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.

Commenter “Wolla Dalbo” asks the following question:

Neo”“Over the years you have been very calm and even-handed in your criticisms and treatment of all sorts of people and issues.

Yet, in the language and arguments you have been using with regard to Newt, I detect what seems to me to be a very active hatred of him.

What gives?

I do try—very hard—to be “calm and even-handed in my criticisms and treatment of all sorts of people and issues.” I like to think that’s one of my distinguishing features as a blogger (in person, well—let me just say I plead the apple). I’m not sure exactly which language and criticisms Wolla Dalbo is referring to, but he (I’m pretty sure Wolla’s a he) is a commenter whose opinions I value, and the question is a good one.

After a moment of reflection (we bloggers only get a moment; it has to be churned out at a fast and furious pace here), I think the answer is that I consider my arguments to be calm and even-handed and based on reason and observation, but I would also say that I have, not an active hatred of Gingrich, but a combination of what I consider a dispassionate evaluation of his pluses and minuses in terms of policy and position and temperament and record, an assessment of his appeal in terms of polls and the reaction of others, and a gut-level negative reaction of my own. In politics, I feel I must always pay attention to my visceral personal reactions, not because they’re mine and therefore important (only to me, really), but because I believe (as I wrote here, perhaps in the comment that sparked Wolla’s question?), that the intangible quality of likablity is a large factor in politics, whether we like it (pun intended) or not:

Most Americans are not political junkies, unlike political bloggers and commenters at political blogs. I know; I spent most of my life as a typical only-somewhat-interested American voter. My observation is that people vote at least 75% with their guts, on impressions they have of the candidates. Romney and Gingrich both are unfortunate in that regard, in almost entirely different ways. Romney is bland and goodlooking, and he doesn’t seem to have much fire in the belly or much conviction. Gingrich is quite different, but his personality is offputting to most people who are not already in his camp, and when I say “offputting” I mean it in the most forceful way possible. He repels people on a visceral level. At least, that’s my observation.

The only other president in my memory who won despite a personally repellent quality (although of a somewhat different type) was Nixon. Americans like to vote for people who seem likable. For neither Romney nor Gingrich is that a strong suit, but Gingrich is the more unlikable. Perhaps not to you or to many of the readers of this blog, to a lot of people.

I didn’t list them in the above comment, but some of the personal characteristics of Gingrich’s that lead to my perception of his generally high unlikability include his arrogance, a destructive rather than a constructive combativeness, his egotism (a characteristic of many politicians, of course), and his shiftiness. He’s hardly the only one with problems on the likability scale, as I wrote above—I think all the remaining Republican candidates have them—but his seem greater to me, and of course that’s a judgment call.

But that “repels people on a personal level” statement was not primarily about me. It’s about my observation of others, both people I know (especially Independents; forget the liberal Democrats, who will vote for Obama anyway) and commenters around the blogosphere. Candidates have a certain je ne sais quoi that’s a plus or minus for them. You may think Bill Clinton’s a slimebag (and strangely enough I was not drawn to him back in 1992, although I voted for him), but a lot of people consider him a lovable scamp. You may think Gingrich is a street fighter, and I would agree, but my observation is that people want that in a VP and not in a president, as a rule.

Ah, but you say that Nixon was every bit as personally repellent (actually, I guess I pointed that out myself, too), and he won, didn’t he? Yes, I remember it well. But in the election of 1968 Nixon was not running against a once-popular incumbent; his opponent was Hubert Humphrey, the VP of the discredited Johnson administration. The country was also in major turmoil, and the battles in the primaries for the Democratic nomination of 1968 make this year’s Republican infighting look like an actual tea party. What’s more, one of the leading candidates of 1968, Robert Kennedy, had been assassinated. Plus, Nixon’s victory was a real squeaker; the winner wasn’t announced till morning.

In 1972, the Democratic Party erred (IMHO) by nominating George McGovern, a mild-mannered man who came off as simultaneously too weak and too extreme—too far to the left—for the majority of Americans at that time. The result was a landslide for Nixon, who had incumbency on his side as well that year.

I’m not sure any of this has much to do with what would happen if Gingrich were to be nominated in 2012, but it certainly doesn’t indicate to me he’d be elected.

But let’s leave the subject of likability for now, because it’s by no means my only or even my most important objection to Gingrich. I believe that the right conservative candidate can appeal to moderates, something I think must happen in order to win an election (Reagan did it, by the way), but Gingrich is very far from being that candidate. The vulnerabilities in his record include but are not limited to his ethics violations (“Newt has done some things that have embarrassed House Republicans and embarrassed the House,” said [Republican] Rep. Peter Hoekstra), his marital history, his own “flip-flopping,” his payments from Fannie/Freddie, and his off-putting attacks on Bain that earned him the ire of many former supporters.

All of this is about the race for the Republican nomination, which I’ve never seen as inevitably going to Romney. It’s early yet, and Gingrich has a fighting chance. If in the end he were to be designated the Republican nominee, my ABO would probably kick in. But I continue to think he’d be a weak candidate despite his pugnaciousness (or maybe in part because of it), less likely to win in the general than Romney, who’s weak as well.

Of course, for an incumbent, Obama is pretty weak, too. Picture, picture on the wall, who is the weakest of them all?

Ah, politics!

…he’d do any better against Obama?

And if so, why? Multiple “yes’s” and “no’s” are allowed here:

—because Newt’s a non-flip-floppy conservative?
—because of Newt’s persuasive abilities?
—because Newt’s such a charismatic guy?
—because of Newt’s stellar record as a legislator?
—because of Newt’s personal integrity?
—because of Newt’s humility?
—because of Newt’s financial history?