Earlier this week, I wrote about the possibility of an intra-conservative fight over defense spending, as sparked by Haley Barbour’s vague but forceful talk about refusing to exempt the Pentagon from scrutiny, and Tim Pawlenty’s hostile response to this idea.
It’s still too early to tell if this argument will become a serious issue on the Right, but it’s sure sparking some serious initial exchanges of fire. Barbour’s act of heresy earned him a contemptuous slap from neocon poohbah Bill Kristol, framed in about as insulting a manner as he could find. In a piece entitled “T-Paw Versus Hee-Haw,” Kristol said this about Barbour’s central contention on defense spending:

This is a) childish, b) slightly offensive, and c) raises the question of how much time Barbour has spent at the Pentagon–apart from time spent lobbying for defense contractors or foreign governments.

Ouchy.
Ol’ Haley’s son, Sterling Barbour, responded with an email accusing Kristol of “assassinating the character of a great conservative,” and concluding with this whiny anathema:

My dad would tell me to leave this alone. And for the record, I have never heard him say an ill word against you. And he never will. He is the consummate team player. Maybe we should rename him the anti-you?

Now I don’t know what sort of personal issues are behind the Kristol/Barbour flareup. But aside from the healthy impact of any discussion of defense spending as a big part of the country’s fiscal problems, any topic that gets conservatives going after each other with claw hammers so quickly elicits a two-word comment from this Donkey: Hee Haw!

