The staples of Gingrich’s repertoire — aggressive rhetoric, intense self-regard, historical pomposity, and organizational chaos — were on full display. “In his world, the government is sovereign, and we are merely subjects,” Gingrich said of President Obama. “In our world, we are citizens, and the government is our servant.” He even tried his hand at a bit of theology. “All of us are flawed,” Gingrich noted when a journalist asked about his well-documented personal foibles. “The belief that only one person was perfect, and that was Christ” encapsulates “the heart of Christianity,” he affirmed.

Gingrich arrived late, causing reporters to speculate that he’d been watching Herman Cain’s withdrawal announcement. Sure enough, when Gingrich finally arrived, he wasted no time in wishing Cain well — thanking him for contributing “bold ideas” to the campaign, such as the “9-9-9 tax” plan. Before opening the floor to questions, Gingrich veered off to talk about the Middle East, asserting that Obama has failed to adequately curtail Iran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon, which he said poses a “direct, mortal threat to the very survival of Israel.”

“The Arab Spring may well turn into a hurricane season of grave, grave danger for the United States,” he explained.

One local journalist asked Gingrich to comment on remarks by former GOP Rep. Guy Molinari, who represented Staten Island in Congress during the 1980s. Last week, Molinari called Gingrich “evil,” adding, “the thought that this man could be president of the United States is appalling.”

“I have stepped on a lot of toes,” Gingrich conceded. “One of the reasons I left Congress is, I frankly burned out a number of Republicans — because I pushed so hard for reform,” he said. “I think I represented the spirit of the Tea Party before there was a Tea Party.”

Toward the beginning of his speech, as Gingrich meandered through another castigation of Obama, someone in the crowd abruptly called out “Mic check!” — the Occupy movement’s signature call for attention.

“Occupy Staten Island says …” this interloper shouted, before being drowned out by the crowd’s angry boos. “Bum!” several sneered. “Don’t worry, Newt — we got your back!” another man exclaimed. A chant of “Newt! Newt! Newt!” reached full force, and the man was escorted from the room. As he exited, someone slapped a “Newt 2012” sticker on his head.

“As I was saying,” Gingrich continued, “about who I presume was his candidate …” The crowd roared.

Gingrich did not scant, of course, the historical significance of his candidacy. “This will be the most important election since 1860,” he declared, likening himself to Abraham Lincoln twice over the course of the speech. A position paper recently posted on Newt.org – suggesting that the Federal Court of West Texas ought to be abolished — constitutes the “boldest” proposal for reforming the American judiciary “since Lincoln’s First Inaugural,” Gingrich proclaimed.

Gingrich touched on disparate themes, at once denouncing “hedonism and acquisition,” and then touting his instrumental role in launching Plan Colombia, the U.S. military’s notorious counter-narcotics interdiction program in South America. He even commented on the notion of holding banks accountable for causing the 2008 financial crisis.

“The idea of any one of us getting the attention of Bank of America is virtually impossible, because they’re so gigantic,” he said. “By the time you get to somebody with any level of power, if it’s not a billion-dollar problem, they can’t afford to pay attention to it.” He said that “too big to fail,” by his lights, means “too big to be managed.”

The man who asked the question then interjected. “I am one of the 99 percent, and I appreciate this dialogue,” he said — another invocation of the Occupy movement. This time, the crowd cheered. Gingrich nodded.

After the speech, Newt and his wife greeted supporters, signed books and posed for photos with fully uniformed Army soldiers. His fan base proved willing to look past Gingrich’s many faults.

Kevin Collins, a former police officer and Staten Island Tea Party board member, rejected Molinari’s criticism of Newt’s character. “Guy didn’t like the treatment that his daughter got from him [Gingrich] when she was in Congress,” Collins said, referring to former GOP Rep. Susan Molinari. “I know Newt Gingrich personally, and I’ve always liked him.”

I asked Frank Santarpia, a real estate investor and co-founder of the Staten Island Tea Party, about some viewpoints Gingrich has espoused only in the past few years that would seem to complicate any bid for support from “Tea Party conservatives” — namely, his endorsement both of an individual mandate in healthcare and the need to “take action on climate change.” But Santarpia was undeterred. “I am not interested in what happened 25 years ago, 15 years ago, or two years ago,” he said. “Circumstances change, people change.”

