Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has been making a lot of noise about running for the White House in 2012. In fact, Newt's chatter has been so loud that Fox News had to dump him as a paid contributer. Although Gingrich has not formally announced yet, I think it is becoming quite clear, Newt needs to abandon all hope right now.
I say this because Newt has beclowned himself before he has even begun to campaign. First, there was that oh so crazy excuse about his infidelity he gave to David Brody during an interview for CBN. Then there was Newt's conflicting statements on Libya that the left is having an absolute field day with. Now we have Newt trying to explain away the hypocrisy of his infidelity vs. Bill Clinton's infidelity. POLITICO: Pressed on “Fox News Sunday” about his adulterous past, Newt Gingrich said it was not hypocritical for him to impeach Bill Clinton while he cheated on his own wife because he never lied under oath.
“I don’t know what you would have had me do,” he said, getting a little testy, “because . . . the president of the United States [was] committing perjury. Remember, he’s a lawyer! This was not some accidental thing. And I thought the outcome was about right.”
The all-but-official candidate for the Republican presidential nomination granted that his own extramarital affairs will be an issue in the coming campaign, but he sounded hopeful that voters will, if they don’t forgive or forget, at least look the other way.
“We’ll find out six months or a year from now whether people are forgiving and whether they put in context events that are 10 and 15 years old,” Gingrich said.
The former House speaker from Georgia said it didn’t bother him that he was throwing rocks at Clinton as president while living in his own metaphorical glass house. He said he would have resigned his leadership post if he didn’t think he could go after Clinton for breaking the law.
“It’s not about personal behavior, and it’s not about what he did in the Oval Office,” Gingrich said of his failed 1998 effort to destroy Clinton. “You can condemn that. You can say it’s totally inappropriate. It was about a much deeper and more profound thing: Does the president of the United States have to obey the law? Or as long as he’s popular, or she’s popular, can they flout the law? Do we become a third world country where the leader gets to get anyway with anything they want to but you and I obey the law?”
“Look, obviously it’s complex and obviously I wasn’t doing things to be proud of,” he added. “On the other hand, what I said very clearly, and I knew this in part having gone through a divorce, I had been in depositions. I had been in situations where you had to swear to tell the truth. I understood that in a federal court, in a case in front of a federal judge, to commit a felony — which is what he did — perjury was a felony. And the question I raised was very simple. Should a president of the United States be above the law? Now I don’t think the president of the United States can be above the law.”
“Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace noted that Gingrich cheated on both his first and second wives.
“I want to talk about your personal life,” Wallace said, broaching the issue in the larger context of whether Gingrich is disciplined enough to run for president. “I hate doing it, but you know it’s going to be an issue in the campaign and so I’m going to go there.”
Wallace played the clip of Gingrich suggesting in an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network earlier this month that his affair was “partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country.”
“Speaker, you’ve had more than a decade to come up with an answer and, in all honesty, there are a lot of people who thought that answer was kind of lame,” Wallace told Gingrich. “That wouldn’t work with my wife!”
Gingrich tried to contextualize the much-mocked clip.“I went on to say that I had to seek God’s forgiveness, and I had to seek reconciliation and I had to believe that being genuinely repentant mattered,” he said.
He touted his happy third marriage to Callista Gingrich, a former aide who figures prominently in most of his public appearances.Callista Gingrich is 22 years younger than Newt Gingrich. Ironically, Monica Lewinsky was 22 years old when she had her sexual encounters with Clinton.
“People have to measure, at 67, have I matured? Am I person that they can trust and rely on as a leader? And discipline is part of it,” Gingrich said. “And I think that’s a legitimate question. And I expect the American people will in the end be remarkably fair.”
“They’ll render judgment and they’ll decide whether or not Newt Gingrich is someone who can solve the country’s problems and can be the kind of leader they want for this country,” he added, speaking in the third person. “I don’t think I’m perfect. I’ve admitted that I’ve had problems. I’ve admitted that I’ve sought forgiveness, but I also think that over time if you look at my total record I’m a pretty effective leader.”
All of these issues are distraction. Distractions are the very things Obama and the left desperately need in order to succeed in 2012. Obama is extremely vulnerable to attacks on his record regarding the economy, jobs and the deficit. Any candidate with a chance of beating Obama must be able to "focus like a laser" on these issues and cannot be distracted from them. Newt Gingrich has already provided way too many distractions to ever succeed in this role.
So, I would like to offer Newt Gingrich some sound and sage advice; pack it in before you make a bigger clown of yourself. You have already damaged yourself beyond repair and there is just no need to go any further.