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We expect to receive some responses to the six essays already published in the Demos-TDS online forum on Restoring Trust in Government.
But as co-moderator of the forum, I’d like to offer a few preliminary observations on the discussion so far, and what it means for progressives.
Significantly, none of our six essayists doubted there was a serious erosion of American’s trust and confidence in our government, or that this condition is threatening to progressive politics and to the ability of the country to address its immediate and long-range challenges. William Galston probably most accentuated the immediacy of the problem, arguing that President Obama must tailor his agenda to reflect the loss of public trust in government, and to mitigate it. And while none of our contributors were the least bit naive about the severity and duration of the problem, Thomas Edsall was perhaps most pessimistic in projecting that an extended period of “austerity” could completely erode any sense that government can or should work for the benefit of all citizens, rather than favored political constituencies.
But perhaps the best way to summarize the forum participation so far is to look at the questions we orginally proposed:
1. Has the collapse of public trust in government been a cumulative process over a long time, or primarily the result of recent events?
Our essayists generally agree that trust in government has been declining for decades. Galston suggests the drop in trust occurred most dramatically during the Watergate scandal of the 1970s, and has sharpened periodically since then. Patrick Besette notes that the phenomenon is international in scope. David Callahan emphasizes the impact of highly publicized political scandals since the 1970s.
2. Is the source of distrust in government its perceived incompetence to achieve generally supported public goals, or its failure to engage effectively with citizens in setting priorities and pursuing them?
This is a subject of great concern to our forum contributors. Galston argues that competence, responsiveness, and a third factor, integrity, are all in play. Based on their polling data, John Halpin and Ruy Teixeira focus on competence to achieve tangible results as the key to resolving the disconnect between public support for specific government responsibilities and lack of confidence in government to discharge them. Bresette offers an extensive critique of faith in “knowledge-based” approaches to rebuilding trust in government, based on the mixed results of various ‘reinvention” efforts, and insists that a more fundamental public cynicism about the efficacy of collective action needs much greater attention. Edsall focuses on who benefits from goverment action in a period of austerity, in the belief that both competence and engagement can fail to engender trust in government among those who perceive its beneficiaries as someone else. And Peter Levine argues that relational accountability–the direct experience of citizens in self-government–is more important that the informational accountability that is typically the object of both government reinvention efforts and pro-government “education” initiatives.
3. Are we experiencing class, generational or racial/ethnic divides over the role of government in which Americans are being pitted against each other in a zero-sum competition for public resources?
This is the main focus of Edsall’s essay, which extensively discusses the current alignment of the electorate on generational and racial/ethnic lines, fostering an atmosphere of fierce and sometimes bitter competition for scare public resources. Both Levine and Bresette suggest that restoring a sense of government as collective self-government can overcome corrosive divisions. And both Galston and Halpin/Teixeira urge leaders to identify with the broad interests of middle-class voters to build a durable base of support for public-sector activism.
4. Should progressives focus on the perception or reality of special-interest control of government, incidents of public corruption, and the ongoing scandal of campaign financing, to improve public trust in government and the political process?
This is the main focus of Callahan’s essay, which calls on progressives to take corruption seriously, to revive interest in campaign finance reform, and to avoid excessive identification with interests (e.g., public-sector unions) perceived as having a stake in large and inefficient goverment. Halpin and Teixeira place special emphasis on the current perception of government as serving corporate interests at the expense of the public interest.
Beyond addressing these questions, the essayists offer varying degrees of specific recommendations for immediate action. Both Galston and Halpin-Teixeira present a detailed agenda for reducing or counteracting the loss of trust in government. Bresette identifies specific models for “common undertakings,” and also suggests national leadership, beginning with the president, to reduce public cynicism. Callahan’s prescriptions for the appropriate reaction to incidents of corruption, and to perceptions of excessive coziness with interest groups, are highly relevant to current events. Edsall is less optimistic about options for avoiding conflicts over public resources, but is instructively specific in analyzing the emerging fault lines. Like Bresette, Levine points to outstanding examples of citizen participation in public functions and agencies, and encourages their expansion throughout government.
