Gingrich’s Phony War
Amy Davidson
If the 2012 Presidential campaign were analogous to the Second World War—and, for the record, it’s really, really not—what stage would we have reached? And who would even think about it in those terms? The answer to the second question is Newt Gingrich, whose dark contemplations were provoked by a latter-day Pearl Harbor, or, as may be better known to the non-historians among us, his own failure to collect enough signatures to get his name on the ballot for the Virginia Republican primary. As his campaign director, Michael Krull, put it on Facebook,
Newt and I agreed that the analogy is December 1941: We have experienced an unexpected set-back, but we will re-group and re-focus with increased determination, commitment and positive action. Throughout the next months there will be ups and downs; there will be successes and failures; there will be easy victories and difficult days—but in the end we will stand victorious.
That scenario is a bit hard to sort out. Are we supposed to picture Perry, who didn’t qualify either, as Czechoslovakia, and Santorum and Bachmann, who didn’t even file any signatures, singing a duet of “The Last Time I Saw Paris”? Is Virginia Japan, is Romney Rommel, and who—given that this was a self-inflicted wound—is Gingrich himself? (That is a larger question.) Maybe Ron Paul is Henry Ford. Or maybe this is just a reminder that trying to parse Gingrich’s historical parables is a form of intellectual masochism.
As has been the case so many times in this season, the absurdity of the rhetoric distracts one from the seriousness of the issues at hand. The Virginia ballot story has mostly been talked about in terms of Gingrich’s almost comical shortcomings as a candidate—and there are good reasons for that. (No one seems to care what it says about Perry or the others.) He had been leading in the polls in Virginia, a big state—one of the reasons that Super Tuesday is Super—and his own home base. What Virginia required—ten thousand signatures, including four hundred in each Congressional district—wasn’t so awful as to provide Gingrich with a real excuse; he just looks clumsy, and not for the first time. A lack of discipline, both practical and ethical, has long been one of the great complaints about Gingrich, even among those who sympathize with him politically. As Larry Sabato, of the University of Virginia, told the Times’ Katharine Seelye, “This sends yet another signal to Republicans that Gingrich is not able to organize,” and suggested that he was “not a serious candidate.”
Mitt Romney, who did qualify (along with Ron Paul), said of Gingrich, “I think he compared it to Pearl Harbor. I think it’s more like Lucille Ball and the chocolate factory,” according to MSNBC. “I mean, you got to get it organized.” That is amusing—Gingrich has a bit of Lucy about him, with a strong admixture of Ethel—but it would have been more effective if it didn’t set one to wondering if Romney is more like Ricky or Fred, and if he had seen the chocolate-factory scene when he wandered over from the set of “Leave it to Beaver.” (It’s an excuse, anyway, to watch the video, below.)
Gingrich had also told his supporters that he expected to qualify with room to spare, suggesting that he is either dishonest or delusional (or both). And there is, again, the Pearl Harbor factor—the way he treats history as a closet of costumes in which to dress up his narcissism.
And this wouldn’t be a Gingrich story without a note of opportunistic hypocrisy: his campaign has been condemning state officials for denying Virginians the “right” to vote for him, and promising a legal challenge, even though, as Matthew Yglesias pointed out earlier this year, he has called for the sort of stricter registration requirements that would have the effect of keeping minorities and the poor away from the polls. Ordinary people, unlike Gingrich (and Perry, who is also filing a legal challenge), do not have lawyers and staffs to help them navigate those rules. (Jeffrey Toobin wrote yesterday about Republican attempts to undermine voting rights in this way.)
In the end, though, the ballot question says more about the character of politics than about the character of Gingrich. The entire Republican primary, thus far, has had the quality of a dream within a dream. The real contrast has not been between the candidates’ ideas, but between the high stakes—our country’s future—and the carnival atmosphere to which we’ve been treated, as if war could never be anything but a rumor. (At the risk of encouraging anyone to quote Churchill, one thinks more of Europe’s “Phony War” period, in late 1939 and early 1940, than of Pearl Harbor.) Historical events, distant and near, have been mangled in the debates, to the extent that playing a video of Ronald Reagan saying something he said a thousand times comes across as subversive—as a “gotcha.” And the present hasn’t been treated much better, either; nor has what we can glimpse of the future, in terms of climate change or public health, for example. The detachment from reality has been profound.
But politics is not, ultimately, a fantasy. Politics has a solid reality to it, one that the candidates are about to confront when people, with real lives, walk into the polls. If their campaigns have not glimpsed that already, at the doorsteps and events and conversations in diners, than they have already lost, and rightly so. Calling what happens on an actual election day the “ground game,” or G.O.T.V.—Get Out The Vote—makes it sound like another scene in the play, but it’s the one in which the candidates learn that they are not the only actors, or even the most important ones. If there is one thing we have learned in 2011—in which Time, in a better than average choice, picked The Protester as the Person of the Year—it is that the lifespans of political frauds do have an end. Maybe, in a few cases, that will come as soon as next Tuesday.
Photograph by Richard Ellis/Getty Images