“Newt’s intelligence is going to go a long way towards softening up liberals who love to bash the Republican party for being stupid,”
Excellent analysis. They can’t say that Newt is stupid like they normally do to all of our candidates. The debates will feature his intelligence so well that he will win over people as he exposes what a fraud Obama is.
Moreover, I wonder if the fact that Newt mistreated his second wife, as horrible as that is for conservative Christians to consider, might actually resonate with “Independents” or conservative Democrats who have had similar experiences with failed marriages. “Hey, this guy is human just like me.”
I don’t think Newt’s found the best way to spin his divorces yet. It actually felt like he shrunk back from answering that question in much detail in the last debate because he didn’t want people who might not have heard about it to realize they were talking about him. I think he needs to use stronger language and say he regrets what he did profoundly, say he’s embarrassed by his past, reiterate asking forgiveness from God and say he’s tried in the last decade to turn his life around and become the kind of husband, father and grandfather that his family deserves. His ego’s been getting in the way of him truly showing humility on this front.
Bottom line, though, as someone said, it’s conservatives who are more likely to be upset about the infidelity. Democrats tend to consider that sort of thing a non-issue. They might more or less use it shamelessly as a campaign tactic, but they might even shy away from that because of how easy it would be to bring up Clinton and to point to how popular he still is among Democrats.
I’m not sure the Democrats have a solid negative narrative on Newt yet. With Bachmann and Paul it would be “they’re crazy,” with Perry and Santorum it would be “they’re stupid,” and with Romney it would be the Bain capital/Carly Fiorina/Meg Whitman angle of making him out to be a heartless corporate 1%er who threw his employees under the bus and doesn’t understand the plight of the working man (A la the G.W. Bush 2nd term attack over the price of groceries, was it?). No idea on Huntsman either...maybe that’s why Clinton said he thought he’d be a formidable candidate, no real negatives to speak of.
They may try angling for Newt on the “crazy” angle because of some of his ideas, but he parried one of those pretty well with the moonbase answer last time, and his obvious intelligence is a good counter-strike to accusations of an unstable mind. The infidelity and the lack of private sector experience don’t work well as attacks for Democrats. They’re probably going to have to fall back on him being a “mean” conservative who is going to cut welfare. I don’t know if we’ve had to run against that line of attack for a while. Maybe Dole a little? I’m too young to remember how the Nixon campaigns played out, I only know that he won twice.