Once reactions (either here or elsewhere) to this forum have been digested, we’ll have another summary to weigh findings and examine outstanding questions for future debate.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
As the 2012 Republican presidential field finally takes shape over the next few months, one thing is fairly certain: An intensely ideological female politician closely identified with the Christian Right and with the Tea Party movement, someone liberals love to hate, will define the race. But surprisingly, it’s increasingly likely that person will be Michele Bachmann rather than Sarah Palin. The former Alaska governor has been deliberately opaque about her plans, but she looks ever less interested in running for president–and even if she is quietly hankering for a White House bid, her approval ratings have been sliding steadily among Republicans as well as the public at large (worse, a vast majority of Americans think she is unqualified to be president). That leaves an opening for Congresswoman Bachmann, the Tea Party firebrand from Minnesota, who is almost an improved version of Sarah Palin: even more right-wing, which appeals to the base, but also lacking many of Palin’s fatal political flaws.
The parallels between Bachmann and Palin are hard to ignore, up to and including their backgrounds as minor beauty pageant contestants. Both women are politically rooted in the anti-abortion movement, having earned the loyalty of anti-choicers by “walking the walk”–Palin by carrying to term a child with a severe disability, and Bachmann by serving as a foster parent to 23 children (in addition to her own five), plus walking a few abortion clinic picket lines over the years. Both candidates are heroes of the Tea Party movement (Bachmann is the founder of the House Tea Party Caucus). And both have regularly played fast and loose with facts and history, constantly treading the boundary between ideologically loaded viewpoint and sheer ignorance.
But when you put Palin and Bachmann side by side, it is striking how much broader and deeper–in a word, more seriously committed–the Minnesotan’s involvement with right-wing causes has actually been. Her signature issue as a Minnesota state senator was fighting same-sex marriage, while Palin made her name as a maverick who fought corruption. Bachmann is the one who organized the borderline-violent demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol just before last year’s final vote on health reform, and suggested that Democratic members of Congress be investigated to determine if they were “pro-American” or “anti-American.” And Bachmann isn’t a casual churchgoer like Palin: She got her law degree from Oral Roberts University (a law school that eventually migrated to Pat Robertson’s Regent University); her husband has long run a “Christian family counseling” center; and both Bachmanns once operated a charter school that was accused of seriously violation of the principle of church-state separation.
Moreover, Bachmann doesn’t give the impression her public persona is just an ego-gratifying act. She hasn’t starred in a reality TV show (or sent her daughter to dance with the stars), appeared on Saturday Night Live, or quit her job. And she is relatively free of Palin’s whiny martyr complex, which conservatives have begun to criticize quite loudly. For all her defiance of the “lamestream media” and the hated “elites,” Palin concedes the power of her critics’ sneers by being so conspicuously wounded by them. Bachmann seems tougher, as reflected in her handling of a recent gaffe in which she said that the battles of Lexington and Concord happened in New Hampshire. Bachmann responded to the mockery with a barbed admission: “So I misplaced the battles Concord and Lexington by saying they were in New Hampshire. It was my mistake, Massachusetts is where they happened. New Hampshire is where they are still proud of it!” Likewise, she refused to wallow in the media backlash over her poorly received State of the Union rebuttal, in which a camera placement error caused her to stare off-screen like a zombie. Instead of making her critics the story, as Palin so often does, Bachmann just moved on.
Moreover, Bachmann is in excellent political position. She could certainly do well in the first-in-the-nation Iowa Caucus, particularly if Mike Huckabee also stays on the sidelines as expected, creating a hunger for a new Christian Right champion in a state where the Christian Right still walks tall. It also helps that she is actually an Iowa native living in next door Minnesota–and it’s hugely important that her very closest associate in Congress is influential Iowa Congressman Steve King. As Craig Robinson, an Iowa GOP insider, says about the Bachmann-King combo:

