A Newt For All Seasons

Early last year an editor friend of mine asked me to write an article about the rumored presidential candidacy of Newt Gingrich. "Nah," I said. "He's not going to run."

A month or two after Gingrich announced he was going to run, the same friend asked me to write about the kind of campaign Gingrich would conduct. "Forget him," I said. "He'll be out of the race by summer."

Autumn came, and another friend asked me how Gingrich managed to stay in the campaign despite empty coffers and microscopic poll numbers. I told him the point was moot. The Gingrich campaign wouldn't last another month. I think I might have used the word toast. At least I did not urge my friend to "stick a fork in him because he's done." So I'm not a complete idiot.

Other observers have made other failed predictions about Gingrich, and it's slightly dizzying to think that our lack of political prescience is almost as vast as Gingrich's capacity for resilience. In our defense, we should note that behind our serial failures are serial Newts, and no one, not even the Newts themselves, knows which one will appear next.

In Florida, especially in the debate on Jan. 23, we had a rare sighting of Affable Newt: mild, gracious, poised and condescending. He was generous with the praise he bestowed on his fellow candidates, those poor dudes who have deluded themselves into thinking they might have a chance to prevent him from claiming the victory that will soon be his. Most Gingrich observers say they hadn't seen Affable Newt since early 1995, shortly before he became Cocky Newt and colluded in a government shutdown that sent his national popularity on a toboggan run from which it has never recovered.

Affable Newt and Cocky Newt--indeed all the Newts--share many qualities beyond the rictal grin and the thatch of snowy hair. Cocky Newt appeared the moment polls first showed him gaining on Mitt Romney, shortly after Thanksgiving. "I'm going to be the nominee," he told ABC News. "It's very hard not to look at the recent polls and think that the odds are very high I'm going to be the nominee." Then he sank in the polls again.

Note Cocky Newt's overuse of the word very. In truth the "very high" odds that Newt saw weren't "very hard" to miss; they were nonexistent, literally impossible to imagine. Future grammarians will someday agree that Gingrich suffers from the worst case of clinical adverbia the world has ever seen: rare is the Gingrichian sentence that doesn't get goosed along by an adverbial modifier. Nothing can be wrong without being fundamentally, profoundly wrong; no act isn't stupid enough not to be stunningly, staggeringly stupid.

Often the grandiosity has an alchemical effect, and when it does, a new Newt will appear--menacingly. Cocky Newt in December gave way briefly to Aimless Newt as his poll numbers fell, leading to brief flashes of Resentful Newt. Inevitably, Angry Newt emerged when John King, the moderator of the CNN debate on Jan. 19, asked about one of the early Gingrich marriages. "To take an ex-wife," he replied, now famously, "and make it [sic; her name is Marianne] two days before the primary a significant question in a presidential campaign is as close to despicable as anything I can imagine."