Run, Newt, Run

June 5, 2006

I find it hard to believe Dems would get this lucky, but these results are encouraging anyway (via Stakeholder).

Former House Speaker [tag]Newt Gingrich[/tag] was the easy winner of a straw poll Friday night that tested [tag]2008[/tag] presidential candidate support at the Minnesota Republican Party state convention. Gingrich got about 40 percent of the 540 votes cast, putting him far ahead of Virginia’s Sen. [tag]George Allen[/tag], who got about 15 percent. Next were Secretary of State [tag]Condoleezza Rice[/tag] and Arizona Sen. [tag]John McCain[/tag], each with about 10 percent.

“This shows activists think that Gingrich has the cachet to help set and drive the conservative agenda, just as he did when he led the Republican takeover of the House in 1994,” said Tony Sutton, a Gingrich supporter and secretary-treasurer of the party. “He and Ronald Reagan were the two most important conservatives in the last 30 years.”

The results also confirm once again that party activists are considerably more conservative than Republican voters and the public in general.

That last point seems particularly noteworthy. Early national polls for ’08 are testing little more than name recognition. While these state straw polls are hardly scientific, they do reflect a problem for which “front-runners” like McCain and Giuliani have not yet crafted a solution: they have a long way to go before they convince the GOP base that they’re conservative enough to be the Republican nominee.

As for the former House Speaker’s possible interest, he’s been traveling to Iowa and New Hampshire quite a bit, and he has a new book coming out: “[tag]Rediscovering God in America[/tag]: Reflections on the Role of Faith in Our Nation’s History and Future.”

Run, Newt, run.

Run, Newt, run.

Agreed. Then virtually any Dem nominee, barring Hillary, has a really good chance to win in 2008.

  • O please, please, please let it be Newt!

    There’s already a barrel full of campaign ideas, not to mention (bad) character references.

  • Yes, run Newt. Right in front of a moving bus.

    Although I WOULD be very interested in reading and learning about Mr. Gingrich’s numerous extra-marital affairs and family values (serving your wife with divorce papers when she is in the hospital getting treated for cancer–classic) in the run-up to the election.

  • Well- I have meet Newt (once) and he is actually quite conversant and comfortable in his own skin. He is not Mr. Charismastic but comes across as charming and affable. In other words he is the extra large proto-politician that inhabits our lives. Interestingly enough, he is not a wingnut and holds some liberal views, not that they would come out in a partisan campaign. The point being not to underestimate him.

  • Raoul, I agree with you. Newt is no dummy, and he’s a very smooth guy. You can’t rattle him, that I’ve seen, and he certainly has an answer to the obvious family-values questions that will be posed to him as a candidate. He’s got street cred, and can rightly claim credit for the last time the budget was balanced in Washington. He scares the crap out of me.

  • Don, can you share the answers to the family-values questions that will be posed to him, including his potential response to the blatant hypocrisy of his conduct? Not to mention certain ethics improprieties.

    I’ve met Newt once, for all of 5 seconds. A very close friend of mine knows him well. According to my friend, who likes Newt very much, Newt is a very bright strategist (which I believe is very apparent) who works well within a larger group of people–like the House, and someone who analyzes certain topics very well, particularly certain domestic policy issues. I just wonder how well Newt will do when he has to stand by himself, especially when he will have to explain his own transgressions. He is a force to be reckoned with, but not some unstoppable force.

  • With those congressional ethics violations hanging over his head, it doesn’t matter how smooth he is. Even the Dems would have no trouble connecting Newt to the culture of republican corruption.

  • “Rediscovering God in America: Reflections on the Role of Faith in Our Nation’s History and Future.”

    Let’s see, how moral is a guy who married his high school teacher (7-8 years older than he, IIRC) so he could dodge the draft for Vietnam, who then divorced her after becoming Speaker, “because she’s too old to be First Lady, and besides, she has cancer.” He then proceeded to avoid all support payments for her and their children, forcing her to turn to her church for charity to keep her house and the utilities turned on – this while he had signed a multi-million dollar book deal and was marrying his cosiderably younger staffer. Then, on the day the Lewinsky affair was first made public, he began his affair with an even-younger staffer only a few years older than Monica Lewinsky (the GOP were all “outraged” that Clinton has a relationship with a woman “young enough to be his daughter”), who is now the third Mrs. Gingrich.

