Mad About Newt

In one way, Newt Gingrich is exactly what the Republican Party needs. Despite a nasty habit of fabricating facts and a borderline psychotic persona, he is almost certainly the smartest candidate in the current GOP field. Of course, the bar for conservative wit has lowered to a level that candidates don’t have to rise to meet so much as not fall into the subway and be electrocuted by. A nimble-minded Republican would be a refreshing choice to run against Obama. Gingrich has picked up on this opportunity. Just as Perry and Bachmann advertise themselves as decimal points, luxuriously rounding off the world’s complications, just as Romney runs as the human incarnation of troubleshooting software, so does Newt Gingrich advertise himself as most able to beat President Obama in a debate. Still, many on the right are uncomfortable with him.

The strangest resistance to Gingrich emerges from the backrooms of the all-important GOP establishment. Why do so few Republicans take him seriously as a challenge to Obama? I suspect that their rejection of Gingrich isn’t entirely to do with his unpopularity amongst independents. The party bosses must also see that his lack of charisma represents an unvarnished vision of Republican ideology’s worst qualities, and that such a vision is appalling.

The prototypical conservative icon is a charming, accessible success story. He or she must be able to relate the ideology of self-help and -sufficiency with a friendly beckon and a wink, a role model who wants you to join the club. Without the personal attraction of “come with me,” all that’s left is, “you’re on your own.” Bootstraps rhetoric only works on an emotional level when its messenger is someone you trust and want to be like. Nobody wants to be like Newt Gingrich. Americans got sick of his political style when he was in his prime, let alone now that he’s an old curmudgeon whose waist and personal history are tied in a fight to carry more baggage. This personal unlikability destroys his ability to spin the small and fearful Republican worldview into a charismatic idiom.

Gingrich’s presentation isn’t steeped in the discomfort and paranoia that founds the conservative gospel—it is that discomfort and paranoia. Instead of professing the endurance of the American dream, Newt’s message for the idle poor is to grow a work ethic. He wants to out-activist the runaway judiciary (?) by arresting them. He’d rather fantasize about invading Iran than advance a single constructive goal for the Middle East. Gingrich serves raw the cynicism that underpins the policies that the eventual nominee will dress up in economic positivity and toothy smiles. That transformative ability either eludes or doesn’t interest him. He is not well-suited or willing to tell the poor that reduced benefits will help them or that a “defense of marriage” is not an assault on gays, because he’s an arrogant asshole and he’d obviously be lying. These sentiments do not fare well exposed to air unprotected. This is why the Republican Party has no use for him as a candidate.

Even more unappealing is Gingrich’s insistence on running for a type of role he will never be able to fulfill, for the above reason, while foregoing other essential but less public ones in which he would excel. His notorious delusion of grandeur comes into focus here. There is a hallowed place inside the GOP for political operatives like Rove, Cheney, Wolfowitz. If Gingrich stuck to that shadowy line of work, he’d be a hot commodity. He has, you would imagine, valuable political intuition and the wattage to be able to project big ideas in a way that would make Rick Perry’s head explode. Yet Newt declines such a life. He needs to be in the spotlight, setting America on a righteous path that he himself falls woefully short of, or else he’s nothing. Well then, he’s nothing.

Newt Gingrich is unelectable because he too-accurately embodies the fear—and the Realpolitik—that defines the modern Republican Party. These things personify into a portrait of an untenable politician and a hideous person. Mitt Romney will wield the same rhetoric and push the same buttons, but he will hide it behind focus-grouped sound bites and his trademark blandness. Gingrich may have a future infusing his myopic vitriol into a pretty young face. On his own, he is conservative misanthropy incarnate.