Newt’s mixture of blarney and bombast is going over well with Republican voters, especially those whose priority is the complete evisceration of Barack Obama. A Des Moines Register poll released later on Saturday showed Gingrich with the lead in Iowa, at 25 percent — followed by Ron Paul in second and Mitt Romney in third. The durability of Gingrich’s surging poll numbers remains something of a mystery; he opened his first office in Iowa just a few days ago. (Conversely, Paul’s organization is “very good,” Gingrich told me during the book signing. “He’s very formidable in Iowa.”)

If Republican primary voters in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina are as conciliatory toward Gingrich as they were in Staten Island, the grandeur with which he views his presence in contemporary politics will, no doubt, continue to inflate.

The film’s producers have released an apologetic press release explaining what went wrong:

The 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged, is known in philosophical and political circles for presenting a cogent argument advocating a society driven by rational self-interest. On the back of the film’s retail DVD and Blu-ray however, the movie’s synopsis contradictorily states “AYN RAND’s timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice comes to life…”

Did you spot the error there? Rand’s Objectivism is staunchly opposed to “courage and self-sacrifice,” along every other essential component of basic human empathy, because it is a philosophy for angry teenage boys who imagine that they’re intellectually superior to everyone around them.

The producers will send everyone a new title sheet for the film that refers, correctly, to “AYN RAND’s timeless novel of rational self-interest and lots of rape.” (J/k I think they toned down the rape.)

“Atlas Shrugged” cost a reported $20 million and made less than $5 million at the box office. The filmmakers claim to be producing Part II.

In other news of the efforts by various wings of the conservative movement to expand the scope of their oft-hilarious parallel media, the people dumb enough to invest actual real-life money in what was supposed to be a TV channel specifically for the Tea Party are now suing the businessman who took their money. Turns out “Tea Party HD” was actually more of a “scam” than a “viable business plan.”

“The alleged purpose of Tea Party HD was to be the ‘world’s first HD provider of news about the Tea Party,’” the lawsuit states. “In reality it was an investment scheme to defraud politically conservative-minded citizens who support the Tea Party mission.”

How does Tea Party HD co-founder Anthony Loiacono respond to that very serious charge? With a very serious proposal, obviously:

Loiacono told the Tennessean, in response to the suit, that he would challenge Hemrick to settle it through a televised “lie detector challenge” — and if he wins Hemrick would have to drop the suit and cover Loiacono’s legal fees.

Giving this very savvy and serious entrepreneur $287,500 definitely seemed like a wise investment at the time, I am sure.

Tea Party HD, TPM notes, is known mostly for setting up that other camera that Michele Bachmann insisted on looking into that night she gave a rebuttal to the State of the Union.

FRC lauds Walsh for his “unwavering support of the family,” by which they don’t mean his family, because obviously his support for them has been known to waver. But supporting one’s actual children is less important, to Tony Perkins and his organization, than Walsh’s steadfast belief that the government’s sole responsibility is to ensure that life is as difficult and miserable as possible for women and gay people.

“We thank Cong. Walsh who has voted consistently to defend faith, family and freedom,” said FRCA President Tony Perkins. “Cong. Walsh and other ‘True Blue Members’ have voted to repeal Obamacare, de-fund Planned Parenthood, end government funding for abortion within the health care law, uphold the Defense of Marriage Act, and continue support for school choice. I applaud their commitment to uphold the institutions of marriage and family.”

Congratulations to Joe Walsh and the Family Research Council, fine representatives of everything small and selfish and hateful in the dark recesses of the American psyche.

After all, if there’s one GOP candidate (besides Jon Huntsman) whose nomination the Tea Party supposedly can’t abide, it’s the formerly pro-choice and pro-gay rights architect of what amounts to the ObamaCare prototype. (The news today that Romney’s Massachusetts healthcare law apparently provides some care for illegal immigrants will only strengthen this perception.) In 2010, the Tea Party united behind unknown, underfunded gadflies and derailed well-credentialed candidates like Romney in several high-profile primaries. If the GOP presidential race was being held back then, the thinking goes, surely Romney wouldn’t have received the pass he now seems likely to get.

But there’s another reason Romney may end up coasting, and why next year’s GOP congressional primary season might not be nearly as wild as that of 2010: The Tea Party has already won.

