Eight years later, after the Virginia Tech massacre, George Stephanopoulos asked him on ABC if he still stood by his Columbine comments. Gingrich said that he did, and when Stephanopoulos asked what liberalism had to do with violence and dehumanization, he answered: “Well, who has created a situation ethics, essentially, zone of not being willing to talk about any of these things?”
If Gingrich made such remarks in a presidential debate this fall, the public would recoil. If he didn’t, Obama could still use the Georgian’s long history of verbal overkill to paint him as divisive and destructive. When he’s under criticism, Gingrich’s standard operating procedure is to interject that people are taking his words out of context. In a Lincoln-Douglas format, he would just have to sit and seethe until his turn came. As we’ve witnessed several times during the current debates, Gingrich is very good when he’s pretending to be angry; he’s very bad when he is angry for real. After his poll numbers fell late last year, he hurt himself by using scarce debate time to complain about attacks by a pro-Romney super PAC; his peevishness compounded his fall. Knowing this history, Obama would try to play with his head.
Gingrich has recently stressed that he prefers having a live audience that’s free to voice its feelings. No wonder: His smackdowns against journalists — especially Fox News’s Juan Williams and CNN’s John King — have won him raucous applause from Republican crowds. His supporters think he would get a similar response this fall. But as conservative commentator John Ziegler has pointed out, the audiences for those debates would include independents and Democrats as well as Republicans. Any incendiary remarks by Gingrich would get more catcalls than cheers.
What of the audience at home? Gingrich is hoping that long-form debates would enable him to reach the great mass of voters without the distorting filter of the mainstream media. But nobody except the most committed partisans would sit through 21 total hours of serial monologues. Even if undecided voters made a good-faith effort to watch, they’d start tuning out after 45 minutes or so. Gingrich’s greatest foe in the debates wouldn’t be Obama — it would be the remote control.
In the end, what most people would see of such debates would be brief clips on news programs. And those clips would naturally consist of the most dramatic and attention-getting material — including the moments when Gingrich drew jeers from the audience for making over-the-top attacks. And so he would be back to where he’s been many times, complaining of selective quotation by liberals and the media.
This line of defense often backfires on him. In May, when his remarks about Medicare on “Meet the Press” were criticized, he took them back and then offered an absurd warning: “Any ad which quotes what I said on Sunday is a falsehood.”
So just picture Obama giving Gingrich everything he wants: seven three-hour debates with demonstrative audiences. Gingrich would then be able to make knockout punches — against himself.
John J. Pitney Jr. is the Roy P. Crocker professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and a co-author of “American Government and Politics: Deliberation, Democracy, and Citizenship.”
Read more from Outlook:
Five myths about Newt Gingrich
Gingrich defends the 1995 government shutdown
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