.”
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Gingrich has been criticized lately by some conservatives most notably DeLay for spending too much time reaching out to center-right voters; he advocates modernizing the government rather than making it smaller. (Gingrich and DeLay barely speak; their relationship came apart in the late nineteen-nineties, when Gingrich suspected DeLay of engineering an attempted coup.) It is true, Gingrich said, that he wants to bring the center into a coalition with the right, “because I want to give the right power. The right can have power only by being allied with the center.”
That, Gingrich said, was Rove’s mistake. “I think he didn’t understand the second-order effect of base mobilization. The second-order effect is that you drive away the center because you become more and more strident at the base.” What you end up with, he said, is cases like Schiavo’s, and the feeling that Republicans risk alienating “America’s natural majority.”
My emphasis on all counts. Naturally, I find Newt’s ideas refreshing, and not just because many of them basically mirror my own post-election rants on this blog from late last year. I think Speaker Gingrich is correct that the Sarkozy model absolutely must be employed by the eventual GOP nominee given the continuing unpopularity of all things Bush. We Republicans are very lucky that no sitting vice president will be running to head the GOP ticket, as such an occurrence would basically guarantee a Democratic victory 18 months out. And while the Speaker likely fashions himself as the American Sarko, I of course have other ideas. As Salon put it recently, It’s Sarkozy Time!
May 29th, 2007 at 8:27 pm
Brilliant analysis by Newt, as always, on every point.
May 29th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
I did find myself nodding in agreement with most of what Newt wrote, but I have to mention the elephant in the room, so to speak. Either this interview should be taken as a sign that he isn’t running, or Newt is the most un-self-aware person in the race. Newt is one of the most polarizing figures in the last generation and Bush’s low approval ratings aren’t going to change that. I think the man has some good ideas, and I think he would be a strong candidate for Secretary of State or another high-level cabinet appointment of his choosing, but Newt is far, far too polarizing to be a remotely credible candidate in even a halfway decent Republican year.
May 29th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
I repeat my theory: Newt is a stalking horse for Rudy and won’t actually run. This doubly confirms this.
May 29th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
One of the real problems with the analogy is that Sarko has been pointedly different than Chirac for a long time, whereas your candidates would have a very hard time pulling such a flop off.
Furthermore, the French left has rarely had much traction against Chirac other than on corruption issues, because his policies were pretty moderate (in the French context of course). The Dems of course, have a very long and illustrious record of being anti-Bush.
I really question whether any Republican can out-antiBush the Dems. And once you start trying of course, you just reinforce the notion that radical change is needed. When the people agree that change is needed, then they will vote for change, not for a pale imitation.
Sarko could credibly promise change, since he has been speaking of it for years. I dont see that from any of your guys.
May 29th, 2007 at 9:17 pm
I agree with Tano (gulp!) that the Republican candidates would struggle to run against Bush like Sarko has. All the major candidates have stood firm on Iraq, and refused to criticise the current President (which Sarko did a lot).
They’re all trying to do it subtly (e.g. Romney is a “competent micro-manager”, Bronback will “bring people together”) but subtle is not enough.
May 29th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
Gingrich makes an interesting point about “writing off entire regions” – as Rudy is arguably the only one who can appeal to the North East. It also suggests that for the Dems to be a credible governing party they need to win something in the South (other than Virginia, where they’re doing quite well at the moment). Edwards & Richardson are the only ones likely to do that.
Why would Gingrich be a “stalking horse for Rudy”? Interesting point, but I don’t understnad the reason for it. A Rudy/Gingrich ticket? (6 marriages!! Aren’t we supposed to be the party of morality?)
May 29th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
The Dems made inroads into the upper south in 2006, winning Senate seats in MO and VA and a House seat in I think KY. They also did well in the southwest and even the northern mountain west (Idaho, etc) started to look scary for a moment or two. Basically, the GOP was pushed back into the deep south and the plains states. We lost heavily not only in the NE, but in the Great Lakes region as well.
It’s interesting to observe the differing strategies of the Big Five on the GOP side. Newt seems to be reaching out to the good-government centrist voters by finding ways to make government work better, which will also please conservatives as government will become more lean, efficient, and trim. Rudy, by running as agnostic on social issues, will bring a lot of fiscally conservative, hawkish secular voters into the GOP tent, many of whom probably thought voting GOP was not an option just as recently as last year. McCain and Romney seem to be saying that they would do what Bush did, but without all of the incompetence, and without tolerating the corruption of the congressional GOP. Fred Thompson is taking an entirely different tack altogether. He’s saying that if we basically present true conservatism to the American people, the conservative majority will re-emerge. It will be interesting to see who becomes the “Sarko” of the field, if any.
May 29th, 2007 at 9:56 pm
Just a thought:
Ron Paul is like Sarko. He is part of the party, but disagrees with it strongly & publicly , and often. The fact he is regarded as a no-shot loose cannon shows that party loyalty is quite important (certainly more so than in France).
So I don’t think the Republicans will adopt a Sarko model.
