Posted on 01/22/2012 11:17:26 AM PST by Brices Crossroads
Not even 24 hours passed before the Establishment hive was out in force this morning, after Newt Gingrich's stunning decimation of Mitt Romney in the South Carolina primary.
Chris Christie said that Newt has been an embarrassment to the party. His political paramour, Ann Coulter (who endorsed Romney in 2008, then Christie this cycle, and now Romney again...three liberals in a row) deemed him the "least conservative" of the current field and the least electable, among other snarky and degrading comments I will not repeat. Paradoxically, She also repeated the old liberal saw that we need to reach to the middle to get the "coveted independents". Brit Hume pronounced how frightened the GOP Congress-critters were to run for election in 2012 with Gingrich at the top of the ticket and how they would move heaven and earth to prevent his nomination.
Just as Democrats will tell you who they fear the most by attacking that candidate, so will the Beltway GOP hive. They are apoplectic in their fear of Gingrich. The ink wasn't even dry in the papers recounting his unprecedented landslide in the Palmetto state before they pulled out the long knives.
Methinks they doth protest too much. In spite of their thinly veiled contempt for the voters of South Carolina, with its supposed rigid conservatism, South Carolina is far from the most conservative of Southern states. It is much closer to a bellweather of those states across the nation which are reliably Republican in Presidential elections as well as some (like Florida and Ohio) which generally go Republican but not always. Both Iowa (whose caucus is too lightly attended to tell us much) and especially New Hampshire, one of Romney's home states are far too likely to be Democrat states for them to be reliable predicters of GOP turnout or base enthusiasm.
As I have said in may previous posts, this will be a "base election". Whoever succeeds in motivating their base the best will win. If the South Carolina results tell us anything, they tell us that the base is fired up. South Carolinians cast 427,000 votes in the 2008 GOP primary. This year, they cast 600,000. Enthusiasm is way up among the base and this portends well for the GOP as long as it nominates a conservative. If the GOP nominates the liberal (Romney), as it did in 2008, the base will stay home and there will go the old ball game.
John McCain won the South Carolina primary over Mike Huckabee, 143,000 to 128,000 in 2008. Newt Gingrich got nearly as many votes (270,000 to 243,000) as the top two finishers last time. Gingrich got substantially more than McCain and either the number three finisher (Fred Thompson, who got 67,000).
In other words, the base is fired up about the election this year. Gingrich's victory was nothing short of breathtaking and it has scared the bejabbers out of the hive. They will use all means, far and foul, to try to take him down. The same tactics were used to dispatch Pat Buchanan in 1996 after he Placed second in Iowa and won New Hampshire. Buchanan was too easy to marginalize, his victories too narrow and his experience in running a national campaign nonexistent, making him easy prey to the hive's attacks.
Not so Gingrich. Gingrich has governed before and the sky didn't fall (In fact, the budget was balanced, taxes lowered and welfare reformed). His victory in South Carolina was the most lopsided in a contested primary since 1980, which will give him a real tailwind.
And, Mr Hume, he HAS run a national campaign before. In spite of your conversations with unnamed GOP Congressmen who (you say) are afraid of an electoral donnybrook with Newt at the top of the ticket, Gingrich was the face of, and ran, the 1994 GOP House campaign which (contrary to nearly all predictions) gained 52 seats and control of the Congress for the first time in 40 years. In spite of Clinton's landslide of 1996 (powered by the lackluster base turnout generated by the top of the ticket, the Mitt Romney of 1996...Bob Dole), Gingrich preserved the GOP House majority. Again, in 1998, Gingrich successfully defended the House majority during the turbulent period of Clinton's impeachment; In fact, Gingrich's 1994 majority lasted twelve years until it foundered on the shores of the big government Bush Establishment in 2006). I honestly don't know where Hume comes up with these hypotheses, but they certainly are not based upon any historical analysis. And since he lived that very history, as did most of us, I am forced to conclude that he is peddling propaganda for the Beltway hive.
Pay no attention to the hive. Or, I should say, pay attention to them. If they aim their attacks in a certain direction, and as their noise becomes deafening, I have one piece of advice. Ride to the sound of the guns.
Go Newt!
Language is such a dynamic thing -- it's as alive and changing the living beings who speak it. This is an interesting detail of the two different words, "flack" and "flak." Thank you for posting it!
Christie is just pissed off that Newt is surging. I suspect that “Round Boy” believes Romney will nominate him for VP or high profile cabinet position if he’s the nominee. He knows he’ll be left out in the cold if Newt is the nominee.
Pay attention people. Christie’s a political whore at his core.
That’s quite a vision! Ann Coulter as Olive Oyl and Chris Christie as Bluto! LOL..... who’s Popeye?
Thanks, Finny, for the kind words. Most of us freepers are too well informed to be led astray by tehse Establishemnt apparatchiks trying to rewrite history.
BTW, Newt is surging ahead in the Florida polls, ahead by 9 in the insider advantage and 4 in another.
God speed Newt Gingrich!
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