    So what part of “family values” does Newt Gingrich represent, other than being the embodiment of every male asshole who ever lived when it comes to believing in marriage vows and in supporting his children?

    The he would end up being the favorite of these “conservative base” is further proof that what these morons think is fact is in truth FANTASY. I mean, these folks put great stock in “integrity,” right? Where is the integrity in anything mentioned above, as well as where is the integrity in a guy who starts out as a “Nelson Rockefeller Republican” and only becomes a “conservative” when he discovers he can’t get elected with that platform? Talk about a guy who gives a who new meaning to the word “opportunist.”

    Yes indeed, run Newt, run. What a beautiful Large Slow Target you are, you living proof that you can take the boy out of the trailer park (in his case, literally) but you can’t take the trailer park out of the boy, that you are.

  • Bubba – no, I can’t answer those questions. I said that Newt probably could, not me. I don’t like him any more than you do, but if former drug-user and drunk Bush can get reelected after 4 years of taking our country into the toilet, what’s stopping Newt? I don’t remember when Bush was asked to “explain his transgressions” – leaving the Guard, using cocaine, being an unreliable drunk. If he can shimmy away from that past, why can’t Newt? The old “that’s in the past, this is now” answer from Newt’s handlers should be all he needs, given recent history. All I’m saying is that I’m sure Newt is aware of the problems with his history, and I’m sure he has an answer for them that will satisfy the conservative media.

  • Tom –

    I’ll bet Newt avoids the wrath of social conservatives for these shenanigans since he married all three ladies. By definition, that’s better than what Clinton did.

    Now, he did divorce two of them, and I’m not sure how that plays into social conservative thinking.

  • … this is not cynism or a feeble attempt at a joke but we must truly help newt … we need volunteers to -I SWEAR I AM SERIOUS- make sure we set that fucker up as the biggest/easiest target to shoot down in the next election … ‘it’ is one of the vilest hypocrite of the repubs and ‘its’ actions are all on record, like divorcing ‘its’ wife in hospital blah blah blah …

    The repubs are doing the same with la clinton -some fucking whore that bitch- even though she does not have a chance in hell … if anyone of you thinks she does then you are sorely delusional …
    Let me ‘splain’ this statement with the following example: the repubs do not need really to ‘re-introduce’ that gingrich fucker because they have millions more of religious imbeciles to choose from, the same goes for that clinton whore, we could have had the same ‘pull’ with a democratic donor -any democratic big wig a la Soros- that she REALLLY did not need to whore herself up to murdock …

    For the older ones reading this just remember the great bit by one of the greatest comedians of all time -Bill Hicks- and what Bill was saying about the advertising community’s lil’ satans …. it also applies to pols … and MURDOCH!!!

    At any rate I have something to say/divulge -Swift Boating style- about those clinton pricks -that has escaped everyone’s attention for the last 5 years- that will surely derail their attempt at ‘stealing’ the scene if they become/get too much public recognition in the near future ….because from now on remember that every time they put that clinton bleeder on t.v. -specially fox.news- they are going to attach that lil’ note/tidbit to the mix and trump up the ‘new’ relation between ‘hillary-ous’ and murdoch .. if murdoch does not register a big fucking FLAG going up whenever his name is mentionned then you guys have missed the best moves our Auzzie fucker pulled since the mid 80’s.

    The sad part of that disclosure is that it might empower the religious assholes of the right … frightening thought but I could live for another 16 years of g.o.p. bullshit if I have too .. I take ‘breathers’ by going abroad …

  • I just wonder how well Newt will do when he has to stand by himself, especially when he will have to explain his own transgressions. He is a force to be reckoned with, but not some unstoppable force.

    Bubba,

    You have to remember that only Democrats are expected to explain anything, and they do. Bush Jr. was a coke-head drunk and he got away with skipping that entire chapter of his life. Meanwhile Gore and Kerry had to explain (well, were accosted about and chose to explain) everything from twenty-year-old votes on minute issues to what they had for breakfast. And Kerry ended up looking bad while explaining how much of a war hero he was.

    I would say, without a doubt, that you cannot count on past transgressions to kill a clever Republican’s efforts at election time.

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