A Bachmann run would create a perfect storm in Iowa. Bachmann is already the darling of the Tea Party. Combine that with King’s statewide network of conservatives in a caucus election and its bound to befuddle everyone in the beltway as well as her caucus opponents.

Even if Bachmann doesn’t win a state outright, she could wreak havoc on the field. Given her fanaticism about root-and-branch repeal of ObamaCare, is there any doubt she would make sure every Caucus-goer knows about RomneyCare? Plus, she represents a deadly threat to the ambitions of her fellow Minnesota Republican, Tim Pawlenty, who has been quietly consolidating a position as likely Republican frontrunner: When she was a state legislator, Bachmann once assaulted a Pawlenty proposal for an enterprise zone, saying it represented Marxist principles. She won’t need an oppo research firm to dig up other alleged Pawlenty violations of conservative dogma. And it’s unlikely Pawlenty could survive running behind a fellow Minnesotan in a state so close to his own.
That said, it’s doubtful Bachmann would wear very well on primary voters in later states, and it’s hard to imagine someone as radical as her actually winning the nomination. Some observers think she will eventually back off and perhaps run for the Senate instead. But I wouldn’t be so sure. Bachmann need look no further than Palin’s example to see that making a big splash in a national election can secure success more quickly than crawling up the career ladder in Washington. And also like her doppelganger, Bachmann has never been shy about her ambitions–or the conviction that her career is being guided by none other than the Lord himself. Why wouldn’t she take a leap of faith?

