If Newt Gingrich is the Answer, Tea Party has Failed

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Joshua Green on Politics
If Newt Gingrich is the Answer, Tea Party has Failed


Newt Gingrich is only the latest improbable Republican frontrunner, and unlike those who preceded him — Donald Trump, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain — he has a decent chance of sticking around. That’s partly due to necessity. Just a month from the Iowa caucuses, conservatives don’t have time to anoint a new savior. It’s also because, despite his copious shortcomings, he seems immune to what felled the others. An able debater, he won’t flop like Perry and Cain. He’s not a full-on nut like Trump. And his legislative record eclipses Bachmann’s, which barely exists.

But his late emergence as the “true conservative” poised to challenge Mitt Romney is rich, and its broader significance underappreciated. For two years, the driving force in national politics has been the Tea Party, whose founding myth was that ordinary citizens were rising up in defiant resistance to the hidebound, self-dealing ways of Washington. Greedy politicians had bloated the government and lined their own pockets at taxpayers’ expense, while letting the country go to rot. Prime examples were held to be the expansion of government health care and federal support for the housing market, especially Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored entities that many conservatives blame for the financial crisis. The mere fact of being a veteran Washington legislator cost respected conservatives like Sen. Bob Bennett of Utah their jobs. Should all that anger, energy and contempt for Washington end up concentrating itself in the person of Newt Gingrich, then the movement will have failed when the stakes were highest.

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And beyond lobbying, he has advanced many positions that are anathema to the Tea Party. He once supported an individual mandate to buy health insurance — Mitt Romney’s inexpiable sin. He teamed up with Nancy Pelosi to urge action against global warming. Earlier this year, he criticized the House Republicans’ budget as “right-wing social engineering,” only to change tack when criticized. Overall, Gingrich has felt obliged to post to his campaign website rebuttals to 18 separate ideological challenges and alleged apostasies.

None of this has stopped him from trying to claim the conservative mantle. “We think there has to be a solid conservative alternative to Mitt Romney,” he told a South Carolina radio station this week. “I wouldn’t lie to the American people. I wouldn’t switch my positions for political reasons.”

But of course he has already done so, many times. And yet this hasn’t appeared to hurt him with conservative activists, who are, in fact, rallying to his side. Odd as it seems, a Republican primary that began as a contest to accommodate these activists — bending mainstream figures like Tim Pawlenty into painful contortions — now seems likely to end as a desperate bid to find someone — anyone! — who isn’t Romney. If the search ends with Gingrich, it will be a measure of just how much the Tea Party has deceived itself.