WORLD VIEW:NEWT GINGRICH didn't actually use the word "amnesty", but he opened the door wide. In Wednesday's Republican presidential debate the new frontrunner for the party's nomination, former House speaker Gingrich, betrayed a fatal humanity when he spoke about immigration, and probably killed off his presidential chances in doing so.
Before the debate the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate poll was putting Gingrich at the head of the field on 23 per cent, just a couple of points in front of former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. An Economist/YouGov poll has Gingrich with the biggest lead yet on 31 per cent compared to Romney's 20 per cent (leaving Herman Cain on 15 per cent, Ron Paul on 8 per cent, Rick Perry on 5 per cent and Jon Huntsman on 4 per cent).
In a surge that has become the hallmark of this bizarre contest, Gingrich had become the latest of many flag carriers of choice for the party’s evangelical/Tea Party right against the suspect Romney. Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann, Perry and Cain have all taken their turn at the front of the pack, only to fall back spectacularly after one mishap or another. Can Gingrich buck the trend?
Gingrich himself is a strange blast from the past, his campaign a resurrection for a polarising politician who made his name when he led a new young Republican intake to seize control of Congress in 1994 and implement chunks of his radical “Contract with America”.
In many ways he was the precursor of the Tea Party ideologically and remains a favourite. His confrontation with then US president Bill Clinton over the budget led to a government shutdown in 1995, and ethics battles culminated in his resignation as speaker in 1998.
Since then he has remained on the political stage as a speaker, think-tanker and writer, a self-styled, though questionable, historian-intellectual. He insists he has been impelled to return to the fray out of a sense of the country's dangerous drift to the left and told the New York Timesit "would be almost unpatriotic not to run". He described himself to CNN as an unconventional political figure, "much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher".
He does not lack ambition or a sense of his own place in history, telling the Washington Postback in 1985: "I have an enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the entire planet. And I'm doing it." But occasionally Gingrich gets out of step with his constituency and on Wednesday suggested he would not be in favour of kicking long-time illegal aliens out of the US. "If you've been here 25 years, and you got three kids and two grandkids, you've been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church," he said, "I don't think we're going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully and kick you out."
His comments chimed more closely with the “path to citizenship” views of immigrant rights groups, US president Barack Obama and mainstream Republicans like John McCain and George Bush than with the hard right of the party.
The issue had apparently killed off Texas governor Rick Perry’s chances when he expressed support for a state programme that provides education for the children of illegals. Now Gingrich too has ventured on to taboo ground, anathema to the Republican voters of Iowa and South Carolina where in six weeks the primary caucuses will kick off.
“Amnesty,” screamed his opponents, led by a delighted Romney campaign. Gingrich stood his ground, probably to little avail, and fired back a message on Twitter to Romney, asking: “So what’s your position on citizenship for illegals again?”
Notorious for his policy U-turns – one of the reasons the party right distrusts him so much – Romney had in 2007 spoken positively about creating a path to citizenship for many of the 12 million illegals. On Wednesday he denied there was any discrepancy in his position.
Others competing for the Republican nomination have vied to ratchet up the rhetoric. Bachmann wants to build a “double-walled fence” the length of the Mexican border. Perry competes with Romney to mention “illegals” most often.
But there are perhaps straws in the wind that suggest genuflections to the hard right may prove strategically counter- productive for the party when it comes to the real election against Obama next year, not least in the heartlands of the Hispanic south.
One such straw was the recent removal from the political stage of Russell Pearce, the architect of what the Nation magazine describes as Arizona’s “blitzkrieg on undocumented immigrants” (and of a proposal to make English Arizona’s official language). He was defeated in a recall ballot by another conservative Republican, also a Mormon, but Spanish speaking.
Linda Chavez, a conservative commentator who served in the Reagan administration, says she hopes the vote will “shake up” her party. “These kind of comments will draw applause but not votes,” she warns, citing the key swing Hispanic voters in states such Florida, Nevada and North Carolina.
“Republicans,” Angela Marie Kelley of the liberal Center for American Progress warns, “are drinking a slow poison.”