Draped in Tiffany diamonds and standing mute in primary-colour suits, Callista is the embodiment of the divide between Gingrich's public piety and private immorality, writes MAUREEN DOWD
IF YOU want to figure out why Newt Gingrich is still out there grasping for lost power, howling at the moon like King Lear, look to his wife Callista.
You can find her any time standing statue-still on stage next to Newt as he speaks, gazing at him with such frozen attentiveness that she could give a master class to Nancy Reagan.
Ann Romney often introduces her husband, chatting warmly about his uxorious virtues, and then disappears offstage or to the back of the stage while he talks.
But the 45-year-old Callista has created an entirely new model for a spouse, standing mute in her primary-colour suits and triple-strand pearls looking at the 68-year-old Newt for the whole event, her platinum carapace inclined deferentially towards his shaggy gray mane.
“She’s a transformational wife,” Republican strategist Alex Castellanos tells me. “She’s the wife who makes the candidate think he is destiny’s gift to mankind, born to greater things.”
While a trophy wife is admired by her man, the admiring eyes of a Transformational Wife are there to propel her man to the next level.
And when a woman who wants to be a Transformational Wife merges with a man who calls himself a Transformational Figure, you can expect a narcissistic blast-off.
Castellanos weaves the common tale of a “great but frustrated” man: “The first wife, and often the second, do not grasp his brilliance or grandeur. The starter wives try to confine him in their small world. But his drive to fulfil his gargantuan potential is too powerful. He rebelliously breaks conventions.
“Then he finds the muse who sees him as he sees himself. He is a man of history and belongs to something larger. She agrees that his rejections have been the fault of the audience. They cannot stare into a light so bright. She directs and channels him, saying: ‘This is what you have to do to achieve your destiny.’
“Now he is unleashed. The best and worst of him have been fed and watered.”
The Republican establishment is chasing Newt around the country with a butterfly net. But when he looks into Callista’s bright blue eyes, he’s reminded of his adolescent dreams of exploring galaxies and saving civilisation.
When Barack is cocky and looks at Michelle, he might see her thinking: “You’re no messiah. Pick up your socks.”
But when Newt is cocky and looks at Callista, he sees her thinking: “You are the messiah. We’ll have your socks bronzed.”
Where Michelle sees herself as the puncturer of delusions, “the Department of ‘Let’s Get Real’”, as an aide called her, Callista reinforces Newt’s delusion that he can be president – even when the staff quit en masse last June because he put pampering her above campaigning.
In business, the Transformational Wife is less complicated. In politics, she’s a double-edged spouse. She feeds his ego like a goose destined for pâté, but drains support among some women and some evangelicals who disapprove of a man who keeps trading in wives, even sick ones.
At the Texas meeting of evangelicals last month, one of the leaders, James Dobson, questioned whether Callista, “a mistress for eight years”, as he put it, would make a good first lady.
Gingrich’s plaint that his passion to save the country may have led him to give in to more corporeal passions did not persuade the women of Florida, who favoured the Mitt-bot over him by a 24-point margin.
One indignant woman I interviewed at a church in Columbia, South Carolina, where Newt was speaking, hurrumphed that Callista was “his Barbie”.
Draped in Tiffany diamonds, Callista is the embodiment of the divide between Gingrich’s public piety and private immorality.
Gingrich’s communications director, Joe DeSantis, has airbrushed Callista’s Wikipedia page 23 times since 2008, often to banish unflattering details from the site, according to BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski.
DeSantis edited the introduction, taking out the fact that she is “the third wife of”, and excising the sentence: “She met her husband while he was in the House, and had an affair while he was conducting the impeachment investigation for president Bill Clinton.”
As the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza reported, the top Google search for Gingrich in Florida during the primary there was “Callista”, right up there with “Newt wives” and “Newt scandals”.
That may be why she has a largely non-speaking role in the campaign, as silent as the slender heroine of The Artist, even though Newt relays that she has described herself as a hybrid of Nancy Reagan, Laura Bush and Jackie Kennedy. The campaign does not want to remind voters that the relationship, portrayed as so redemptive, was born in sin and hypocrisy.
There’s always a chance, of course, that Callista is not staring so intently at Newt to make him feel more Napoleonic. Maybe she just doesn’t want to let him out of her sight.
As the maxim goes: "When a man marries his mistress, he creates a job opening." – ( New York Timesservice)