Its victory has mainly been a psychological one. The defeats of Sen. Robert Bennett and Reps. Mike Castle and Bob Inglis along with the GOP primary triumphs of Sharron Angle, Joe Miller, Dan Maes and Rick Scott sent a clear signal to Republican elected officials and party leaders that their base was absolutely serious about ideological purity — and absolutely opposed to any kind of compromise with President Obama and other Democrats. If they didn’t show that they understood this message, and if they didn’t back it up with action, they could be next on the hit list. Basically, the Tea Party got in their heads.

And fear of arousing a Rush Limbaugh/Red State-fueled backlash among the party base — which is essentialy synonymous with the Tea Party — has clearly shaped the actions of the Republican establishment since last year’s uprising. John Boehner set the tone for the 112th Congress when he refused over and over in a “60 Minutes” interview last December to use the word “compromise.” Since then, Boehner has presided over one manufactured crisis after another, forced to continuously prove to Tea Party purists that he’s not about to sell them out in any kind of compromise with Obama. Even when the president offered the prospect of a “grand bargain” with significant cuts to Medicare and Social Security and only modest revenue hikes, Boehner felt compelled to walk away.

Tea Party fear was also evident in the House GOP’s decision to rally around Paul Ryan’s politically toxic Medicare privatization plan, which has no chance of becoming law and which provides Democrats with an easy campaign weapon — but which even reluctant Republicans felt it necessary to vote for. On the Senate side, Republicans have shattered records employing the filibuster to fight anything with Obama’s name on it — no matter how popular it is.

This is why it’s not very surprising that the some of the Republican who were initially seen as obvious 2012 targets for the Tea Party may end up facing weak or even nonexistent primary challenges: They got the message and modified their behavior.

Take Orrin Hatch, who rocketed to the top of the endangered list when his fellow Utah Republican, Bennett, was crushed at the state’s GOP convention last spring (a result that ended Bennett’s reelection campaign). Hatch has a long history in conservative politics (he supported Ronald Reagan over Gerald Ford in the 1976 primaries), but his vote for TARP, occasional collaboration with Democrats (he and Ted Kennedy used to team up now and then), past support for an individual healthcare mandate (which received new attention thanks to ObamaCare), and decades in Washington stirred suspicion on the right. But after watching Bennett go down, Hatch abandoned whatever instinct for compromise he once had, called his TARP vote a mistake, swore off his old support for the mandate, and began attacking Obama with jarring intensity — branding his healthcare plan “an awful piece of crap” and “a dumb-ass program.” And it worked: Hatch’s most serious would-be challenger, Rep. Jason Chaffetz, announced over the summer that he won’t run for the Senate. Hatch didn’t avoid a challenge because the Tea Party weakened; it’s because he proved his loyalty to the Tea Party mindset. (Alex Pareene has a pretty definitive guide to what Hatch did to survive.)

Similarly, Maine’s Olympia Snowe now seems likely to avoid a serious primary challenge. Her tone hasn’t changed as dramatically as Hatch’s, but she’s been just as willing to play along with the Filibuster Everything strategy. And while Tea Party groups are mobilizing against Indiana’s Richard Lugar, who faces a 2012 primary challenge from the state’s treasurer, Lugar has helped himself by curtailing any non-foreign policy cooperation with Obama.

This is why a Romney victory wouldn’t really be a repudiation of the Tea Party at all. He’s tried to be careful with the tone of his rhetoric, mindful that a full-on embrace of all of the right’s anti-Obama hysteria could hurt him in the general election. But as I wrote last week, Romney’s actual positions are fully in line with the Tea Party’s. He’s a moderate only in the sense that so many people believe he’s faking his conservatism. But while there’s good reason for the right to wonder if it could really trust Romney as president, the reality is that he’d be dealing with a congressional party that is fully gripped by the Tea Party mindset. He might have little choice but to play along.

But the Democrats since George McGovern captured the party’s presidential nomination in the same fateful year of 1972 have been the opposite of a left-wing populist party. Thus while right-wing populism reinforces the existing Republican story about America, any genuine left-wing populism would challenge the basic constituencies and values of the McGovern-to-Obama Democrats. There are six reasons in particular why Democrats are unlikely to benefit as much from populism as Republicans.

Reason No. 1: The Democrats depend on Wall Street for campaign donations. Both national parties are captured to a large degree by financial industry contributors. But this is not as much of a problem for the Republicans as for the Democrats. Since Nixon, the Republicans have successfully channeled anger away from Big Money to Big Government. They have done so by manipulating the classic populist paradigm of producers vs. parasites. They have treated private sector workers, business owners and investors as allies in a common struggle of producers against parasitic public sector employees and poor people dependent on welfare.

To counteract this powerful neo-Jacksonian narrative, the Democrats would have to be equally pungent in their criticism of plutocratic bankers and overpaid CEOs. But how can President Obama and Democrats in Congress wave pitchforks at Wall Street while engaging in Wall Street fundraisers for their 2012 campaigns?

Barack Obama, who went without federal matching funds in 2008 so that he would be free to shovel in unlimited amounts of big money, is a particularly unlikely critic of Wall Street. In 2008, if professors at universities are not counted, the top institutional donors to the Obama campaign were Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup and Time Warner.

Obama’s 2008 campaign looks less like William Jennings Bryan’s outsider challenge than like William McKinley’s successful fundraising in 1896 from the banking and corporate elite.

Reason No. 2: The Democrats rely increasingly for votes on elite professionals. Having lost the white working class to the Republicans decades ago, Democrats have had some success in winning over upscale white professionals with liberal attitudes on social issues and the environment. But identification with the professional-class minority poses as many problems for would-be Democratic populists as does the party’s reliance on the financial sector.

The majority of Americans do not go to college and are not likely to be inspired by the elite progressive vision of a society where anyone with high test scores can study until his or her 30s, earn an expensive credential, and then get an interesting and fulfilling office job. The populist ideal is the horny-handed son of toil who can fix a car engine, not the meritocratic nerd who could flourish in a lightning round on “Jeopardy.”

Even worse, to avoid alienating their professional-class supporters the Democrats are forced to come up with absurdly restrictive definitions of “the rich” or “the wealthy” that will include billionaire hedge fund types but exclude the toilers who earn a quarter of a million dollars a year and can afford vacation homes, maids and private schools for their children. According to the Democratic version of populism, corporate lawyers who make less than $250,000 a year, along with janitors who make $15,000 a year and rely on food stamps, are both members of the suffering proletariat exploited by the rich. This explains the emphasis on the gains in income and wealth of the top 1 percent, rather than, say, the top 10 percent or 20 percent. And it explains the widespread opposition among Democrats to lifting the cap on wage income taxed by the Social Security payroll tax above the present limit of $106,800. It’s one thing for billionaires and millionaires to pay as much as their secretaries in taxes, and quite another for Democratic lawyers, consultants and professors with lower six-figure salaries to pay the same share of income in payroll taxes as their secretaries. A genuine populism of the left would go after America’s pampered and privileged professionals, not just billionaires.

Reason No. 3: Public Sector Unions. The left-populism of the New Deal era drew on both organized farmers’ movements and organized labor. The right’s counterrevolution against organized labor since the 1980s has all but annihilated unions in the private sector.

Can a populism of the left be based on the public sector workers who, with professionals and minorities, are part of the Democratic Party base? In theory, it could. The progressive view, set forth recently with admirable clarity and passion by Elizabeth Warren, is that the U.S. is a mixed economy, in which the success of the private and nonprofit sectors depends on the success of the public sector. And front-line public servants like police officers, first responders and teachers continue to command the respect of their neighbors.

But it is not easy for public servants to replace the construction workers in the New Deal murals as icons of the hardworking yeomanry. Samuel Gompers, the longtime president of the AFL-CIO, opposed public sector unions on the theory that, while private sector unions share profits with capitalists, the wages of public sector workers come out of taxes paid, in part, by private sector workers. Moreover, as right-wing opponents of public sector unions never tire of pointing out, unionized firms can go bankrupt, but governments can raise money by coercive taxation. For these reasons, it is much easier for conservatives, now that they have shattered private sector unions, to portray public sector workers as parasites on the producing classes in a Jacksonian morality play, than it is for progressives to assign to public sector workers the role in a left-populist coalition played by private sector unionists and farmers in the New Deal era.

Reason No. 4: Identity Politics. The essence of populism of the left, right or center is the defense of the common good of the demos, the people, against unjust privileges sought by special interests — that is, populations who make up less than the whole. Populism only works if there is a clearly identifiable “people.”

In most nation-states “the people” is identified, in the popular mind if not officially, with the dominant ethnocultural population in the country—the French in France, the Czechs in the Czech Republic. For this reason, populism is easily captured by right-wing movements for whom the “true people” are members of the ethnic or racial majority and for whom national minorities are threatening outsiders.

