In “Lunar Colonies, Lunacy and Losses” Mr. Blow says it was only a matter of time before the erratic and unpredictable Newt Gingrich of the ’90s took center stage in the Republican presidential contest. Mr. Nocera, in “Et Tu, Harvard?”, says even one of the nation’s most prestigious universities won’t stand up to the N.C.A.A. when it comes to idiotic policies. Ms. Collins addresses “Newt’s Real Legacy.” She says the public doesn’t mind misbehavior. It’s the other politicians who care. Here’s Mr. Blow:
Newt Gingrich is spaced-out. Literally.
Anyone who remembers him from his days as speaker of the House in the ’90s remembers how erratic, unpredictable and off-the-wall he could be, but, so far, this campaign season he has managed to conceal his many absurdities and eccentricities.
Furthermore, many Republican primary voters seem willing to forgive and forget his past. Others seem not even to remember it. He has been able to pass himself off as a wise elder statesman — a historian without a history — able to capture the anger and anxiety of the right and articulate it with force, lucidity and gravitas.
Oh, it is to laugh! That is if you’re on the left.
But for those on the right with firsthand knowledge of working with Gingrich when he was in Washington, this is a nightmare scenario. The outside possibility that Gingrich could win the nomination and wreck the party scares them to death. Their panic over this has reached a fever pitch.
And this is not without merit.
An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll released this week found that Gingrich now enjoys a 9-point lead nationally among registered Republican likely primary voters. However, Gingrich fared worse than all other Republican candidates when tested against Obama. The poll suggested that Obama would trounce Gingrich by 18 points.
(Luckily for Mitt Romney, Gingrich’s surge in Florida may be fizzling. A Quinnipiac poll of likely Republican voters in that state found that Romney leads Gingrich by nine percentage points. If that holds, Romney and the establishment Republicans will have dodged a bullet like Neo in “The Matrix.” A Romney loss in Florida would call his candidacy into question and send the party scrambling for a more attractive replacement.)
One of the latest establishment Republicans to try to avert the Gingrich catastrophe is former Senator Bob Dole, who wrote a letter to the Romney campaign on Thursday saying: “I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich, but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late.” It only got better from there. Dole continued, “hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him, and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice.”
Dole’s concern in his statement, and the concern of countless others, is: “If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state and federal offices.”
As Peter D. Hart, a Democratic pollster, told MSNBC, “Gingrich is Goldwater.” He continued, “In the general election, Gingrich not only takes down his ship, he takes down the whole flotilla.”
Part of the reason for this is Gingrich is thoroughly unlikable among the electorate at large and utterly nonsensical in his approach to real problem-solving. The fact that he has convinced some primary voters that he is an intellectual is one of the best electoral sleights of hand I can recall. As Dole said of Newt when he was in Washington: “Gingrich had a new idea every minute, and most of them were off the wall.”
To that point, Gingrich told a crowd on Florida’s so-called Space Coast on Wednesday that “by the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the Moon. And it will be American.” And he said that he would push for the introduction of a “Northwest Ordinance for Space” so that when the number of colonists reached 13,000, they could petition for statehood.
(By the way, I find it interesting that Gingrich didn’t insist on answering the question about Puerto Rican statehood at Thursday’s debate, yet he’s advocating for a state on the Moon. Earth to Newt: phone home.)
In the speech, Gingrich implied that he was “bold” and “romantic” and called himself “visionary” and “grandiose” in the vein of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and the Wright brothers. Gingrich is a virtual supernova of megalomaniacal madness.
In a way, the space speech made sense. Gingrich was doing what he does: tossing out random ideas like darts at a board, hoping to score. He was repackaging the idea of Manifest Destiny for the Moon and appealing to an area of the country whose pride and purpose were wounded by the ending of the space shuttle program.
But, on the other hand, this is exactly the kind of election-year lunacy that establishment Republicans have been worrying about. Florida has one of the highest state unemployment rates in the country and has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country. The last thing that people who can’t hold on to their jobs and houses here on Earth want to hear about is a colony on the Moon. The whole thing bespeaks a man detached from the real world concerns of real people.
As Dole’s statement went on to say, “In my opinion, if we want to avoid an Obama landslide in November, Republicans should nominate Governor Romney as our standard-bearer.”
The truth is that the Republican Party has no good choice at this point. It only has bad choices and worse choices. And the American public is beginning to recognize that. As the Republican courtiers of incompetence beat up each other, knock down each other and reveal each other’s flaws, a number of recent surveys have found that President Obama’s poll numbers on a number of metrics have begun to trend upward.
That’s because an election is a choice, a zero-sum game — the worse the Republican field looks, particularly if Gingrich is at the front of it, the better President Obama looks by comparison, regardless of one’s misgivings about his first term.
Establishment Republicans understand this simple, painful truth: Romney is no guarantee of victory, but Gingrich is an absolute guarantee of defeat. At least here on Earth.
