From Glenn Beck, via Mediaite:
“If you have a big government progressive, or a big government progressive in Obama… ask yourself this, Tea Party: is it about Obama’s race? Because that’s what it appears to be to me. If you’re against him but you’re for this guy, it must be about race. I mean, what else is it? It’s the policies that matter.”
There is an old saying that a broken clock is right twice a day, and it would appear that today happens to be the day that Glenn Beck’s perennially broken clock is right. However, it’s more than that. Above all else, Beck is a huckster and a grifter, out to line his own pockets at the expense of his audience. He knows he’s allowed to continue doing what he does based on the good will of his party masters. He may spout off some really crazy stuff, but he doesn’t operate in a vacuum either.
What Beck’s quote tells me is that the GOP elite are deathly afraid that Newt Gingrich will topple Mitt Romney and take the Presidential nomination. Moreover, they are no longer interested in sitting on the sidelines, hoping Mitt will look less like an android who was built to approximate a politician, and more like a real honest to God human being, while watching Newt Gingrich wipe the floor with him.
Simply put, Newt Gingrich has left the open fields of being the inconsequential flavor of the month, just like Bachmann, Perry, and Cain before him, and wandered into the tall grass of being the non-Mitt front-runner, where old white men in suits, reeking of cigar smoke, scotch, and lies, wait with long knives to cut him down.
Newt represents the raging id of the Republican party. Dishonest, hypocritical to an extreme, full to bursting of absolute crap ideas, but more than willing to take shots at his opponents, reveling in political combat. He is corrupt to his core, but comes off as an aw shucks Georgia boy. He makes these people believe that he can fight all the big bad Democrats at once and somehow emerge triumphant. He is the perfect candidate for the base voters; he’ll say whatever it takes to get their vote, and sound absolutely sincere about it. That is, up until someone buys him off.
However, Newt cannot be the nominee. Newt cannot be the nominee because the American people got to know Newt in the 1990s, and they didn’t just dislike him; as a matter of fact, they hated him. It’s folly to think that anyone is going to forget that he was fined $300,000 by the House Ethics Committee for egregious violations of House ethics rules, or that anyone is going to overlook the blatant hypocrisy of Newt driving the impeachment against Bill Clinton for infidelity whilst simultaneously banging one of his staffers. No, Newt Gingrich cannot be the GOP’s nominee for President, because he’s odious enough to kill the GOP’s downticket candidates as well.
In the weeks to come, it would not surprise me for things to “leak” about Newt. I guarantee you Romney and Perry and just about everyone has an opposition research file three binders thick on him, and that doesn’t even begin to tally what the DNC or Obama 2012 has stashed away. No, Newt Gingrich is done, he just doesn’t know it yet.
That leaves us with Mitt. If Gingrich is fire and brimstone, then Romney is ice. Cold, transparent, and easily broken. Mitt will be the nominee, because he’ll convince just enough low information voters to go his way. He’ll lose to Obama; maybe by a little, maybe by a lot, but he’ll still lose. Most importantly, he won’t be so toxic as to drive high Democratic voter turnout which might hurt downticket races.
The difference between Newt and Mitt is simple: Newt might cost the GOP the House and let the Democrats keep the Senate and Presidency. Mitt might let the GOP keep the House and take the Senate while leaving the Dems the Presidency. Above all else, the GOP values the acquisition of power. Deviation from that goal on flights of ideological fancy is not in their DNA.
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