To understand, I went traveling around conservative sites this morning - that's where you get the real story of how this is playing. No one nailed it better than Erick Erickson at Red State.
Newt Gingrich’s rise has a lot to do with Newt Gingrich’s debate performance. But it has just as much to do with a party base in revolt against its thought and party leaders in Washington, DC. The base is revolting because they swept the GOP back into relevance in Washington just under two years ago and they have been thanked with contempt ever since.
Adding insult to injury, the party and thought leaders now try to foist on the base a milquetoast moderate from Massachusetts. Newt Gingrich can thank Mitt Romney and more for the second look he is getting...
People are mad as hell they are about to be stuck with another boring, moderate, uninspiring choice that has at best a 50/50 shot at losing to the worst president since Carter. They are flocking to Newt not because they think he’s a great guy, but because right now, he’s the only one fighting for conservatism and GOP voters are looking for a vessel to channel their anger with Obama and their complete disappointment with the GOP establishment which is now embodied perfectly by Romney....
Newt has taken the worst the media, Romney and the left can dish out, and he’s still standing and fighting with passion and eloquence. Sure, he’d probably be an erratic President, but right now Republican voters don’t care about his Presidency. They care about the fight with the left both Mitt Romney, and the Washington Republican leaders like John Boehner and Mitch McConnell don’t seem inclined to engage in.
This should help us understand that when we use the word "electability," Republican base voters mean something totally different than many of us assume. As Erickson said, they don't care about the Presidency and actual governing...they want a fight - the nastier the better.
Injecting a big dose of testosterone into the presidential debate, Republican candidate Newt Gingrich said Tuesday he wants to "knock out" President Obama in the general election in response to a question about whether he wants to bloody his nose...
Gingrich responded, "I don't want to argue with you about the analogy. I don't want to bloody his nose, I want to knock him out."
The audience applauded.
You have to remember, these Republicans are the ones who fanned the flames of Obama as the Kenyan socialist antichrist who is out to destroy America with his death panels and government intrusion into every nook and crany of your life. Republican base voters bought all that garbage and now you want to offer them the "milquetoast moderate from Massachusetts?" I think not!
Update: The perfect example of the "milquetoast moderate from Massachusetts" is Romney's statement that he will release his tax returns this Tuesday.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney said Sunday that he will release his 2010 tax returns and 2011 estimates on Tuesday, acknowledging it was a mistake for his campaign not to have done so earlier.
First he said "no," then he said "maybe," then he said "later," and now he says "yes."
While most of us would say the later is the right thing to do, this kind of thing is EXACTLY what pisses off the Republican base. What did Gingrich do when pressed about his marital infidelities? He basically said STFU and blamed the leftist media. Republicans in SC flocked to his campaign because of it.
What's funny is that Newt used to be a "Saul Alinsky radical." Newt's a joke to me. The tea baggers have proven that they deserve my disdain.
ReplyDeleteVic78
Yeah, they may want a fight with Obama, but they are going to have deal with this major riff first. This riff is between The GOP elites and the rank-and-file GOP (mostly working class and social conservatives). The rift was always there and in certain states, the riff has played out openly at the state and local government level. However, this fight has gone national!
ReplyDeleteAlso, the Bain documentary is a major cause of this riff. In the SC primary, Romney got very little of working class vote. This demographic supported Newt overwhelmingly.
So, I'm not so sure if Newt is fighting for the conservatism described in the Red State comment above. All I know is that the working class/social conservatives in the party are angry at Romney and others in the GOP elite.
If ever there were a cautionary tale, this is it. The Republican Right don't care about governing (that much has become abundantly clear with Congress); they want a fight...bloody the nose of the Left. Isn't that exactly what we've been seeing with the Radical Left? They don't give any real care to the actual day-to-day tasks of governing or change...they want their perp walk, they want the President to use the bully pulpit, they want the President to bloody the noses of the Right. Plain and simple. I think it's time we acknowledge that the Left have become militant in their outlook, very much like they did in the 70's. This is about doing violence to the other side but it has been couched in the 'non-violence' of civil disobedience. We cannot afford to let the Left take over the Democratic Party the way the militant Right has taken over the Republican Party.
ReplyDelete