PROFILE NEWT GINGRICH:He is the first official candidate in the Republican Party's coming brawl to choose a 2012 challenger to Barack Obama. Newt Gingrich may not make it to the White House, but he has livened up the campaign, writes LARA MARLOWE
NEWT GINGRICH’S supporters consider him an idea factory, the intellectual of the Republican Party. The former speaker of the House of Congress, who this week became the first officially declared candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, also has a propensity for lobbing verbal incendiary devices. He may never make it to the White House, but he will certainly shake up the campaign.
A former history professor who likes to display his erudition, Gingrich has published 20 books, eight of which were historical fiction on, for example, what would have happened if Adolf Hitler had gone into a coma in 1941.
To Save America: Stopping Obama's Secular-Socialist Machineis the title of a more recent tome. The "secular-socialists" and "the party of food stamps" are Gingrich-speak for Democrats.
Twelve years have passed since Gingrich last held public office. “I am more mature,” he told Sean Hannity when announcing his candidacy on Fox News. By comparison with his customary brashness, Gingrich’s rhetoric was almost mild. He attacked the usual Republican bugbears: “media, left-wing billionaires like George Soros, the unions, the Hollywood crowd”. In the past Gingrich has called Barack Obama “the most radical president in US history” and said he represented as great a threat to the US “as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union”.
On the opening day of his own presidential campaign, Gringrich said the president’s background, world view and appointees were all “very far to the left”.
Asked about Obama’s allegation that the Republicans’ proposed 2012 budget would hurt children, the old and people with disabilities, Gingrich said: “President Obama should be ashamed of himself. For the president of the United States a year and a half before an election to deliberately use dishonest scare tactics demeans the United States of America. He said things . . . that were false. He said things that were deliberately divisive.”
Gingrich's favourite theme of the moment is American exceptionalism, the idea that the US is uniquely superior to all other countries. Gingrich Productions, the documentary film company that his wife, Callista, runs, has just completed a film entitled A City Upon a Hill: The Spirit of American Exceptionalism, in which his potential rival candidates Sarah Palin and Donald Trump make guest appearances.
Although Gingrich’s political legacy is mixed, he now claims credit for the low unemployment and balanced budgets that were achieved when he and the then US president, Bill Clinton, were forced to co-operate following the government shutdowns of 1995 and 1996.
For some Gingrich is the man who led the 1994 revolution that restored Republican control of Congress. The Contract with America, Gingrich’s manifesto in 1994, was last year imitated by the mainstream party in its Contract from America and by the Tea Party in its Pledge to America. Gingrich promises to draft a new contract if chosen as the Republicans’ presidential candidate.
Last autumn, in the midst of the controversy over the so-called Ground Zero mosque, Gingrich stoked the flames of Islamophobia, warning the US of “stealth jihadis” who connive to convert the US to Islam. He called Feisal Abdul Rauf, the Sufi imam who is a paid consultant to the US state department, a “radical Islamist” and proposed a federal law that would ban any court in the US from recognising sharia.
Gingrich’s Islamophobia and fervent support of Israel please the evangelical Christians who comprise a significant portion of the American right. But much as they like what they hear now, the evangelicals are not totally convinced by him.
As speaker of the house from 1995 until 1999, he was not particularly energetic in promoting the right-wing cultural agenda, aside from persecuting Bill Clinton in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, even as he carried on his own six-year affair with Callista, the congressional staffer who became the third Mrs Gingrich.
Gingrich left his first wife, Jackie, who had been his high-school maths teacher, for his second wife, Marianne, while Jackie was recovering from surgery for uterine cancer. He told Marianne about Callista soon after Marianne was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
The repeated infidelities and divorces were long thought to be an insuperable obstacle to the Republican presidential nomination. In the Fox News interview announcing his candidacy Gingrich evaded the question, saying: “If you are a conservative, you have to start with the assumption you are not going to get an even break from the elite media.”
