A real catch. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
(Justin Sullivan/Getty Images - Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
No wonder he’s currently riding at the top of the polls. Newt Gingrich has a lot going for him.
For example, he's not Mitt Romney. And then also, he's not Herman Cain. Nor is he Rick Perry. Nor, if you Google his last name, does an obscene sexual term come leaping into your mind and scar you forever.
In this sense, he stands head and shoulders above the other candidates.
Also, when asked questions about places like Libya and Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan-stan-stan, he responds to them, with precision and color, in complete sentences, as though he actually has some knowledge of what he's talking about.
When you start listing things like this, you get more and more impressed. He has no ranches with racial epithets for names. Sure, there’s the sexual indiscretion, but that was only because he loved his country so much. Can Herman Cain say the same?
He has not mixed up John Wayne and John Wayne Gacy in a speech. No one has pictures of him eating a corndog to a disadvantage. He cites the Northwest Ordinance in the course of debate from memory, without breaking a sweat. He doesn’t adhere to one of those religions with peculiar undergarments.
He has not paused and flailed for nearly a minute in the course of debate trying to remember one of the cabinet departments he would cut. He has never suggested doing violence to the chairman of the Fed — or if he did, we knew he was too slow-moving to follow through on it.
This is one of those blind date scenarios. Hear the description, and he sounds like a real catch. Then he walks into the room, and he’s Newt Gingrich.
Newt Gingrich, one of those 90's throwbacks that we thought we could shelve next to big hair and financial prosperity. Newt Gingrich, whose book-tour-slash-campaign is broke and kept hemorrhaging advisers. Newt Gingrich, who has been known to spend an amount equivalent to the GDP of small countries at Tiffany’s. Newt Gingrich, the corpulent relic with a surfeit of ideas, the larger-than-life, smirking Big Daddy of the field, whom everyone jokingly favored because they assumed he was just in it for the opportunity to address large crowds of people on television without their yawning and telling him to go back to the 90’s, whence he came. Newt Gingrich, with most of Chris Christie’s avoirdupois, and none of his crowds of people suggesting he get into the race.
True enough.
But other than that, the man’s perfect.
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