I’ve expressed my concerns about Newt Gingrich several times already, so there’s no need to rehash them here. But I’m certainly willing to give Gingrich his due: his smashing victory in South Carolina was a comeback for the ages. A week ago Gingrich was in the political intensive care unit, having finished in the back of the pack in both Iowa and New Hampshire and trailing Mitt Romney in the Palmetto State. Now he’s comfortably ahead of Romney in several polls in Florida.
Two debates are set for this week, including one tonight, and the primary is a week from tomorrow. And all of a sudden Newt Gingrich, 2012 GOP nominee, is not beyond the realm of the possible. All because Gingrich put together an extraordinary four days, beginning with last Monday night’s Fox News debate and culminating in his verbal assault of CNN’s John King on Thursday.
It was an amazing 96 hours.
There are several factors that explain Gingrich’s victory in South Carolina. But arguably the main reason Gingrich won in South Carolina doesn’t have to do with his capacity to articulate a conservative vision, his stand on the issues, or his past achievements as speaker of the House (though they all mattered). Rather, it has to do with his style. Interviews with South Carolina voters seem to confirm this judgment.
“I think Mitt Romney is a good man,” Harold Wade, 85, told reporters. “But I think we’ve reached a point where we need someone who’s mean.” And Gingrich, he said, was the only one mean enough. E.P. Chiola had been for a third candidate, former Senator Rick Santorum. But Chiola pulled the lever for Gingrich as well. “The more I thought about it, the more I decided I’m looking for a good fight,” Chiola said.
One heard some version of these statements time and again. Gingrich is, according to his supporters, combative and pugnacious. He’s a fighter, a political warrior who seems to relish a knife fight. In Gingrich’s own words, he won’t punch Barack Obama in the nose; he’ll “knock him out.”
And what Gingrich has done – and what he more than any politician in America seems well equipped to do – is to tap into people’s anger. What “nobody in Washington and New York gets is the level of anger at the national establishment,” Gingrich said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” yesterday. “People who are just sick and tired of being told what they’re allowed to think, what they’re allowed to say.” He added, “As they look at the big boys on Wall Street, they look at the guys in Washington, they know none of that help got down to average, everyday Floridians, and I think that gap creates a real anger against the national establishment.”
It may be that Newt Gingrich’s ability to give voice to voters’ anger and grievances – what philosophers from Kierkegaard to Nietzsche referred to as ressentiment, a deep-seated resentment, frustration, and hostility accompanied by a sense of powerlessness – is just what the GOP base is looking for these days. Time will tell.
I should add that anger can be a perfectly appropriate response to some situations. And conservatives have plenty of reasons to be unhappy with the president, our political institutions, and the state and direction of the country. But there’s a difference between a candidate who is sometimes angry and an angry candidate. Ronald Reagan was the former, never the latter. He was, in fact, a politician of unusual grace, human decency and modesty, seemingly incapable of nursing grudges or harboring hatreds. But let me turn to someone who knew Ronald Reagan far better than I.
In her book When Character Was King, Peggy Noonan wrote this about Ronald Reagan: “I always thought criticism hurt him now and then, but never made an impression on him. He wasn’t up nights thrashing around being angry. It didn’t get to his core the way it got to Nixon’s and LBJ’s. Criticism didn’t inspire him to take action to deflect or mollify or defy. He became expert at the shrug and the laugh, so much so that when he met with the press in the Rose Garden, as he walked away, he looked like he was shaking his leg as if to shake off a herd of wild puppies who were trying to bite his pants cuffs.” She went on to say that Reagan never took criticisms from the press personally and never gave them the tribute of his resentment. And she added this: “A lot of Reagan’s critics, not all by any means but many, seemed to have a kind of talent for hatred, a well-honed ability to disparage. Reagan himself didn’t have those things – he wasn’t a hater and found it hard to see hatred and enmity in others.”
Conservatism does miss Ronald Reagan.
