Published: December 10, 2011
IT’S probably not wise for a man who had a weepy boy crush on the last Democratic president to threaten to stalk the current one around the country.
But more than anything in his Icarus flight toward the White House, Newt Gingrich seems infatuated with the idea of recreating the seven three-hour Lincoln-Douglas debates with President Obama.
“I will concede in advance that he can use a teleprompter,” Gingrich said at a Republican Jewish Coalition forum here on Wednesday.
The president idolizes Lincoln, but now Newt wants to ape Abe.
Wherever Stephen Douglas went, Gingrich said, “Lincoln would show up one day later. And presently, Douglas began to figure out, the news coverage was always Lincoln’s rebuttal.”
Just so, Gingrich says, if he gets the nomination, he’ll let the White House be his “scheduler.”
“Wherever the president goes, I will show up four hours later,” he vowed. In a rare moment of self-deprecation, Gingrich asked: How does the Harvard Law Review star “look in the mirror and say he’s afraid to debate some guy who taught at West Georgia College?”
A match between Gingrich and Obama would be fascinating: two men who grew up without their hot-tempered, hard-drinking fathers, vying to be the nation’s patriarch.
The Drama Queen versus No Drama Obama. The apocalyptic prophet versus the ambiguous president.
One hot, one cold. One struggles to stop setting fires as the other struggles to get fiery. One who’s always veering out of control, one who’s too tightly controlled. One reining it in, one letting it rip. One tamping down his pugilistic side, the other ramping it up. One channeling Ronald Reagan to seem more genial; the other channeling Harry Truman to have more spine.
One pretending to be a populist when he can’t drag himself out of Tiffany’s; the other pretending to be a populist when he’d like to be at Davos with Jamie Dimon.
Obama is a foul-weather populist and Gingrich is a fair-weather normal guy. Neither is a convincing populist for the 99 percent who crave one, but it would be fun to watch the Hand Grenade take on Cool Hand Luke.
Whereas Obama usually faded away on stage during his primary debates in 2008, Gingrich revived a fading campaign this fall with his confident debate performances against pitiful foes.
Where Gingrich is vesuvian, Obama is spartan. Gingrich spewed a lot of ideas but often lacked the discipline to see them through. Obama has plenty of discipline, but some plans come a cropper because he gives away too much too early to the other side and delegates too much to Congress.
Like Obama, Gingrich loves to give seminars. But Gingrich, unlike Obama, has a talent for the visceral. Often, however, his rhetoric goes off a cliff.
In an interview with The Jewish Channel, Gingrich shrugged off Palestinian statehood with this incendiary blast: “I think that we’ve had an invented Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs, and were historically part of the Arab community. And they had a chance to go many places.” The Palestinian Authority, he averred, has “an enormous desire to destroy Israel.”
Nutty Newt is dancing a fandango on Mitt Romney’s head even though not a single hair has gone askew. As Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chief, so eloquently summed up the Romney free fall on MSNBC, “I don’t care how you cut it, the brother just can’t bake the cake.”
Republicans still seem a bit dazed by Newt’s dizzying rise from the ashes.
Peggy Noonan calls him “a trouble magnet” and “a human hand grenade who walks around with his hand on the pin, saying, ‘Watch this!’ ”
Joe Scarborough, one of the House plotters against Speaker Gingrich back in 1997, quipped, “Let me just say, if Newt Gingrich is the smartest guy in the room, leave that room.”
Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who was in the House when Gingrich was speaker, told Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday” that he would have a hard time supporting Newt because his leadership was “lacking oftentimes.”
Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, who worked with Newt in the House, noted, “He’s a guy of 1,000 ideas and the attention span of a 1-year-old.”
Congressman Peter King of New York told CNN’s Erin Burnett that Newt’s “inflammatory” statements, his “erratic” and “self-centered” behavior, and his “Armageddon language” wear people out.
The Gingrich grandiosity was on display, King asserted, when the new frontrunner “compared his wife to Jacqueline Kennedy and Laura Bush and Nancy Reagan.”
King said that because Newt “puts himself at the center of everything,” and because he can’t “stick with a game plan,” Bill Clinton was constantly able to outmaneuver him.
If Newt doesn’t fly into the sun but instead lands in sunny Tampa, Obama should use the Clinton playbook: Make him get a crush on you. Then crush him.