In an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network in March Gingrich invented a novel explanation for infidelity: “There’s no question that at times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked too hard and that things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”
Gingrich says, “It is impossible to explain America without reference to the Creator.” Raised a Lutheran, he became a Southern Baptist. Then, in 2009, after years of listening to the devoutly Catholic Callista singing in the choir at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington DC, he converted to Catholicism. The couple recently completed a documentary about John Paul II’s trip to Poland in 1979.
Gingrich is trying to transform Callista from a handicap into a political asset. He often begins sentences with the words “Callista and I”. Once described by US media as a blond bombshell, she now fulfils the Republican idea of what a first lady should look like. At 45 she is nearly 23 years her husband’s junior. Not one of her platinum hairs is ever out of place. She wears three-strand pearl necklaces, diamonds and bright tailored suits.
Together the Gingrichs have built a politico-media empire, dubbed Newt Inc. They work in adjoining offices on K Street, where Washington lobby groups are clustered, and they employ 60 people. Newt Gingrich’s main non-profit organisation is American Solutions for Winning the Future. He also runs a think tank called Renewing American Leadership, whose stated goal is “to preserve America’s Judeo-Christian heritage” and a for-profit advisory group, the Center for Health Transformation.
He has reportedly amassed 1.7 million voter and donor contacts and raised $32 million over the past two years.
Gingrich’s greatest disadvantage may be that he is viewed as a part of the Washington establishment and a man of the past. He is playing on the right’s anti-government obsession with states’ rights by organising a decentralised series of locally organised groups. He calls his a “10th-amendment campaign” after the the section of the constitution that gives all powers not specifically granted to the federal government to the states.
In a poll published on Wednesday more than half of respondents said that Obama deserved to be re-elected. The incumbent president’s popularity, the disruptive effect of the Tea Party and the feeling among Republicans that they started too early four years ago have all contributed to the most chaotic Republican primary process in memory.
With one exception, since Gallup polls begin in 1952, the Republican party has always had a front-runner with a double-digit lead at this distance from the presidential election. "Republican primaries are usually as orderly as a coronation," says Karen Tumulty, the national correspondent for the Washington Post. "This time it looks like it could be a brawl."
Before Gingrich declared his candidacy on Wednesday, only two Republicans had announced the formation of “exploratory committees”: the former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and the former governor of Minnesota Tim Pawlenty, whose most endearing feature is his nickname, T-Paw. Michele Bachmann, the representative from Minnesota who leads the Tea Party caucus in Congress, is expected to announce her exploratory committee in the coming weeks.
In the Real Clear Politics average, a combination of all Republican party polls this week, Gingrich came fifth, trailing Romney, the former governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee, the property magnate Donald Trump and the former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin.
Romney, like other possible candidates such as Jon Huntsman of Utah and Mike Pence of Indiania, is reassuringly bland. Trump has been silent since he was ridiculed at the White House correspondents’ dinner. Palin made news this week with her outrage that Michelle Obama invited a rap musician known by the pseudonym Common to the White House. Common is accused of calling for the assassination of George W Bush with the line: “Burn a Bush cos’ for peace he no push no button.”
As Gingrich said this week, “I’m going to have many good friends running” for the Republican nomination. “The only competitor I think about is President Obama,” he said, already imagining their televised debate: “The difference in our fundamental values, our fundamental belief systems, is so great that it would be one of the most educational debates in modern America.”
Curriculum vitae
Why is he in the news?The former speaker of the House of Congress on Wednesday became the first officially declared candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.
His chances of winningNot good. Gingrich comes fifth in this week's Real Clear Politics average of Republican party presidential polls, with 7.7 per cent of the vote. But with no probable candidate topping 17 per cent and several yet to declare, the field is wide open.
Most likely to say"Callista and I will stop Barack Obama's secular-socialist machine and save America."
Least likely to say"America needs to recognise its limitations and work more closely with Europe, the UN and the Arab League."
Greatest assetSelf-confidence, cynicism, audacity and a sharp mind.
HandicapsHis reputation for adultery and divorce, and the view that he is part of the establishment and a man of the past.
