Can you imagine winning this election only to install a George W. Bush in the White House? Even if we succeed in shedding the soft tyranny of Barack Obama, events are already in control and a reckoning of some sort or other cannot be evaded but only shaped. Gingrich has the power by virtue of his intellect, experience, and vision to bring the country through.
Consider one example. Our $16 trillion national debt is about to wreck the economy, destroy our defense system, and probably do away with capitalism in favor of a controlled, paternalistic economy. It will install crony capitalism/socialism, and utterly vitiate representative democracy. Gingrich has pointed out that if we permitted extraction of oil and gas on federal property it would likely generate $16 trillion or more in license fees and taxes in the next decade. He says he can find $500 billion a year in savings by resorting to modern management methods and his figure does not sound unrealistic. Combining these two numbers would produce about $21 trillion in 10 years and come close to restoring us to fiscal sanity without increasing taxes etc.
These are matters of vision which Gingrich possesses in abundance and which no other candidate apart from Barack Obama himself has demonstrated. Unfortunately, Obama's vision is breathtaking but tyrannical and ruinous.
Gingrich alone among the candidates articulates a coherent foreign policy which accepts the complexity of the threat of aggressive Islam, the limitations as well as the uses of military power, and the need for clear thinking to avoid self-deception, which has been the distinguishing characteristic of the Obama administration.
Yes, Santorum and Romney declare they will be muscular but they also have to bring the country along. Churchill did that with his speeches and Gingrich can do the same. When he says, "I want to say a word about foreign policy, I think we should have one" he drives a shaft into the heart of the Obama administration foreign-policy failures and then he brings the audience to its feet by declaring he wants an American constitutional foreign policy.
In other words, he can bring the country along.
Just as it avails little to win the election only to install a non-entity, even more does it avail nothing to lose the election. As John F. Kennedy said, "first you gotta win." So we have to have a candidate who can beat the billion-dollar baby.
Consider the utter failure of the McCain candidacy. His failure was not that he lost debates, his failure was the had no vision. His failure was that he was selling nothing but himself. Sounds like Mitt Romney, doesn't it?. Small wonder that McCain could never bring himself to attack Obama for having no specifics in his grandiose "vision" because that driving impulse was as foreign to him as it was to George HW Bush.
Gingrich has vision and from that he will structure a campaign to put himself and us on the attack and dominate the stage. That is the way to defeat Obama. The Bush-McCain path of passive resistance will probably fail. It is not simply a question of stringing together soundbites against Obama's policies and results, it is vital to explain why the failure is so abject. It is vital to offer a positive solution. It is vital to do so in words that clarify, convince, inspire.
What will Romney offer? Certainly not "vision." His path to the nomination has demonstrated that he has but three things to offer: 1) electability-now a greatly damaged presumption; 2) a Nixonian tendency to sacrifice his party by destroying his opponents through cut-out surrogates slandering with negative ads; 3) a dismaying tendency to conspire with the Ron Paul libertarian camp to contrive a fifth column operating against the other candidates-a very Nixonian and unattractive modus operandi.
The question is, can Newt gain the nomination? His chances are slim. A lot depends on the viability of Rick Santorum who, I predict, has started a slide and whose supporters for the most part are likely to go to Gingrich. I believe Santorum will lose both Michigan and Arizona and will as a consequence be further weakened. The pity is that the folks will not get another look at Santorum in debate to decide whether or not he is in fact "presidential."
If Santorum does slide, the real question is whether his lack of viability will be apparent in time for Gingrich to rise once again to the top? Any opinion on this is mere speculation. Clearly, Gingrich is making one terrific speech after another to one constituent group after another such as the Hispanics, the NRA, the Jews, the energy consumers etc. He is predicating his main issue on energy and I think he is right to do so. We normally fill our cars once a week and that means that Gingrich's message is being reinforced potential voters every week. Half of those people who take their cars are women and that gender represents Gingrich's greatest electoral weakness.
But is he getting his message out? We junkies watch it on the net but what about Joe The Plumber?
If I had to predict, I will say that Romney wins the nomination but if Gingrich can stay viable yet a while longer fate may yet have another trick to play on us.
