If late-breaking polls of likely voters in South Carolina today are accurate, Newt Gingrich is on his way to a decisive comeback victory and Mitt Romney's road to the nomination will soon get a whole lot rockier. The frontrunner has weathered his worst week of the campaign, and will soon head to Florida desperate for safe harbors and smooth sailing in the relatively light month that precedes Super Tuesday in early March, when eleven states will hold primaries or caucuses.
From my vantage point in snowy Chicago, Romney remains the inevitable nominee, and Gingrich's appeal elusive. To me, his lobbying efforts on behalf of Freddie Mac are disqualifying in a polarized political environment of tea party rallies and an occupied Wall Street; the common denominator being anger towards a governing class who deemed their private sector counterparts "too big to fail."
As I've said previously, I am a fan of Gingrich's intellectual heft. I remain appreciative of his leadership of a "revolution" via the Contract with America that placed Congress in Republican hands for the first time in four decades. He reached across the aisle as Speaker to balance the budget and reform welfare. His hypocrisy (a point I'll address below on the marital front) in taking on former House Speaker Jim Wright for his corrupt financial dealings, and President Bill Clinton for his personal dalliances with an intern, resulted in mutiny within his ranks and a premature end to his congressional career. My shelves are stocked with the litany of books he wrote in the interim years, and he remains in my mind, one of the great sources of conservative policy solutions.
It is Gingrich's presidential candidacy that I contest. For a party that impeached Clinton for his extramarital excursions and claimed that his poor personal character tarnished the Oval Office, the hypocrisy of its members who have embraced the former Speaker as the candidate who will take on a man of high character (but flawed beliefs and limited experience) rests at high noon. The presidency requires high moral character of its occupants as its power rests on invoking the bully pulpit and persuading the masses of the integrity of the solutions he embraces.
Gingrich married his high school geometry teacher (their affair began when he was sixteen), and later delivered divorce papers to her hospital bed as she was treated for cancer. His affair with who would become his second wife had already begun, and he later turned the tables on her too after her diagnosis with MS, asking for an "open relationship" in order to carry on an affair with a Capitol Hill staffer who now poses as his Stepford-like wife. While his recent conversion to Catholicism may yield ultimate salvation, his political fate should be sealed, his obituary surfacing long ago.
His decision on Thursday to turn these latest allegations against CNN debate moderator John King was nothing short of pathetic. Killing a mainstream media messenger may be popular sport among conservatives, and this goes a long way in explaining Gingrich's sustenance in this campaign cycle, but voters across the spectrum deserve an answer he simply cannot provide. He lacks the integrity, humility, and moral compass required of the leader of the free world.
The Republican field is down to four finalists, and three of them possess sufficient character for the duties they desire. Gingrich is the odd man out, and it may be up to GOP voters outside of the Palmetto State, Illinois included, to make a market correction and send the former Speaker back where he belongs as a scribe on the sidelines.
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