SALON

Tuesday, May 17, 2011 9:54 PM UTC

No, Newt, your campaign’s not just like Reagan’s

The most epically disastrous presidential campaign rollout in history continues

By

Topics: Newt Gingrich, War Room, 2012 Elections,

No, Newt, your campaign's not just like Reagan'sNewt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan

Sometime after he was told to drop out “before you make a bigger fool of yourself” and before we learned that he and his wife had racked up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt at Tiffany’s, Newt Gingrich convened a conference call Tuesday afternoon in an effort to put a good face on what has been an epically disastrous presidential campaign rollout.

In particular, conservative activists and opinion-shapers are still fuming over the surprise criticism he leveled against Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan on Sunday’s “Meet the Press,” but according to the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein, Gingrich insisted that his rocky start as a candidate is nothing remarkable, likening his campaign to … Ronald Reagan’s:

“Every once and awhile there’s going to be a problem, and you gotta spend three or four days fixing it,” he said. “If you go back and look at Ronald Reagan’s record, the opening week of the campaign in Sept. 1980, they didn’t have a very good week. And they had to go back and fix it. This happens occasionally. The trick is to relax, look at it, try to figure out what happened, and keep moving.”

This is one of Newt’s favorite devices — the “fatuous historical analogy,” as Jonathan Bernstein has labeled it. Here, we are supposed to believe that Gingrich is in roughly the same political situation that the patron saint of modern conservatism was when he embarked on his history-changing campaign three decades ago.

Why this is a completely absurd comparison should be fairly obvious, but for the record:

  1. September 1980 was the start of Reagan’s general election campaign. He had already survived the GOP primaries (where his main rival ended up being George H.W. Bush) and been officially nominated at the Republican National Convention in July. The hard part was arguably over: As a general election candidate, Reagan was in a position to benefit from the country’s profound desire — spurred by soaring unemployment, inflation and interest rates, and an endless hostage ordeal in Iran — to throw Jimmy Carter out of office. Yes, that first week after Labor Day — the unofficial opening of the fall campaign season — was rough for Reagan, thanks to a series of controversial statements involving the Ku Klux Klan, the Vietnam War and creationism. But given the favorable electoral climate, it was easy for him to recover. Gingrich, by contrast, is a long-shot (to put it politely) candidate for the Republican nomination — one who already faces enormous skepticism (again to put it politely) about his fitness to lead the party into a general election. The three awful days that Gingrich is enduring now are just totally different — and infinitely more devastating — than the bad week Reagan had in September 1980.
  2. Reagan’s actual nomination campaign rollout — the phase that Newt is now in — in November 1979 was a remarkably successful enterprise, devoid of the embarrassments and self-inflicted wounds that have marked Newt’s formal entry into the race. Reagan formally announced his candidacy on Tuesday, Nov. 12, with a speech at the Hilton in New York — a location chosen to demonstrate Reagan’s commitment to competing in the Northeast, a region that had shunned him in his 1976 race and played a critical role in his loss to Gerald Ford. Over the next few days, Reagan trotted out an impressive series of endorsements from key GOP officials throughout the region, a demonstration of strength that had been missing in ’76. Then, on the Saturday after declaring, he posted a strong victory at the Florida Republican Convention straw poll — a result that sapped the momentum of his chief rival for Southern support, John Connally. When November ended, Reagan had solidified his position as the clear, overwhelming front-runner for the nomination. Newt, on the other hand, has in the last 48 hours been blasted by, among others, the Wall Street Journal, Charles Krauthammer, Rush Limbaugh and the Republican governor of one of the most important GOP primary states (South Carolina’s Nikki Haley) — this on top of the humiliating “You’re an embarrassment” clip that’s now making the rounds.

It is hard to find a presidential campaign rollout that has failed as spectacularly as Gingrich’s.

A logical parallel might be Joe Biden’s in the 2008 cycle; on the same day in January 2007 that Biden filed his paperwork with the Federal Election Commission, his infamous “clean, articulate” comments about Barack Obama appeared in a New York Observer story. Biden, like Gingrich now, was already a long shot for his party’s nomination, and the ensuing uproar merely validated why this was the case. But in another way, Biden’s botched rollout wasn’t nearly as destructive; the reaction from most Democratic elites was that poor old Biden had made another gaffe — not that he was a bad guy who needed to be condemned and isolated. The conservative establishment’s response to Gingrich has been much more hostile.

We’ve long known that Newt Gingrich is not a serious presidential prospect. In the last few days, the most influential voices in his own party have made it clear that they feel the same way. The question is: Will Newt ever realize it himself?

Steve Kornacki

Steve Kornacki writes about politics for Salon. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki More Steve Kornacki.

Next Article

Related Stories

More Related Stories

Featured Slide Shows

The week in 10 pics

close X
  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11
  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
    Credit: AP/LM Otero

  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
    Credit: AP/Matt Rourke

  • A photo taken Monday captures Vice President Joe Biden's response to a Milwaukee second-grader's innovative proposal to end America's epidemic of gun violence. This guy!
    Credit: AP/Jenny Aicher

  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
    Credit: AP/Molly Riley

  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
    Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite

  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
    Credit: AP/Carolyn Kaster

  • O.J. Simpson sits during an evidentiary hearing at Clark County District Court in Las Vegas, Nev., Thursday. Simpson, who is currently serving a nine-to-33-year sentence in state prison for armed robbery and kidnapping, is using a writ of habeas corpus to seek a new trial.
    Credit: AP/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Jeff Scheid

  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
    Credit: AP/NASA/Chris Hadfield

  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
    Credit: AP/Jacquelyn Martin

  • A smoke plume rises high above a road block at the intersection of County A and Ross Road east of Solon Springs, Wis., Tuesday. No injuries were reported, but the the wildfire caused evacuations across northwestern Wisconsin.
    Credit: AP/The Duluth News-Tribune/Clint Austin

  • Recent Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • Thumbnails
  • Fullscreen
  • 1 of 11

Related Videos

Comments

 35 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>

follow salon

Most Read

Popular on Reddit

links from salon.com

From Around the Web

Presented by Scribol
listener_new_rect The Listener: Chekhov's story mirrors Russia's own

Recommendations