Gingrich And His Weaknesses

Gingrich is polling at 50% in Florida.  He is more than doubling Romney’s support in the Rasmussen poll. Peter asks below if there is enough time to stop Gingrich.  If we were talking on Christmas Day, I’d say no.  But it is December 1st and I’ll be very, very surprised if Gingrich’s numbers hold up until January 3.  As Peter said, Gingrich was coming out in favor of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the year after Freddie Mac paid him $300,000 to be a “historian.”   There is a lot of this with Gingrich.

Gingrich is more vulnerable than you would think from looking at his poll numbers.  In fact, Gingrich’s position is even more vulnerable than you would think from just focusing on Gingrich’s past policy statements about cap-and-trade, the federal health insurance mandate, etc.  I was listening to Fox & Friends on the drive to work this morning.  They played this clip where Gingrich promised that if Obama didn’t agree to a series of 3 hour debates, Gingrich would follow Obama around the country giving intellectual deconstructions of whatever Obama had just said in a given city.  Gingrich is doing something really dangerous here by raising already inflated expectations about his skill as a debate performer. 

One of the most important factors is Gingrich’s rise (in fact probably the most important factor) has been Gingrich’s debate performances.  This has produced the sense among many conservatives that Gingrich would kill Obama in a debate.  If you’ve seen Gingrich debate with a prepared opponent from the left-of-center (I once saw Gingrich debate Ralph Nader) you might wonder how well Gingrich would do.  But most people haven’t seen Gingrich take on a prepared left-of-center opponent.  Many conservatives have seen Gingrich tell off debate questioners and are fantasizing about Gingrich reducing Obama to a puddle by telling the world that Obama is a socialist, secular, bureaucratic, European, statist, reactionary, blah, blah, blah.

Several factors have gone into Gingrich’s strong debate performances.  The first is that he has a very good sense of what conservative narratives resonate on the national level (though as the Ryan “right-wing social engineering” thing showed, this sense isn’t flawless.)  Second, he has smartly picked his fights with the debate questioners and the absent President Obama rather than his fellow Republican candidates.  The third factor is that the other candidates have mostly left him alone to do his Gingrich thing.  The incentives are now there for Romney and Bachmann (and probably Ron Paul and Rick Santorum) to go at Gingrich hard and from all kinds of directions at the Republican debates that are going to happen in the next couple of weeks. 

The next two debates pose several kinds of risks for Gingrich.  The first is that the other candidates will publicize his record as a pro-federal health insurance mandate, pro-amnesty, pro-cap-and-trade, paid shill for Freddie Mac, crony capitalist, flip-flop artist.  That is bad (and very bad because true) enough, but it gets worse.  There is a substantial fraction of Gingrich supporters who know most of this and look past it because they think the Republicans need a Gingrich-type as nominee to defeat Obama in the general election.  They don’t like him because they think he is a good guy.  They support him because they think he is rough and tough, and wicked smart, and an invincible debater.  If Gingrich gets bruised by all the attacks that will come in the next couple of debates, he won’t just look like a pro-federal health insurance mandate, pro-amnesty, pro-cap-and-trade, paid shill for Freddie Mac, crony capitalist, flip-flop artist.  He will also look like an overrated, washed up loser. 

If Gingrich were a stock, I’d say sell high.