Anger and sarcasm pay off for Lazarus-like candidate

Gingrich won because he is the meanest, nastiest contender, writes LARA MARLOWE in Charleston

Gingrich won because he is the meanest, nastiest contender, writes LARA MARLOWEin Charleston

AS THE scale of Newt Gingrich’s victory in the South Carolina primary became apparent on Saturday night, a Fox News commentator joked that, if Gingrich becomes president, there should be a gilded ceiling fresco in the White House dedicated to John King, the CNN presenter who wilted under verbal fire from Gingrich on January 19th.

Gingrich won South Carolina largely because of two televised moments. Two-thirds of voters told exit polls that the debates were an important factor in their decision.

Gingrich acknowledged this in his victory speech: “In the two debates we had here, in Myrtle Beach and then in Charleston, where the people reacted so strongly to the news media, I think there was something very fundamental that I wish the powers that be and the news media would take seriously,” he said.

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“The American people feel that they have elites who have been trying for a half-century to force us to quit being America. People misunderstand what’s going on. It’s not that I am a good debater, but that I articulate the deepest-held values of the people.”

For all the palaver about “deepest-held values”, Gingrich’s victory was about style, not substance. With the exception of Ron Paul’s isolationist foreign and defence policies, the four remaining Republican candidates have virtually the same platforms on all the main issues. Gingrich won not because his policies are different, but because he is the meanest, nastiest candidate, wielding both bluntness and innuendo like a gladiator’s sword.

Mitt Romney shies away from confrontation. Violent language is second nature to Gingrich. The former speaker of the House of Representatives corrected a supporter who asked him to “bloody Obama’s nose” on January 17th in Florence, South Carolina. “I don’t want to bloody his nose, I want to knock him out,” Gingrich said.

The Roman amphitheatre has now shifted to Florida, but Romney is running scared.

Both men had scheduled events at Tommy’s Country Ham House in Greenville, South Carolina, at the same time on election day. In a lapse out of character for the hyper-organised Romney campaign, staff apparently failed to confirm the time with the restaurant owner. So Gingrich challenged Romney to debate him in the Ham House.

Romney declined, showed up an hour early and slinked away before Gingrich arrived. “Where’s Mitt?” Gingrich mocked the erstwhile frontrunner. “I thought he was going to stay and maybe we’d have a little debate here this morning.”

Gingrich’s supporters made clucking sounds, like chickens.

It is ironic that the two exchanges which upturned the Republican campaign involved attacks on television journalists, not Romney. On the contrary, Gingrich’s attacks on Romney’s “exploitation” of failing companies as a venture capitalist seemed to work against him.

Because they have changed the course of the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Gingrich’s two standing ovations are worth recalling. In Myrtle Beach on January 16th, Fox News analyst Juan Williams asked Gingrich whether his constant denigration of US president Barack Obama as the “food-stamp president” was “intended to belittle the poor”.

“I know that among the politically correct you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable,” Gingrich shot back. “If that makes liberals unhappy, I’m going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job.”

First standing ovation. (One of Gingrich’s suggestions for “helping the poor” is to put children to work as janitors.)

The largest group of food-stamp recipients are white, but Gingrich’s constant harping on about the programme feeds delusions on the right that the government confiscates their hard-earned dollars to feed lazy ethnic minorities; the equivalent of Ronald Reagan’s obsession with “welfare queens”.

Gingrich’s victory speech, in which he repeated the unfounded food-stamp accusation – the president puts no one on food stamps, which are attributed, by law, according to income – was filled with language coded for the ears of aggrieved conservatives: the “elite media”, “food stamps” (for which read: “poor blacks”) and – three times – Saul Alinsky, a Jewish-American community organiser from Chicago who died in 1972. Gingrich’s association of Obama with what he calls “the radicalism of Saul Alinsky” is yet another way of saying that Obama is different, foreign, the follower of the left-wing son of Russian-born Jewish immigrants.

Gingrich’s campaign was twice pronounced dead by pundits: last summer, when he took his third wife, Callista, on a Greek cruise, and was revealed to have a $500,000 (€387,000) credit line to buy her jewellery at Tiffany’s; and again in Iowa in December, when Romney’s “super political action committee” savaged him with $3 million in attack advertisements.

The debate moments resurrected Gingrich, Lazarus-like, a second time. In the decisive exchange with John King of CNN, Gingrich dodged what could have been a death blow in a state where two-thirds of voters told exit polls they are evangelical or born-again Christians.

Gingrich’s second wife, Marianne, had just recounted his scandalous behaviour in asking her to share him with his mistress, then asking for a divorce when Marianne was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Gingrich called the media “destructive, vicious, negative . . . despicable”, and accused them of peddling “trash”.

Saturday’s primary occurred 15 years to the day after Gingrich became the only speaker to be publicly reprimanded for using tax-exempt donations to fund his pet projects, and for lying to the House ethics committee. For these misdeeds, he was fined $300,000. The Romney campaign vainly attempted to draw attention to the anniversary.

South Carolina voters blithely ignored evidence of Gingrich’s flagrant adultery and financial impropriety. He was the most popular with almost every category – women, conservatives, born-again Christians, Tea Party supporters and voters aged 30 or over. Only self-described moderates and liberals voted in greater numbers for Romney.

In South Carolina, Gingrich’s seething anger and sarcasm paid off. “People are mad as hell they are about to be stuck with another boring, moderate, uninspiring choice that has at best a 50/50 shot at losing to the worst president since [Jimmy] Carter,” wrote conservative blogger Erick Erickson. “They are flocking to Newt, not because they think he’s a great guy, but because, right now, he’s the only one fighting for conservatism.”