Romney vs. Gingrich: Who Will Win GOP Voters?
November 26, 2011
Former White House speech writer Michael Gerson offers a dead-on description of Newt Gingrich’s strengths…and his weaknesses in this Washington Post op-ed today. He compares HIS view of the strengths and weaknesses of both Romney and Gingrich, the two front-runners for the GOP presidential nomination. At least for the moment.
Follow @TKC_US“Following guilty flings with Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain, the GOP is finally contemplating marriage, which concentrates the mind. The two current Republican front-runners, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, come from the same political territory — the land of at least minimal presidential credibility. Both are economic conservatives without being demolition-derby libertarians. Both are Reagan-inspired internationalists. Both have interesting records of ideological deviance — Romney on health care, Gingrich on the environment. Both display a knowledge of history and current events and the capacity to reason in public — attributes that can’t be assumed of all of the Republican field.
Disciplined and Steady, But Does He Connect?
But for all these similarities, Romney and Gingrich are a study in contrasts. Seldom has a political choice been less ideological or more dramatic.
Romney is a politician of moderate virtues and moderate vices. He is steady, disciplined and capable — important, but not Churchillian, leadership qualities. Romney’s eagerness to please has left a trail of discarded policy positions — managing to displease true believers on all sides. While lacking scandalous personal vulnerabilities, he can also lack a human connection. This week Romney publicly confessed that he had “tasted a beer and tried a cigarette once, as a wayward teenager, and never did it again.” Americans might identify with Romney more if he had taken that second sip.
Will His Free-Wheeling Style Be Explosive?
Gingrich possesses larger strengths and larger weaknesses — both of which have been on recent display. In debates and forums, he shines. Sometimes he also preens. His sense of historical urgency can be exhausting. Every political moment, it seems, is the most decisive since the Battle of El Alamein, or the rise of Kemal Ataturk, or the Lincoln-Douglas debates. It is not enough, for example, for the Congressional Budget Office to be wrong. Its bland, nonpartisan economists, according to Gingrich, are part of a “reactionary socialist institution.” He has perfected an unusual rhetorical method: provocation through exaggeration.
Gingrich’s message is often driven not by strategy but by his constantly renewed stock of intellectual enthusiasms. So at a conservative forum I attended in Iowa, Gingrich used his time to criticize the tenure of Paul Bremer at the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, before calling for the elimination of certain federal circuit courts — a presidential maneuver that would invite a constitutional crisis. Afterward, a Gingrich associate admiringly told me that the candidate had spoken from a few notes hastily jotted immediately before the event. It was simultaneously a triumph of extemporaneous speaking and a failure of message discipline.
Gingrich is the former speaker of the House of Representatives for a reason. In the success his talent brings, he lacks the discipline his prominence requires. He can spend years building a movement — then undermine it in a day. The phoenix always reemerges, but there are ashes around him.
So what do Republicans want? Pastel safety or neon risk?
Romney should take comfort from the fact that political parties usually choose safety. But Gingrich’s indiscipline is sometimes admirable.
Neon Risk!! All the way! Like Jesus; go big or go home!
I don’t see Newt as a risk at all, but more a proven warhorse. He has staid the course. His “sense of historical urgency” are right on and what this writer describes as “provocation through exaggeration” simply reveals that the writer is one of the blind followers of the blind who simply will not see the dedicated efforts of the enemies of our nation to dismantle it from the inside out. Newt has the experience, knowledge, wisdom and skills to recognize and call out the strategies of our ‘enemies domestic’ more than any other candidate. I vote for Newt!
After reading this article, my pick is still Newt. Every time Romney comeas on, i get a weird feeling in the pit of my stomache, much like the one i get when Obama opens his mouth. Thanks, but no thanks on Romney, i’ll take the old war horse!!
Good for you. Let’s see how the next 4 weeks shake out. It concerns us that Newt’s entire campaign staff has quit. Twice. Hopefully this isn’t as bad a sign as it seems for the long haul…….