The Objective Reality of the Campaign
Posted: February 5, 2012 Filed under: Newt Newt 1 Comment »I’d been tuned out enough the last couple of days to not even realize that Nevada was yesterday until I flipped the TV on in the morning, and whenever I had CNN on for the rest of the day, it was just background drone, up to and including the results. (Even Sullivan didn’t post once about Nevada yesterday.) But I made it a point to watch Gingrich’s late-night press conference. Newt + big loss + press conference promised to be a strange kind of fun. And it was.
Victor David Hanson has something up on The Corner making the obvious comparison to Nixon’s ’62 press conference. True enough, with a couple of differences: Gingrich was there to announce he’s ready to be kicked around for a few more months, and whereas Nixon genuinely despised the press, Gingrich only pretend-despises them—he was courting the assembled reporters mightily, and having a great time doing it. Speaking of which, the weirdest moment of all for me came after he finished, when CNN’s David Gergen, with heavy heart, observed that he can’t remember a presidential candidate who was more “driven by hatred” than Gingrich. Huh? A quick check of his own résumé may help Gergen jog his memory.
So Gingrich still has lots of venom left to spew. How much notice anyone takes from here on in, I don’t know, but he’s still the most compelling reason by far to keep watching. Alex Castellanos, who was responsible for that creepy Jesse Helms ad twenty years ago (“Hands”) but is probably the funniest guy on all the panels right now, had a great line on Meet the Press this morning: “Romney won every demographic last night except for divorce lawyers and narcissists.” True up to a point—Canadian election bloggers don’t vote, but we’re for Newt too.
(The headline for this post was something Newt said during his post-Nevada press conference—that won’t make sense anymore, now that YouTube has removed the relevant clips.)
I too did a double-take on Gergen’s comment!
One thing that struck me during Gingrich’s speech: as I was watching I was continually refreshing my twitter feed on my phone, and most of the politicos I follow (everyone from Donna Brazile to Byron York to K-Lo) were commenting accordingly. But then there was Drudge: he’d been posting updates about the Nevada contest through most of the night, but literally within minutes of Newt taking the stage, he just started posting a bunch of entirely unrelated stories, almost non-sequitir-like (“Crime rate up in San Francisco”; “Man arrested for selling pot to his priest” — I’m making these up, but you get the point). It was kind of a hilarious comment in its own way.