One of those shoes you just knew would eventually have to drop was some exposure of the massive contradiction between conservative Republican militancy about federal spending and that party’s tradition of support for open-ended defense spending and aggressive military interventions around the world.
But while it would have been predictable if this latent conflict had been brought to light by someone like Rand Paul, who has never made a secret of his neo-isolationist foreign policy views, it now appears that Haley Barbour, of all people, is making it a calling card for his own likely presidential campaign.
In a speech in Iowa guaranteed to attract maximum attention, this most conventional of GOP pols went out of his way to attack the idea that defense spending should be off the table in deficit reduction efforts, and specifically suggested the U.S. consider winding down its troop levels in Afghanistan.
Dramatizing Barbour’s heresy, Tim Pawlenty promptly went out of his way in South Carolina to oppose significant defense cuts or any reconsideration of the Afghanistan commitment. At least two other probable 2012 presidential candidates, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, have long been on record calling for higher defense spending and a more confrontational foreign policy towards states like Iran and North Korea. And another right-wing luminary, Sarah Palin, once offered to take up the mission of convincing her admirers in the Tea Party Movement to exempt the Pentagon from any budget-cutting exercise.
Now it’s entirely possible Barbour’s gambit and the reaction to it will turn out to be smoke and mirrors, reflecting a desire to dominate a news cycle or two rather than any serious interest in defying the neocon wing of the Republican Establishment or the long-settled Republican habit of encouraging a foreign policy based on threats of military intervention and little else. But even a token gesture in that direction could be politically significant, much like Mike Huckabee’s 2008 effort to distinguish himself from other Republicans by refusing to celebrate the Bush Economy as a total success, or hail Wall Street as an unambiguous source of economic and moral virtue. Like Huckabee on the economy, Barbour may fail to follow through with any truly heterodox thoughts on foreign policy and defense.
But the next few days of reaction to Barbour’s speech will be interesting. If nothing else, it shows he’s not planning on running for president purely on the basis of his fundraising power, his lobbying skills, or his claims of having turned Mississippi into an economic dynamo.

