Newtpolian of a Hundred Days

"The Democrats are spending millions of dollars running negative ads against Romney as they are hoping that Gingrich will be the nominee which could result in a landslide victory for Obama and a crushing defeat for Republicans from the courthouse to the White House.” –Bob Dole 1/26/12

"With Newt Gingrich, you throw out the baby and keep the bathwater.”—Ann Coulter, 1/23/12

         The Republican mainstream seems to be treating the Newt Gingrich surge the way that the crowned heads of Europe treated Napoleon’s escape from Elba. They thought they had gotten rid of him, they were finally starting to clean up the mess that he made, and they couldn’t believe that it was all about to happen again. Somebody send for that English fellow and let’s end this once and for all.

         Would-be Wellingtons include Bob Dole, who just got in the act today, along with Trent Lott, Tom DeLay, and Elliott Abrams—and these were the guys friends. The conservative media is not far behind, with Glenn Beck and  Ann Coulter taking turns trashing Gingrich and promoting his rival. And the story they all tell is the same: Gingrich can’t win a general election. If you vote for Gingrich, you will get Obama.
           That is a valid point, but I can’t help thinking that there is more going on—that they are really more afraid that he really could win and become both the President of the United States and the leader of the Republican Party. A large number of mainstream Republicans, I suspect, would rather muddle through four more years of Obama than place an unstable megalomaniac on the throne. Republican strategist David Frum said as much just this week. “Gingrich,” he confides, “has convinced almost everybody who has ever worked closely with him that he cannot and should not be trusted with executive power.”
         Which brings us back to Napoleon. Gingrich shares more with the Corsican general than just a bad haircut. Napoleon was one of the greatest minds of his age and one of the most ambitious men ever to walk the earth. He craved power and could never get enough to satisfy his need. He was willing to throw a half a million of his own soldiers away—as he did in Russia—for no reason beyond his own aggrandizement. And in the end, he was willing to destroy a continent rather than slip quietly away. If he had to go, he was going to take half the world with him.

         If I were a Republican right now, I would be as terrified as the Republicans seem to be that Gingrich would do something similar. I don’t think that he is going to win. The attacks by nearly every Republican that anybody has ever heard of are already driving Newt’s numbers down. But the Gingrich candidacy is exposing a fault line within the Conservative movement that Republicans would rather not expose during an election cycle. On one side of the line are the Tea Party activists; on the other is the Republican Party.

         Tea Party leaders have made it clear that they are only dating, not marrying, Republicans. Last summer, a Gallup Poll indicated that a majority of conservative voters would back a third party if they felt that the Republicans were abandoning conservative principles. With the forces of the right arrayed against him, Newt is now in the unsustainable position of being a former leader of the Republican Party running against the Republican Party for the Republican Party's nomination. And his anti-establishment rhetoric is wildly appealing to the 15-20% of Americans who associate themselves with the Tea Party--without whom the Republican Party would be consigned to perpetual second place in a winner-take-all world. There may be a better scenario for a third-party run, but I can't think of it.

         But, for Republicans, this could get much worse than a single-cycle third-party run. As a Democrat, albeit a moderate one, the idea of a permanent, electorally meaningful third party to the right of the GOP warms my heart cockles. It would virtually guarantee Democratic dominance in government for a generation. But I try not to get too giddy because I know that it would be virtually impossible for a third party to take root in the United States. Our entire political structure is oriented to a two-party system.

         For such a thing to happen, the stars would have to align with almost unreal precision. There would have to be a coherent group of voters that constituted something like (in Madisonian terms) a permanent faction. This group would have to be paired with a leader of rare intelligence and charisma who was also a rudderless megalomaniac. This leader would have to be willing to lead 15-20% of the electorate off of a political cliff with no motive beyond his own aggrandizement. He would have to be willing to turn his back on his own party and throw them out of power for sheer spite. And he would have to see himself as a world-historical figure on an epic scale—with an unshakable conviction that history and destiny were on his side. 

         And all that Democrats have to do is remember Napoleon’s greatest maxim: “never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.”