She Turned Me Into A Newt

Newt Gingrich meets with his cabinet.

I don't usually argue with my father in law.  I don't think it's respectful, and I know that I can get agitated (and he can get agitated) when rhetorical disagreements get prolonged, so why go there?

But last summer I got unusually heated when he said that Newt Gingrich was at least a "smart guy".  I'm not sure what set me off, but I really defended my position that Newt is a perverse beneficiary of the tragedy of low expectations.

Simply put, place Newt Gingrich in a room with other GOP politicians, and he looks like Edmund Burke.  Put him in a room with just about anyone else, and he looks like an blowhard idiot.

From whence does this respect for Newt's intellect derive?  Yes, he has a PhD.  But that reminds me of the quip about Henry Cabot Lodge: "His mind was like the soil of his native New England.  Highly cultivated but barren."  Or maybe he's like the Scarecrow in the Wizard of Oz.  Give him a diploma and suddenly he's a genius.  (Of course, in the movie, the Scarecrow messes up the Pythagorean theorem.)

He's also credited with coming up with the Contract On With America.  But that's not really true.  It was written by a committee of conservatives, including Gingrich, Armey, Delay, Boehner and other usual suspects.  The actual writing of the document was done by something called Larry Huuinter.  So his authorship is questionable to say the least.

The idea that the Contract somehow explains the 1994 election results and Newt's tactical brilliance is also faulty.  As we saw in 2010, the presence of Democratic control of the Executive and Legislative branches tends to motivate GOP voters.  Add to that the increased momentum behind the geographical realignment of the South and the weak economy and... 1994.

As Speaker, Gingrich's Contract largely floundered and while he did get Welfare Reform done, he is most remembered for shutting down the government because of personal tiffs with Clinton and bringing impeachment to the floor while cheating on his own wife.

While I admit that Gingrich can talk pretty with all the multi-syllabic words that befit a man with a PhD, his real intellectual abilities represent more of a low cunning than any platonic intellectual ideal.  But his ability to speak in complete sentences and use jargon make his a latter day Cicero to the political press.

The sealer of my argument happened the other day.  Newt for weeks has said we need to institute a no-fly zone over Libya to protect the Anti-Ghaddafi/Kaddafy/64d4ff1 forces.  As soon as Obama DID institute a no-fly zone, Gingrich flipped and condemned it.

Maybe that just shows that where most people have a soul, Gingrich has a howling vacuum.  Maybe that shows his incapability to tell a straight truth or his cynical appraisal of the state of American political journalism.

But holy shit, Batman!  To reverse yourself that quickly, that blatantly and that completely bespeaks an intellectual vacuity bordering on the Palinesque.

On the other hand, maybe he's trying to out pander and out flip-flop Romney.

If so, good freaking luck.