Now here’s Mr. Nocera:
If the worst thing that ever happens to Temi Fagbenle is that she gets to play college basketball for only three seasons instead of four, she’ll have lived a blessed life. No question, the wrong being perpetrated on this 6-foot-4 Harvard freshman pales compared with some of the injustices in college sports that I’ve been recounting lately.
Still, Fagbenle’s ordeal is worth telling for three reasons. It illustrates the sheer pettiness of the N.C.A.A. It shows that the N.C.A.A. won’t rectify even an obvious mistake to help an athlete. Saddest of all, it shows that even mighty Harvard won’t stand up to the N.C.A.A. Originally intended to help universities police their athletic teams, the N.C.A.A. has become higher education’s Frankenstein, terrifying its overseers.
Let me tell you a little bit about Temi. Yes, she’s 6-foot-4 and a terrific basketball player, but she’s a lot more than that. Born to Nigerian parents — her father is a prominent journalist — she moved with her large family to London as a girl. When she was 15, her parents enrolled her as a junior in Blair Academy, a New Jersey prep school, hoping the education she got there would lead her to the Ivy League. The Fagbenles had their hearts set on Harvard.
Temi struggled her first year, so much so that she and her parents decided that she should repeat her junior year to better her chances of getting into Harvard. By the time she graduated, she had won letters in track and tennis as well as basketball, had starred in the school play, had improved her grades enough to be accepted at Harvard, and had become one of the most popular students at Blair. Along the way, she turned down scholarship offers from big-time basketball schools like Duke.
If you are wondering how this outstanding high school career could have led to Temi’s being ruled ineligible to play as a freshman, you’re not alone. Her mistake, if you can call it that, was to take an exam, the General Certificate of Secondary Education, required of all British students when they are around 15. Inexplicably — and incorrectly — the N.C.A.A. says that the exam marks a British student’s graduation from high school. Under its rules, a British high school graduate must enroll in college within two years of taking the G.C.S.E. Because Temi repeated her junior year, it took her three years.
The sheer idiocy of this rule boggles the mind. As Harvard pointed out in a letter to the N.C.A.A., if she had stayed in London until she finished high school, she could have played. If she had started as a freshman in an American high school and repeated a grade, she could have played. But because she repeated a grade after coming to the United States, she is ineligible. It not only seems unfair, it seems discriminatory.
Behind the scenes, Harvard worked to get the N.C.A.A. to reverse its decision, making four separate appeals. All were denied. With Harvard’s help, Temi retained a lawyer, who gave serious thought to trying to get a restraining order against the N.C.A.A., on the grounds that the rule violates state antidiscrimination laws. But, in the end, Temi decided not to sue, to Harvard’s palpable relief. After all, if Temi began playing and then ultimately lost the case, the women’s basketball team would have to forfeit the games in which she had played. Sotto voce, officials also expressed fears that the N.C.A.A. might retaliate in other ways.
Despite its behind-the-scenes efforts, Harvard has never once said publicly that the rule is wrong and that Temi is being unfairly punished. On the contrary, in an e-mailed statement, Bob Scalise, the Harvard athletic director, said, “We at Harvard are fully committed to following all N.C.A.A. rules and guidelines.” Even, apparently, when those rules are wrong and unjust.
And, I might add, deeply hurtful. “When someone has a tremendous talent, you are taking away a fundamental part of their identity,” says Temi’s lawyer, Beth Reilly. “And there is a stigma in being declared ineligible, an implication that you have done something wrong. You have a label attached that the whole world sees.”
I understand why a school like the University of Connecticut won’t stand up to the N.C.A.A. There is nothing bigger in the state of Connecticut than UConn basketball. If it were to start playing Ryan Boatright, the suspended point guard whose mother is the subject of an N.C.A.A. witch hunt, it would risk not only forfeiting games, but missing the N.C.A.A. championship tournament. The price is too high.
But I would have thought that Harvard was made of sterner stuff. Harvard claims to have values that transcend wins and losses. Harvard has often been a leader in changing how universities act. So long as schools continue to cower in the face of N.C.A.A. abuses, those abuses will continue.
The Temi Fagbenle case was a perfect opportunity for Harvard to stand up for what’s right. Maybe next time.
And now here’s Ms. Collins:
Do you think that after all is said and done, Newt Gingrich will just go down in history as the politician who conclusively proved that voters don’t care about a candidate’s sexual misbehavior?
Imagine the history students of 2112, reading about the early 21st century on their vaporphones, or whatever they have by then. They would get to this presidential campaign and there would be a little footnote saying that despite a totally outrageous marital history, Newt Gingrich won the presidential primary in one of the most socially conservative states in the country. Maybe there would be a clip of him making the how-dare-you-sir speech to CNN’s John King.
Probably not exactly what Newt has in mind.