The suscepitbility of today’s conservatives to conspiracy theories and mass delusions is not a new phenomenon. But it continues to amaze.
Via Dave Weigel, check out a new PPP poll showing that one-fourth of self-identified Republicans in this country believe that the once-obscure community organizing group ACORN will steal the 2012 presidential election for Barack Obama. Not “wants to steal,” mind you, or “will try to steal,” but “will steal.” That’s interesting, of course, because ACORN ceased to exist nearly a year ago. But it’s not that surprising, since ACORN played such a central role in a variety of conservative delusions, including the idea that poor and minority home-buyers caused the housing and financial crises, and the belief that Obama was not legitimately elected president. The ACORN of conservative imagination is such a total phantom that the demise of the actual organization need not interfere with it.
But of all the deluded Republicans out there, among the most in need of a reality check may be those pundits who continue to confidently predict that the great big adults of the GOP will deliver the 2012 presidential nomination to great big adult Mitt Romney. According to the PPP poll, 61% of self-identified Republicans say they would not be willing to vote for a presidential candidate who supported a state-level health insurance purchasing mandate. Only 17% said they would be willing to vote for such a candidate. Even given the ignorance of many Republicans about ACORN, I doubt Romney’s opponents are going to let very many GOP primary voters go to the polls without knowing a lot about RomneyCare.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
On Monday night, the 2012 Republican primary kicked off in earnest. The occasion was an Iowa forum sponsored by Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, which is eager to ensure that the Christian Right (and Ralph Reed, who is launching his own comeback) maintains a prominent–indeed, an absolutely overweening–place in the decision-making process of the GOP. This “cattle call” was held in a brightly colored suburban megachurch in Waukee, Iowa, known locally for having a rockin’ pastor and praise band. It was a strange event, full of partisan red meat, but also off-kilter due to the fact that several major figures in this election’s social-conservative psychodrama, Mike Huckabee, Mitch Daniels, Sarah Palin, and Michele Bachmann, were not in attendance. What the audience did witness was an eclectic group of conservative sinners jockeying against each other–and the absent ghosts listed above–in hopes of subtly differentiating themselves in the eyes of Christian conservatives.
Obscure talk-show host and former pizza magnate Herman Cain was actually the most natural. He managed to act as something of a stand-in for Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann, evincing a snug synthesis of the old Christian Right and the new Tea Party, and fluently tying together attacks on legalized abortion with claims that liberals were trying to turn America into the “United States of Europe.” But who cared? With several more appealing, more electable Christians waiting in the wings, his fluency seemed a moot point.
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich opted to bury his audience in chillingly direct rhetoric about the clash between secularism and Christianity. He referred to the opposition not as “liberals” or “Democrats” but as “secular socialists”; compared the current partisan conflict to the buildup before the Civil War; and promised that two of his first four executive orders as president would deal with abortion, while a third would move the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem (a guaranteed applause line among staunchly pro-Israel evangelicals). It seemed almost enough to distract the audience from his less-than-sterling family values.
Ex-Senator Rick Santorum spent most of his speech dwelling on his role in the Right to Life movement, even going so far as to declare it a good thing that Bill Clinton vetoed two bills banning partial-birth abortions because the procedure’s legality served as agitprop for general opposition to legalized abortion. (George W. Bush finally signed a bill on this subject, which Santorum had originally sponsored.) Had he waved a fetus poster right there at the podium, it would not have been surprising.
The most unusual speech of the evening was delivered by former Louisiana Governor Buddy Roemer, best known for a failed 1991 re-election campaign that teed up the infamous “race from hell” runoff between Ed Edwards and David Duke (Roemer wryly noted in his speech that he narrowly lost, but Edwards and Duke both wound up in the penitentiary). Roemer’s shtick is to refuse to accept campaign contributions over $100, and he tried to frame his assault against “special interest” money as a moral issue, even going so far as to blast Iowa’s beloved ethanol subsidy as a symbol of corruption and Big Government. This attracted hearty, charitable applause, of the kind that brooks no commitment whatsoever.
Perhaps the most consequential talk of the night was given by Tim Pawlenty, who is trying to frame himself as a good alternative for Christian conservatives, in case their more visceral champions fail to enter the race or to gain traction. He is clearly trying to figure out the right mode of speaking to the Republican base without appearing too bland–so this time he just spoke extremely loudly and quoted as much scripture as possible. Pawlenty did deftly employ one of the Christian Right’s most potent dog whistles, referring multiple times to the line in the Declaration of Independence which says that people are “endowed by their creator” with inalienable rights. (The implication is that religion and “natural rights,” i.e., the rights of the unborn or absolute property rights, can be sneaked into the Constitution via their alleged presence in the Declaration.) But, by and large, Pawlenty did not manage to give off the impression of an ardent culture warrior who chews nails for breakfast–something he will have to perfect if he wants to capitalize on the political opening available for him in 2012.
Meanwhile, everyone was bagging on Mitch Daniels, who is looking less and less like a viable Iowa candidate. Early on in the event, Ralph Reed directly alluded to Daniels’s belief that Republicans should declare a “truce” in the culture wars by trashing it; and nearly everyone who stood at the podium attempted to make it clear he didn’t buy the idea that the “Red Menace” of debt–in Daniels’s phrase– should motivate them to stop talking about abortion or same-sex marriage or secularism.
The mood of Ralph Reed’s forum was instructive. Religious conservatives are not about to be consigned to the background of Republican politics, particularly in Iowa where–as Reed reminded the audience–they are in a position to dominate the caucuses. There was no appetite for talk of compromise or dialogue with the Democrats, and candidates like Daniels, or even Pawlenty, seem like they might face a disadvantage if they do not sharpen their red-meat delivery. After the Tea Party victories of 2010, the atmosphere of the event was unabashedly triumphalist. It was a signal that conservatives will be highly energized in 2012–but perhaps also over-confident.

Of all the Republican spin coming out of Washington in recent months, nothing quite exceeds in audacity this statement by House Speaker John Boehner in response to the jobs report showing unemployment dipping below 9%:

“The improvement seen in this report is a credit to the hard work of the American people and their success in stopping the tax hikes that were due to hit our economy on January 1,” Boehner says in a statement. “Removing the uncertainty caused by those looming tax hikes provided much-needed relief for private-sector job creators in America.

Gee, mighty nice of Boehner to give a shout-out to “the American people,” and not just those wealthy “job creators,” currently sitting on some of the highest business profits in recent history, that the rest of us must perpetually bow down to if we’d like to have a job. It’s especially amusing to see someone who is holding the operations of the federal government hostage to demands for new budget cuts take credit for reducing “uncertainty.”
Until fairly recently, there was something of a bipartisan consensus in this country that economic growth depended on a variety of factors other than corporate or high-income tax rates, such as the skills and knowledge of the work force, the positioning of the country with respect to key future industries like sustainable energy, and national progress on challenges like rising health care costs. Yes, conservatives worried about top-end tax rates and regulatory costs, but few if any pretended these were the only issues. Now, at a time of almost unprecedented income inequality, the GOP is committed to the proposition that only by making the rich richer can anyone else be vouchsafed any sort of future at all. That, my friends, is a particularly perverse form of the “class warfare” conservatives are always accusing progressives of trying to foment.

