The New Neo

Getting ready ahead of time for those results.

Fasten your seat belts, folks.

Commenter “reliapundit” has a question:

Gingrich retook the lead in SC thanks to…conservatives…who no longer seem to have any problems endorsing a serial adulterer—one who gave the finger to the Tea Party when he endorsed Scozzafava.

And thanks to a conservative base that sounds more like the anti-capitalist bolsheviks of the OWS than free-marketeers.

It’s insane.

The SC crowd applauded applauded the serial adulterer who had to pay the house $300,000 in fines due to ethical violations, but they booed a self-made millionaire who has paid all his taxes.

Bizarre.

Can you explain this mass hysteria?

I can certainly try, as I did here, in a comment on which I will now expand.

Voting is not completely or perhaps even predominantly rational, although we like to think it is. The right tends to run somewhat less on emotion and more on rationality than the left (at least, IMHO, on average) but is by no means immune to this sort of behavior.

Emotion in politics is not necessarily a bad thing. As I’ve said elsewhere several times, we must evaluate and react to candidates on subtle signals they give out about what kind of people they are: likeable or not, calm or excitable, arrogant or less arrogant (I’ll leave out “humble,” because most candidates aren’t going to exhibit that particular characteristic), able to laugh at oneself or not, comfortable in one’s skin or awkward.

You get the idea. These things—which I’ll summarize as personality and temperament—are not irrelevant to how a person would function as president.

The last few election cycles have featured an electorate with its own emotions at high pitch. Last time it was the Democrats who had been through the ringer for eight years (with a legislative reversal two years earlier, 2006, that had given them some hope), and believed themselves to be due. After a tough primary, they united behind a (to them, at least) charismatic candidate who emphasized hope for the change they were looking for.

Now, after three years of that and two of a Democratic Congress, plus a lot of anti-conservative reporting in the MSM and the rise of the Tea Party and a very bad financial climate, both parties are pretty angry but Republicans are more so.

A lot of Republicans also have a feeling of angry desperation about their candidates. Few people are really happy with the slate, and it’s particularly galling because most people perceive Obama to be highly vulnerable this year. This should be our time, they think; and this group’s all we’ve got to show for it?

In that climate, it’s no surprise that a Gingrich might rise to the fore. After all, he’s the near-perfect candidate for an angry conservative electorate that’s also angry at perceived RINOs such as Romney and 2008”²s McCain, whose wishy-washy moderation and lack of fight is perceived as having led to Obama’s victory, and whose candidacy is thought to have been “forced down our throats” by a conspiracy of Republican elites.

That’s the angry crowd Gingrich plays to when he gives it back to the media when they ask him gotcha questions during the debate, the crowd that sees Romney as the same-old same-old McCain-esque pap. They want blood (metaphorically speaking), and Gingrich gives it to them.

Gingrich is also perceived as being the best person to beat Obama in debate. Despite his considerable baggage and his own “flip-flopping” (for example, he supported an individual Romneycare-like mandate), he (unlike Romney) is also considered the true conservative in terms of policy; after all, he led the conservative return to power in the mid-90s. As for Gingrich’s Bain attack—which reliapundit notes has the crowd acting a bit like OWS—it plays to a populist strain and “anti-finance-guy” sentiment that exists in conservatism to a certain extent and is not limited to the left.

The ethics charges? They’re seen as minor and trumped-up, for the most part—whether the general electorate will see it that way or not.

Gingrich’s supporters shrug off Gingrich’s personal history of marital cheating as being of little import. It’s been my observation that many people (on both sides) will jettison principles like the idea of fidelity, and ignore old violations, if they think a candidate can offer a lot of other things (or even one big thing) that they like very much. Plus, the rationalization is that Gingrich has gotten religion and repented. To Christian fundamentalists personal morals are certainly important, but religiously-motivated repentance is understood as being very real and meaningful, and requires forgiveness. Personally, I don’t buy it in Gingrich’s case (I also find his current wife puzzlingly strange). But then, I’m not an evangelical, nor am I a Gingrich-supporter.

Another phenomenon occurring here is that, until the race boils down to two candidate—and especially while there are still four—any single candidate can win with about 30% or so of the vote. That can represent a small and extreme faction of the party. I always get worried when there are more than two candidates in a race (and especially more than three), because of that phenomenon. Gingrich is the beneficiary of it at the moment.

But primaries are primaries and generals are generals. What works in the first doesn’t always work in the second: just ask George McGovern or Mike Dukakis. I’ve noted before that I don’t think Gingrich will beat Obama in the general, if nominated. The particular form anger he’s channeling is unlikely to be appealing to anyone other than the right, and a certain segment of it at that.