Perhaps things will go differently. Maybe, despite his blah debate performances in Florida, Newt will do well in this week’s primary, and go on to win the nomination, become president and build lots of moon colonies while saving America from Shariah law and the corrosive effects of the writing of Saul Alinsky.
But if not, he’ll still be the guy who managed to become a credible presidential candidate despite the three wives, the serial adultery, etc. etc. etc. He had a lot of help from the voters. In South Carolina, only 31 percent of the people interviewed by Public Policy Polling said they believed the second Mrs. Gingrich when she told ABC that her husband had asked her to share his sexual favors with his longtime mistress, who is now the third Mrs. G.
Presumably they believed Newt, who said that he had “witnesses” who were eager to go to ABC and denounce the story. Although the Gingrich campaign now says the proffered witnesses didn’t really exist. Except for his daughters by his first marriage. Who truly would not seem to be the best possible experts on whether Newt wanted to have whoopee rights to both their stepmothers.
If Gingrich loses the Florida primary, I hope it is for the crime of middle-aged-child abuse.
But about that open-marriage poll question: I believe that what the voters were actually saying was that they didn’t want to hear about it. The American public has a long history of ignoring the private lives of elected officials whenever possible. They gave up on politicians as role models somewhere around Richard Nixon.
Perhaps the critical moment came when voters decided to elect Bill Clinton president despite what were very clear storm warnings about his tendency to wander off, sexually speaking. Which was followed by the public’s very clear decision to keep Bill Clinton even after he was caught in behavior that, really, even the head of Hedonists Inc. could not possibly have thought was a good idea.
And it all worked out! Now Clinton is Beloved Ex-President Clinton, and everybody keeps sighing over how great things were when the prince of bad behavior was in charge.
That goes for the social right, too. They are going to go for the guy who they think will carry out their agenda. Even if he is, say, an anti-abortion crusader whose ex-wife swore that he took her to get an abortion. (See: former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr.)
The far right seems to be particularly indifferent to bad-behavior issues. Maybe this is because their supporters know that sinning social conservatives operate at a disadvantage. It is way easier to avoid the hypocrisy label if you’re a straying civil libertarian whose family values speeches mainly involve encouraging kids to donate money to feed impoverished people in Africa. You’re not going to be charged with speaking out of both sides of your mouth when the first side is talking about supporting Doctors Without Borders.
Conservative voters also like expressions of remorse and promises to reform. When all else fails, they have even been known to argue that everybody does it. “I’m just saying, they all have stinky feet,” former Congressman J. C. Watts, a Baptist preacher, said while he was campaigning for Newt in South Carolina.
Although actually, when you’re talking about 1) Committing adultery, 2) Divorcing your wife while she’s sick to marry your mistress, 3) Committing adultery, 4) Allegedly asking your wife to let you keep the mistress on the side and 5) Divorcing your wife while she’s sick to marry your mistress … it’s pretty clear everybody doesn’t do it.
But in a way, Watts is right. (And we do like that stinky feet line.) Everybody has something. Rick Santorum lusted in his heart for earmarks. Mitt Romney drove to Canada with the family Irish setter strapped on the car roof.
And Newt argues his checkered past is actually an advantage. He suggested to the Christian Broadcasting Network that “it may make me more normal than somebody who wanders around seeming perfect and maybe not understanding the human condition, and the challenges of life for normal people.”
Take that, Mitt.
I once wrote a book on how gossip about politicians’ private lives impacts their careers, and it was a very interesting experience, as a result of which I know way more about Grover Cleveland’s sex life than most people would find reasonable. Until the 1970s, voters found it very easy to ignore things they would rather not know about prominent politicians, since the mainstream media didn’t report it. That rule began to crack about the time one of the nation’s most powerful politicians, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman Wilbur Mills, was caught trying to drunkenly fish a striptease dancer out of the Washington Tidal Basin.
Ever since then, we have been writing about the ways politicians misbehave in private, usually after an ex-lover or angry wife blows the whistle. And the voters frequently yawn. However, the people a misbehaving politician really has to worry about are not his constituents, but his peers. These days, a congressman’s colleagues will throw him overboard in a second. We all remember that Anthony Weiner was driven out of Congress after he got caught tweeting pictures of his underwear. While he was inhabiting it. I am going to go out on a limb and say that his constituents in Brooklyn and Queens were not charmed by this behavior, but you did not see any widespread calls within his district for him to resign. No, the people who forced Weiner to go away were the Democratic leaders, particularly Nancy Pelosi, who thought he was hurting the party in general.
Over the last few days, there has been a big-name Republican uprising against Gingrich, featuring everybody from Bob Dole to Ann Coulter. They aren’t personally offended by Newt’s marital history — or if they are, they can certainly live with it. But they’re totally afraid that if he actually got the nomination and people had to take a long, serious look at the whole Newt picture, the Republicans would be destroyed in November.
We’ll see what happens. But here’s the good news: Newt has always dreamed of being a figure in American history books, and I think he’s got that nailed.
