Newt Can't Win Over Republicans Outside The Racist South, Right? Wrong

I forget which MSNBC wag said it the other day, but someone did mention that Gingrich hasn't been using dog whistles in up-country South Carolina and the Florida Panhandle, he's using a fog whistle. And Republicans are hearing it all over the country. By and large... they love it.

I guess it's a tribute to Mitt Romney's typically savvy acquisition of Tim Pawlenty but Minnesota is going for Newt. Or, at least, not going for Romney. According to the latest PPP release, "Gingrich has a large lead in Minnesota... for the moment. Our weekend polling there found him with 36% to 18% for Mitt Romney, 17% for Rick Santorum, and 13% for Ron Paul... very good for Gingrich and very bad for Romney. Gingrich's favorability is a +34 spread (59/25) while Romney's is just +14 (50/36). Since PPP last polled the state in May Gingrich's favorability with GOP voters has increased by 40 points from its previous -6 (35/41) standing."

Gingrich's supporters are also more committed with 39% saying they'll definitely vote for him compared to only 27% who say the same for Romney. Among voters whose minds are totally made up Romney actually drops all the way down to 4th place at 15%, behind Gingrich's 44%, Santorum's 25%, and Paul's 16%.

If Santorum's out of the race by the time Minnesota's vote comes around it could work to Gingrich's further advantage. Santorum voters prefer Gingrich to Romney 44-20 if they had to pick between the two and overall Minnesota Republicans pick Gingrich 50-29 in a head to head with Romney.

Newt's winning with pretty much every key group in Minnesota. He's up 44-12 on Romney with Tea Partiers (Paul's at 18% and Santorum's at 14%) but he's up 33-22 with non-Tea Partiers as well. He's up 44-18 with men, but he's also up 28-19 with women. He leads Romney with Republicans (40-20) but he's also up with independents (26-15) who are likely to be a similar share of the electorate to what they were in Iowa. And Gingrich is winning every age group, although he's tied with Paul among young voters.

And the GOP Establishment is throwing everything they've got against him. Yesterday Establishment hack and notorious war criminal Elliott Abrams took to the pages of National Review to expose Gingrich some more, this time about his lies for having been best buds with Ronald Reagan, who in reality he barely knew. That hasn't stopped him, as Abrams points out, from dropping phrases like, “I worked with President Reagan to change things in Washington,” “we helped defeat the Soviet empire,” and “I helped lead the effort to defeat Communism in the Congress.” Abrams is blunt: "The claims are misleading at best."

As a new member of Congress in the Reagan years-- and I was an assistant secretary of state-- Mr. Gingrich voted with the president regularly, but equally often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides, and his policies to defeat Communism. Gingrich was voluble and certain in predicting that Reagan’s policies would fail, and in all of this he was dead wrong.

...[Gingrich] voted with the caucus, but his words should be remembered, for at the height of the bitter struggle with the Democratic leadership Gingrich chose to attack [Reagan].

The best examples come from a famous floor statement Gingrich made on March 21, 1986. This was right in the middle of the fight over funding for the Nicaraguan contras; the money had been cut off by Congress in 1985, though Reagan got $100 million for this cause in 1986. Here is Gingrich: “Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire’s challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing, and without a dramatic change in strategy will continue to fail... President Reagan is clearly failing.” Why? This was due partly to “his administration’s weak policies, which are inadequate and will ultimately fail”; partly to CIA, State, and Defense, which “have no strategies to defeat the empire.” But of course “the burden of this failure frankly must be placed first on President Reagan.” Our efforts against the Communists in the Third World were “pathetically incompetent,” so those anti-Communist members of Congress who questioned the $100 million Reagan sought for the Nicaraguan “contra” rebels “are fundamentally right.” Such was Gingrich’s faith in President Reagan that in 1985, he called Reagan’s meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”

Gingrich scorned Reagan’s speeches, which moved a party and then a nation, because “the president of the United States cannot discipline himself to use the correct language.” In Afghanistan, Reagan’s policy was marked by “impotence [and] incompetence.” Thus Gingrich concluded as he surveyed five years of Reagan in power that “we have been losing the struggle with the Soviet empire.” Reagan did not know what he was doing, and “it is precisely at the vision and strategy levels that the Soviet empire today is superior to the free world.”

There are two things to be said about these remarks. The first is that as a visionary, Gingrich does not have a very impressive record. The Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, just as Reagan had believed it must. The expansion of its empire had been thwarted. The policies Gingrich thought so weak and indeed “pathetic” worked, and Ronald Reagan turned out to be a far better student of history and politics than Gingrich.

The second point to make is that Gingrich made these assaults on the Reagan administration just as Democratic attacks were heating up unmercifully. Far from becoming a reliable voice for Reagan policy and the struggle against the Soviets, Gingrich took on Reagan and his administration. It appears to be a habit: He did the same to George W. Bush when Bush was making the toughest and most controversial decision of his presidency-- the surge in Iraq. Bush was opposed by many of the top generals, by some Republican leaders who feared the surge would hurt in the 2008 elections, and of course by a slew of Democrats and media commentators. Here again Gingrich provided no support for his party’s embattled president, testifying as a private citizen in 2007 that the strategy was “inadequate,” contained “breathtaking” gaps, lacked “synergism” (whatever that means), and was “very disappointing.” What did Gingrich propose? Among other things, a 50 percent increase in the budget of the State Department.

Presidents should not get automatic support, not even from members of their own party, but they have a right to that support when they are under a vicious partisan assault. Today it is fair to look back and ask who had it right: Gingrich, who backed away from and criticized Republican presidents, or those chief executives, who were making difficult and consequential decisions on national security. Bush on the surge and Reagan on the Soviet empire were tough, courageous-- and right. Newt Gingrich in retrospect seems less the visionary than the politician who refused the party’s leader loyal support on grounds that history has proved were simply wrong.

Now it will be the job of Fox and hate-talk radio to get the message out to the morons and zombies who vote in Republican primaries. I doubt they'll want to do anything with this MoveOn video: