During
the Punic wars between the ancient Romans and the Carthaginians, the Romans
came face to face with one of the most fearsome sights the ancient battlefield
had to offer, a fully grown elephant, equipped for war. As the invention of firearms was some 1700
years away, killing these war elephants was no mean feat. A few elephants could disrupt an entire
formation, and decidedly tilt the balance of power on the battlefield. However, the Romans came up with a brilliant
strategy to counter the Carthaginian war elephants. They realized that elephants are incredibly
hard to kill, but relatively easy to panic.
Rather than killing the elephants, they used fire and trumpets to panic
them into running wildly around the battlefield, ignoring their riders and
trampling friend and foe alike.
Newt
Gingrich is President Obama’s panicked elephant. Gingrich is undoubtedly a powerful debater, a
great modern conservative thinker, and should be a huge asset to the Republican
Party. Out of all of the current
candidates in the Republican primary, you would be hard pressed to find anyone who
either has a more appealing set of ideas (to both conservatives and moderates),
or does a better job of explaining those ideas than Gingrich. However, his temperament is decidedly
non-presidential. He is pugnacious, at
times bordering on impudent. He likes to
speak extemporaneously, and this leads to occasional gaffes. He was able to overcome these flaws as Speaker
of the House, but the President is the Head of State, with responsibility for
directing the country’s diplomacy. Gingrich
is many things, but he is decidedly not diplomatic. People thought George W. Bush pissed a lot of
other countries off? That was nothing
compared to what Gingrich would do.
Gingrich also brings a tremendous amount of personal baggage to the
race. In fact, it is a testament to the
quality of his ideas and his skill as an orator that he is even considered a
serious candidate. The man has had two
divorces, and was fined for ethics violations while speaker (the charges were
overblown, but still, THE MAN WAS FINED FOR ETHICS VIOLATIONS, just a thought,
but that might provide your political
opponents with some ammo). Gingrich has
secured his place as one of the great men of late 20th century
conservatism, but he will never be President.
Gingrich,
however, seems unwilling or unable to reconcile himself to this fact. Gingrich has been driven mad by what he sees
as the unfair, ungentlemanly (but extremely effective) personal attack ads
aired against him by Romney’s super-PAC.
The rest of the world might find it a bit hypocritical for the man who
led the charge to impeach Bill Clinton for his personal indiscretions in the
oval office to cry foul over ads which reference his personal life while he
seeks the oval office. But whether Gingrich
is genuinely convinced that Romney has crossed a line, or he is just seeing his
political life flash before his eyes, he has embarked on an impulsive,
destructive rampage that puts panicked elephants to shame.
Rather
than trying to promote his conservative agenda, Newt is striking out at Romney
with anything and everything he can think of that might gain traction with the
public. One line of attack in particular
is damaging not just to Romney, but to the Republican Party, and American
Conservatism in general. This is the
charge that in his time at Bain Capital, Romney was a greedy Wall Street tycoon
who heartlessly killed companies, fired all the workers, and pocketed the
assets for himself. He’s not accusing
Romney of breaking any laws. He’s
accusing Romney of being an integral part in a broken, manipulative, unfair
system. The problem is that that system
happens to be the free market economy. Newt
Gingrich, the champion of small government, free market conservatism during the
1990’s, is now criticizing Mitt Romney for being an extremely successful free
market capitalist. (For the record I do
not buy a lot of the criticisms of Romney’s work at Bain financial. But more on that later. ) Gingrich’s attacks
are the kind of attacks you would expect from not just a liberal, but a fairly
left-leaning liberal. At the least,
Gingrich’s attacks will provide the Obama campaign with a roadmap of how to
attack Romney. If Romney ends up winning
the nomination, not only will Obama be able to pull the old, “even your fellow
Republicans said…” move, but he will also know exactly how various forms of
attacks on Romney’s Bain record resonate with each cohort of voters. There will be no risk involved with running
attack ads against Romney, he’ll know exactly what he’s getting. Even worse, Gingrich’s attacks could actually
succeed and convince a chunk of the electorate that the free market system is
an evil that needs to be radically overhauled or abandoned, and shift the
American electorate a little bit further to the left. Talk about a politician cutting off his nose
to spite his face.
As a
countermeasure to the Roman strategy of panicking their elephants, the
Carthaginians began equipping their elephant riders with a spike and a mallet
that they could use to instantly bring down the elephant if it started to panic
and posed a danger to other Carthaginian troops. Newt has no rider. His staff is bare bones. All of his experienced advisers and campaign
gurus left the campaign during its early difficulties. No one can calm Newt down or rein him
in. So Newt will continue to rampage, striking
out wildly at whoever dares to approach him, until his rage is sated by time,
or Romney finally manages to clinch the nomination and forces him to accept the
fact that he will not be the Republican nominee for President.
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