But more inclusive versions of populism are possible. In the U.S. the idea of “the melting pot” held that Americans of many different ancestries, by cultural interchange and intermarriage, amalgamate over time to produce a new nationality that is distinct from ancestral subcultures. In its mid-century formulation, the melting pot ideal in practice was limited to the amalgamation of Anglo-Americans with immigrants from Ireland and continental Europe to form a kind of generic white “people.” With the Civil Rights Revolution, the white-ethnic melting pot could have been redefined as a larger, more inclusive trans-racial melting pot.

Instead, however, the American center-left from the 1970s onward rejected the idea of the melting pot, in favor of identity politics, which seeks the permanent preservation of ethno-racial identities as fixed elements of a multicultural America. These official ethno-racial identities are those of America’s Soviet-style bureaucratic racialism: non-Hispanic white, Hispanic (may be of any race), African-American, Asian and Pacific Islander, and Native American. A genuine left-wing populism in the last generation would have mocked these bureaucratic categories and celebrated fluidity and hybridization across racial lines. Instead, the power of identity politics is shown by the fact that Barack Obama, the son of a white mother and a black father, is identified, and identifies himself, as “black” rather than “mixed race.”

Reason No. 5: Progressives and Double Standards. The definition of America as a collection of peoples, rather than as a single, diverse people, creates another problem for would-be Democratic populists — their endorsement of race-based double standards. One consists of race-based affirmative action, which, in spite of liberal attempts to argue otherwise, means nothing if it does not mean sometimes favoring blacks and Latinos with lower tests scores in college admissions at the expense of whites and Asians with higher test scores.

“Equal rights for all and special privileges for none” was the motto of Jacksonian populism. Racial preference policies created a genuine, grass-roots populist movement among so-called non-Hispanic whites for their repeal, which succeeded in many states. Had there been genuine populists of the left in America, they would have spent the last 30 years fighting for living wages and universal social insurance, which benefit Americans of all races, rather than fighting losing battles to defend double standards in college admissions and small business loans for some groups at the expense of others.

Having largely lost the ill-conceived battle in defense of racial preferences, many progressive activists have found a new kind of race-based double standard they can embrace: celebrating illegal immigration as the equivalent of the civil rights movement, as though a Guatemalan janitor or Irish bartender who sneaks into the U.S., buys a forged Social Security card and repeatedly deceives federal, state and local governments, at the expense of other Guatemalan or Irish would-be immigrants who patiently wait in line, is somehow the equivalent of Rosa Parks. A case can be made for providing citizenship to many of today’s illegal immigrants, if only to prevent the existence on American soil of a permanent class of metics or workers without rights. But what kind of populism idealizes foreigners who break immigration laws made by the elected representatives of the people?

Reason No. 6: The Vilification of Working-Class Lifestyles by the Cultural Left. Last but not least, Democrats are not likely to be able to compete on populist terrain with the right as long as a substantial portion of the progressive intelligentsia is identified with scorn toward the lifestyles of people in the suburbs, where the majority of working-class blacks and Latinos as well as whites are now found. Since the days of Nixon, right-wing populism has derived much of its appeal from attacks on “limousine liberals” — more recently, “latte liberals” — who, according to conservatives, look down their noses at the religious beliefs and folkways of the American working class. Unfortunately, much of the progressive intelligentsia seems determined to live up to the right’s stereotype, by demonizing the elements of modern American working-class life, from SUVs and low-price exurban box stores to the kinds of cuisine that upscale foodies frown upon.

It is all too easy for conservative populists to portray progressive thinkers and pundits who denounce suburban single-family homes, the reliance of most Americans on automobiles for commuting and shopping, church attendance and, in some parts of the country, traditions of hunting as out-of-touch elitists at war with the Main Street way of life. And what could be more anti-populist than the enthusiastic embrace by much of the center-left of Cass Sunstein’s notion of public policy based on “nudging,” in which elite liberal technocrats will use taxes and other devices to manipulate irrational working-class yokels into doing the right thing against their bad instincts?

Today’s plutocratic America could use a populist movement of the center-left, comparable to the coalition of workers and farmers and radicalized professionals who provided the backbone of the New Deal Democrats. But the prospects are remote that any genuine populism of the left will come from a party funded by Wall Street that finds its core constituencies among upper-middle-class professionals and public sector workers and reaches out to minorities on the basis of narrowly tailored patronage policies targeting particular groups. A Democratic Party that channeled popular anger for constructive liberal purposes would look and sound very different from the Democratic Party of today.