I made a case yesterday as to why Newt Gingrich could conceivably make himself attractive to dominant conservative elites and actual voters, if he ever gets his act together to launch a presidential campaign.
But Nate Silver offers a pretty good argument that Gingrich is neither popular enough among hard-core conservatives to lift himself from the field among activists, nor with enough of the public at large to make him attractive on electibility grounds:
As compared to Huckabee, Palin and Romney, the other potential ’12ers polled most often:

[A]mong Republican voters, Mr. Gingrich has the lowest favorable rating of the brand-name candidates, and the highest unfavorable one….
Last month, Gallup detailed primary preferences among 21 different demographic categories of Republican voters; Mr. Gingrich ranked no higher than third among any of them.

Things don’t look better for Newt among the general electorate; they actually look worse:

Based on a simple average of all polls since Nov. 1, Mr. Gingrich’s numbers with the general population are 32 percent favorable, 47 percent unfavorable. Those numbers are somewhat worse than when we checked in on Mr. Gingrich a year ago, when they were 35 percent favorable, 38 percent unfavorable.
They’re also not appreciably better than those of the supposedly unelectable Sarah Palin; Mr. Gingrich is perhaps one gaffe away from joining her on the other side of the 50 percent unfavorable mark.

So Gingrich is falling between the two stools of base appeal and electibility.
Now Gingrich’s standing is, like any candidate’s, dependent on the shape of the field, and as much trouble as he is having launching a campaign, he’s a lot closer than most of his potential rivals. But to become viable, he’s going to have to come up with a rationale for his nomination that’s more compelling than his apparent belief he’s some sort of Churchillian world-historical figure destined to lead the Republic in troubled times.

There’s obviously been a ton of polling on federal deficits and budget cuts, showing variable levels of concern (often depending on the wording) about deficits and debts, but nothing like majority support for any but a very few specific cuts (typically, “foreign aid” is at or near the top of disposable spending categories in the eyes of the public).
But a new NBC/Wall Street Journal survey shows sophisticated breakouts of support-levels for budget cuts that nicely illustrate the trap congressional GOPers are struggling to avoid.
There’s a sizable gap between the deficit-hawkery levels of rank-and-file Republicans (and Tea Party supporters) and the public at large:

More than seven in 10 tea party backers feared GOP lawmakers would not go far enough in cutting spending. But at the same time, more than half of all Americans feared Republicans would go too far.
Among those most fearing spending cuts were younger voters, independents, seniors and suburban women–groups that include many swing voters in national elections, who potentially could turn against the GOP.

So Republican pols are truly caught between a core constituency demanding more budget cuts than they are comfortable with enacting, and a broader electorate that fears they are already going too far.
Comments Republican pollster Bill McInturff, who conducted the survey with Democrat Peter Hart:

“It may be hard to understand why someone would try to jump off a cliff” to solve the debt crisis, Mr. McInturff said of his fellow Republicans, “unless you understand that they are being chased by a tiger, and that tiger is the tea party.”

And unfortunately, once poll respondents were asked to focus on options for reducing the deficit, they reacted in a way that should frighten Republicans nearly as much as the “tiger” at their backs:

The most popular: placing a surtax on federal income taxes for those who make more than $1 million per year (81 percent said that was acceptable), eliminating spending on earmarks (78 percent), eliminating funding for weapons systems the Defense Department says aren’t necessary (76 percent) and eliminating tax credits for the oil and gas industries (74 percent).
The least popular: cutting funding for Medicaid, the federal government health-care program for the poor (32 percent said that was acceptable); cutting funding for Medicare, the federal government health-care program for seniors (23 percent); cutting funding for K-12 education (22 percent); and cutting funding for Social Security (22 percent).