May 29th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
I think all of you who are bashing Paul on foreign policy are forgetting that Goldwater, in 1964, advocated pulling out of Vietnam, and was very critical of the war. You guys would want Goldwater to be excluded from the debates today.
May 29th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
The other difference between Sarkozy and any of the US candidates, and a more crucial one in my opinion than the date of his divergence from Chirac, was that, up until the final weeks of the election campaign, he occupied an important official position, Minister of the Interior, that also put him near the center of the most charged social conflicts in France (concerning immigration and assimilation, interestingly enough). I’m not sure that there’s an official in the current US government, any branch, that compares now. Nor do we know what issue or complex of issues the eventual nominees and winners will have to make their own. McCain has lately been pulling a non-Sarkozy by joining Bush on the base-antagonistic immigration bill. By going against McCain and the Administration on the same issue, though in different ways, Romney, FDT, and Guiliani are all Sarkozying up to the right precisely where it’s just about fed up with Bush. Neither has yet gone all in, yet, however strong their comments might have been.
I’m finding myself looking foward to next week’s debates.
May 30th, 2007 at 12:17 am
If Newt enters it will raise the bar for the current candidates.
The other candidates will have to their own reform agendas or become irrelevant in the primary debate.
May 30th, 2007 at 4:32 am
At least gingrich talk about winning elections other than the presidency. Giuliani and McCain are such jerks that do not seem to care if any other Republican wins an election. Giuliani would probably have negative coat tails in that Giuliani would cause people to vote for him but vote Democratic in every other election. He would be as much a Disaster for the national Republican party as Gov.Schwarzenegger has been for Republicans in California. If you want to ensure that the Democrats get more than 60 seats in the senate, the Republicans should nominate Giuliani.
May 30th, 2007 at 7:00 am
Superdestroyer,
That’s just a stupid argument. You can bet that if Giuliani is the nominee, GOP chances in NY-24, NY-19, NY-20, NH-1, NH-2, PA-8, PA-10 would improve. If Hillary is the Dem nominee and we don’t go with Giuliani we may have to write off 5 GOP congressional districts (probably all except NY-23 – McHugh). If we go with a southerner again then we’ll be in even more trouble in PA-6, PA-15, NJ-7, NY-29, CT-4 and others. And let’s not forget about Susan Collins of Maine and Norm Coleman of MN. The socon right is sucking the life out of the party everywhere except in the south. We’re going to hold the south, regardless. Why cede any more ground in the Mid-Atlantic and interior northeast?
May 30th, 2007 at 7:02 am
*should have read that if Hillary is the Dem nominee we may have to write off 5 GOP congressional districts in NY.
May 30th, 2007 at 7:08 am
Adam,
Image a Republican candidates running on a platform opposite of most of the Republican congressional candidates. Giuliani would more likely get Democratic voters to possibly cross over while voting Democratic down ticket.
Seats in all states south and west of maryland will be harmed by a Giuliani run.
Giuliani also energizes the blacks to turn out to vote against a candidate that they perceive as racist.
May 30th, 2007 at 7:15 am
Except for abortion, I don’t know that Giuliani is running on an opposite platform. Voters south and west of Maryland might not be happy that Giuliani isn’t far enough to the right on social issues but I don’t see how they’d logically decide to go with Hillary, who is even further away from them ideologically.
I really don’t know what you’re talking about regarding racism. Even if you’re correct (and I don’t know why you would be) that Giuliani is perceived as a racist, it can’t energize the blacks to flip districts because the blacks already have their own districts…and they vote lockstep Democrat. Think of Georgia as an example. Last year we had a bunch of conservative districts – and a kook fringe lunatic Cynthia McKinney majority black district. Any district that votes for McKinney isn’t going to vote for Guiliani – or Bush – or (god forbid) Romney.
May 30th, 2007 at 7:31 am
Adam,
The conservative voters do not have to vote for Hillary. They just have to stay home while moderate voters (swing voters) show up to the polls to vote for Giuliani and Democratic on all of the other races. Giuliani is the kind of candidates that every Republicanin a swing district outside the Northeast will have to run away from in order to maintain local voters. That is a recipe for a rout in 2008.
Now, maybe you can show a reference where Guiuliani talked about helping Republicans lower down the ballot you would have some crediblity but how many Democrats were elected in NYC in the years before Giuliani and after Giuliani and you will see he never cared about down ticket candidates. He only cares about himself and the Republicans are suffering now from having a president who thinks like that.
May 30th, 2007 at 7:46 am
I just think you’re dead wrong. It doesn’t make any sense. Moderate voters in the south *ARE* conservative. Independents went for Bush in 2004 south of the Mason-Dixon line precisely because of it. It was only in Northern states where Independents voted for Kerry.
Not only that but it’s the Mid-Atlantic and Interior Northeast districts that are in play. All those districts I rattled off earlier are marginal. And we knew they were competitive before election night and hoped for the best and braced for the worst. I just don’t see crimson red districts in the south all of a sudden electing a Democrat candidate to congress.
May 30th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
Giuliani has a rep within black communities. Diallo?