SARASOTA, Fla. — In a cavernous airplane hangar, an emcee warmed up a restless crowd.
“If you’re going to take on the establishment, you can’t be namby-pamby!” he began as people cheered and waved little American flags.
“Let’s send Obama back to Chicago!” he went on, and a gray-haired woman yelled, “You mean out of the country!” and an elderly man shouted, “Yeah!” and a younger woman held up a homemade sign that read “Newt-er Obama!”
“Throw the dogs a bone!” a man in neatly creased khakis blurted out, and soon people began chanting the name of the candidate they believe could give them the brawl they were spoiling for.
“Newt! Newt! Newt! Newt!”
As the country anthem “Only in America” swelled, a blue bus delivered the white-haired presidential contender, a man whose up-and-down 40-year career has been defined by his eagerness to play the warrior in audacious, often destructive political battles.
“You have to imagine looking out over this crowd,” said Newt Gingrich, a student of the fictional Japanese samurai warlord Toranaga, the Turkish revolutionary Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, among others. “And what it does to make you feel GOOD!”
More than 2,000 supporters cheered in Gingrich’s largest gathering yet.
On the eve of Florida’s increasingly raucous GOP primary, Gingrich is settling once more into the familiar, against-all-odds role he’s always relished, from his storied days as House speaker to his early campaigns to his childhood, when the chubby, awkward Newtie would pretend to get beat up by a friend and lie on the sidewalk until a car pulled up.
“Newt would jump up and scream ‘Surprise!’ ” the friend told Time magazine in 1995, adding that it was always Newt who wanted to play dead.
As the Republican establishment mounts attacks denouncing him as too erratic to be president, Gingrich has seemed only more energized. Despite slipping in Florida’s polls, he has vowed a “wild and woolly” primary battle that will end with his victory. And on Sunday, he and Mitt Romney traded their harshest attacks yet, with Romney telling Gingrich to “look in the mirror” if he wants to understand his slide in the polls, and Gingrich slugging back, calling Romney a “pro-abortion, pro-gun-control, pro-tax-increase moderate.”
In many ways, Gingrich was operating on the harsh political battlefield he helped create.
“He relishes confrontation, the engagement, the challenge, the one-on-one, the whole thing — he would have made a great gladiator,” said Eddie Mahe Jr., a former Republican Party official who worked with Gingrich in the 1980s.
“One of the keys to Newt is that he’s always seen politics as war,” said John Pitney Jr., a professor at Claremont McKenna College who has written about Gingrich. “What I see now is just an older version of the younger Gingrich. He hasn’t changed radically, to use one of his favorite words. He’s still audacious.”
An audacious proposition
Gingrich’s political career began with the audacious proposition that a Republican could win in the solidly Democratic Georgia district outside Atlanta. His first two tries failed. Running for Congress in 1974 and ’76, he first faced an electorate soured on Republican President Richard Nixon’s resignation to avoid near-certain impeachment, and then swept up in the Democratic tide led by Georgian Jimmy Carter. They were the first two “nos” in a political career staked on overcoming them.
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