Among the popular ideas, one (killing earmarks) has already been “banked” in order to fund the two-week continuing resolution signed by the President. Another (cutting weapons system not wanted by the Pentagon) has some bipartisan support in Congress, though there will probably be areas (e.g., missile defense) where Republicans will want to force spending on DoD. The other two are violently opposed by Republicans.
The least popular ideas are supported pretty much only by Republicans, and to a considerable extent force unsavory choices (i.e., if the GOP decides against unilateral attacks on “entitlements,” cut in programs like education will have to be even larger).
All of those pundits who think congressional Republicans have Obama and Democrats on the run as the budget showdown grows nearer should take a good look at this poll.

This item is cross-posted from The New Republic.
After many feints in this direction dating back to 1996, Newt Gingrich seems to be finally preparing a run for president. Generally, he is not being taken as seriously as potential candidates like Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee–or even D.C. insider heartthrobs such as Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, and Chris Christie. I agree with this assessment of Gingrich’s potential, to an extent; he’s the opposite of a fresh new face, and the guy’s baggage rivals Charlie Sheen’s. Yet having carefully watched Gingrich up close since he was a Rockefeller Republican in the 1970s, I also know that he is a master of tactical reinvention: a microcosm of the modern Republican Party contained in one complicated man. And at least superficially, he seems to have transmuted himself into exactly what the lost Tea Party Republican is yearning for this election cycle.
In the 1970s, I was a budding Georgia political junkie (and, actually, a Republican activist). I recall Gingrich, whom I first met at a Republican state party convention, as an overtly eccentric and extremely talkative history professor at West Georgia College who lived a sort of strange double life as a politician obsessed with getting elected to Congress. He had been born in Pennsylvania, landed in Georgia during high school, and as a graduate student at Tulane University in 1968 became the Southern regional director for the brief and unsuccessful presidential campaign of the liberal Nelson Rockefeller–not the sort of item a Southern Republican in those days usually wanted on his resume, but a first step on the political ladder nonetheless.
A few years later, having fathered two children with his high school math teacher (whom he had married at the age of 19), Gingrich returned to Georgia and launched his electoral career, running for Congress in 1974 and again in 1976. His incumbent opponent was John Flynt, an old-fashioned conservative Democrat best known for being on the League of Conservation Voters’ “Dirty Dozen” list of environmental reactionaries. Unlike many Georgia Republicans who sought to out-flank Dixiecrats by coming across as better-bred right-wing extremists, Gingrich ran to Flynt’s left, emphasizing environmentalist and “reform” themes, and enlisting significant support from liberal Democrats. Unfortunately for him, these were the two worst election cycles for Georgia Republicans since the 1950s (the Watergate election of 1974 and Jimmy Carter’s Georgia landslide of 1976), and he lost narrowly both times.
But then Flynt retired, just as Gingrich’s form of liberal Republicanism was falling out of fashion nationwide, in the run-up to Ronald Reagan’s election as president in 1980. When Gingrich ran for Congress again in 1978, this time against a more conventional Democrat, he reinvented himself as a fighting conservative focused on anti-tax and anti-welfare messages. He also burnished his conservative credentials by heading up a statewide group opposed to President Carter’s Panama Canal Treaty, a major right-wing (and specifically Reaganite) cause at the time. Gingrich won as a newly minted conservative, riding a conservative trend in his state and the country. It’s hard to know whether his earlier liberal persona, which seemed consistent with his private behavior and the polyglot crew of environmentalists he hung out with at West Georgia, or his later conservative incarnation was more genuine. But it is clear his turn to the right was well timed, and launched him not only into Congress but into a career as a national political celebrity.
From the moment he arrived in Congress, Gingrich aligned himself with a rapidly growing group of young supply-side Republicans, and became especially well known for advocating confrontational tactics against Democrats, to the chagrin of his old base of moderate-to-liberal supporters back home (many of them were also close to Gingrich’s wife, whom he divorced in 1980 while she was recovering from cancer, after a bitter financial dispute). He was also an energetic purveyor of right-wing agitprop: As a staffer in the Georgia governor’s office during that period, I recall having to find a nice way to reject his pleadings that the state officially declare a “Lessons of Granada Day” to impress upon schoolchildren and the citizenry at large the importance of that great Reagan military victory. By the mid-to-late 1980s, when Gingrich began his climb into the House Republican leadership, he was considered more a threat to the traditional mores of the congressional GOP than to Democrats. His own ideology, now staunchly conservative but sprinkled with vague futurist themes (“I see myself as representing the conservative wing of the postindustrial society” he once said), was nicely attuned to the “Morning in America” times.
Gingrich, of course, rose to the summit of power in 1994 and then quickly descended into infamy when he lost a humiliating budget battle with Bill Clinton, and subsequently attempted to impeach the president over Monica Lewinsky amid revelations about an extramarital affair of his own. But the lesson of Gingrich’s early years is that he has a jeweler’s eye for a political opening and a willingness to transform himself as necessary to exploit such opportunities when they arise. This could be one of those times: Because the 2012 Republican field is exceedingly weak in ways that would benefit Gingrich, he could end up in a surprisingly good electoral position if he decides to run.
Take Iowa, where ostensible frontrunner Mitt Romney is likely to put in a minimal effort (given his upset loss to Mike Huckabee in 2008), and popular Fox News contributors Huckabee and Palin may not show up at all because they prefer to keep their day jobs. According to a recent analysis by Iowa Republican insider Craig Robinson, Gingrich actually ranks first in terms of positioning for the Iowa Caucus: He has already spent considerable time there, along with other early caucus and primary states, and cozied up to the state’s very powerful Christian Right faction by writing a book alleging an abandonment of God by American liberal elites. Moreover, one of his ideological heresies that annoys conservatives elsewhere–his longtime support for ethanol subsidies–is actually a big plus in Iowa. If he wins or places there, and then survives Nevada and New Hampshire, he could do well in the Southern primaries thanks to his ties to the region.
More generally, he has positioned himself well to take advantage of a number of issues that obsess the modern right. In addition to courting the Christian Right and describing the Obama administration as a “secular socialist machine,” he has gone further than any putative presidential candidate in railing against the alleged threat of Islam at home and abroad, even hyping the phantom menace of creeping Sharia law in the United States. And, in a Republican electorate that is hungry for a fiery, uninhibited radical like Palin or Michele Bachmann–but is also attracted to wonky “ideas men” like Paul Ryan or Mitch Daniels–Gingrich can plausibly claim to be both. As the last speaker to shut down the federal government and the leader of the “Republican Revolution,” he has serious bomb-thrower credentials; and, ironically, his fall from grace in 1998 saved him from complicity in George W. Bush’s big-government conservatism, which Tea Partiers deplore. Yet he is also constantly spitting out sunny, whiz-bang ideas, from a pet scheme to fix Social Security to a plan that would force every American child to take gym class. He’s still very much the college professor intent on impressing his students with interesting, if half-baked thoughts, all delivered with the deceptive certainty of a born salesman.
The downside of a Gingrich candidacy is quite clear. He did, after all, become something of a national pariah the last time he got his hands on power in Washington. His marital history alone–which includes two divorces from chronically ill wives, quickly replaced by younger women–could provide fatal ammunition for an oppo researcher who wants to tar him in the eyes of Christian conservatives and ordinary women voters alike. But the Republican Party electorate is clearly desperate, deluded, and filled with ennui right now. Everything we know about the adaptable Gingrich tells us that he will bend over backwards to give Republican audiences what they want, whether or not it comports with what he was saying the day before yesterday. In this strange environment, that might be all that’s necessary.