Newt Gingrich and the Future of the Right
http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/newt-gingrich-and-the-future-of-the-right/?hp
By THOMAS B. EDSALLIn 1999, shortly after the Senate voted to acquit President Clinton on two charges of impeachment stemming from his affair with the intern Monica Lewinsky, Paul Weyrich — mastermind of the union of the Republican Party and the Christian right, a founder of the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the Free Congress Foundation — threw up his hands in despair.
In a letter to his ideological allies, Weyrich declared: “I no longer believe that there is a moral majority. I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values.”
Weyrich declared defeat:
What would Weyrich, who died in 2008, make of the fact that Newt Gingrich — who was himself having an adulterous affair during the Clinton impeachment proceedings (one of several conducted by the former speaker, according to his own testimony and a number of lengthy journalistic investigations, including this one and that one) — won the 2012 South Carolina Republican primary with a plurality of voters who described themselves as evangelical or born-again Christians?
Exit polls show that Gingrich beat Romney by 44-22 among born-again and evangelical Christians, and by 46-10 among voters who said the religious convictions of the candidates mattered “a great deal.” His margins were equally strong among supporters of (and sympathizers with) the Tea Party, a constituency that closely overlaps with religious conservatives.
In fact, the Gingrich campaign reveals the current state of the Christian right, its status anxieties, its desperation, its frustration and in particular its anger. The extreme volatility of Gingrich’s primary season bid reflects not only the success and failure of his own tactical maneuvers and those of his opponents, but also the ambivalence of the Republican electorate in choosing between ideology and pragmatism — an intra-party struggle dating back to the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964.
In strategic terms, religious conservatives need to be motivated to turn out in high numbers. Republican consultants have developed tools to identify and inflame what they call conservative “anger points.”
The consultant who pioneered this work, Alex Gage, now works for the Romney campaign.
But it is Gingrich who is the quintessential “anger points” candidate.
Richard Land, the host of the nationally syndicated radio broadcast “For Faith & Family” and president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, noted as others have that Gingrich won the hearts of many devout voters two weeks ago when he exploded in anger as CNN’s John King asked him to respond to the claim made by his second wife, Marianne, that he had refused to give up his six-year affair with Callista Bisek and offered his wife the option of an “open marriage.”
Gingrich’s reply to King brought the audience to its feet, capturing one of the most deeply felt conservative “anger points” — hostility to the mainstream media:
Evidence in support of Land’s analysis can be found in a webcast on the Internet site of Don Wildmon’s American Family Association. On the site, Matt Barber, an aggressive promoter of a socially conservative agenda, voiced unalloyed joy over a video celebrating the Gingrich-King confrontation like a nature show. Barber describes
There are fewer and fewer “traditional” families in the United States; the number of secular voters is growing at a faster rate than the number of those who are religiously observant; women’s rights and homosexual rights have become broadly accepted; births outside of marriage are now routine among whites, Hispanics and African Americans.
While some religious conservatives are backing the former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, many partisans on the moral values right have lined up behind Gingrich, including a good number who formerly sympathized with Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain. Joining Gingrich’s National Faith Coalition are Tim and Beverly LaHaye (Tim LaHaye is the author of “Battle for the Family” and Beverly LaHaye is the founder of Concerned Women for America, the largest women’s pro-family advocacy group in America); Dr. Jim Garlow, the California pastor who presides over the website ProtectMarriage.com, which backed the Proposition 8 campaign against gay marriage; and Don Wildmon, whose American Family Association website features his unshakeable commitment to “Strengthening Today’s Marriage and Family Movement.”
In South Carolina, we saw the consequences of this. Gingrich’s strength as the tribune of conservative rage at liberal elites trumped his long history of personal failings. He violated the very family values and the sanctity of marriage that social conservatives profess to believe in, but it was much more important that Gingrich was the enemy of their enemy.
It may well be that in this period of unprecedented moral upheaval, voters in Florida will decide differently from those in South Carolina. Under assault from his competitors on the topic of his multiple marriages, his ethical failings and his role as a Washington influence-peddler, Gingrich pulled in his horns. He seemed almost quiet. He has not been as effective a spokesman for the right’s “anger points,” which have propelled his success so far.
In the immediate aftermath of his South Carolina victory, Gingrich was riding high in Florida, where the next primary will be held on Tuesday. In three separate polls conducted on Jan. 23 and 24, Gingrich had a seemingly firm advantage, running ahead of Romney by margins of 8, 9 and 5 points.
Seeking to mute the building crescendo of assaults from his competitors, Gingrich abandoned the tactics of an insurgent in favor of those of a front-runner. Gone was the almost violently aggressive debate posture in favor of a surprisingly passive strategy.
“You know, there is a point in the process where it gets unnecessarily personal and nasty. And that’s sad,” Gingrich declared in the Jan. 23 debate in Tampa.
That is not what his potential supporters want to hear. They want red meat. The more Gingrich backed away, the less he stoked voter anger and the more his numbers dropped.
In the eight most recent polls reported by Real Clear Politics on Jan. 26, Jan. 27 and Jan. 28, Romney has pulled ahead, by 7 to 9 points, rising to an 11 to 16 point advantage on the 28th.
What does this political volatility say about the conservative movement and the Republican Party?
First, that although the Christian right is now in decline, it remains powerful, making up roughly 35 to 40 percent of the Republican primary electorate. But its preoccupations are less and less those of Americans taken as a whole. The Christian right might become increasingly marginalized and as the movement shifts to the periphery, it becomes more of a liability to the party than an asset.
Second, the Republican Party will, over time, struggle to develop a coherent moral stance that does not conflict with the leftward drift, both in values and behavior, of the electorate.
Gingrich’s swings from low to high to low to high to low — his success in South Carolina and his increasing desperation in Florida — suggest that his candidacy is more a burst of light before the candle dims than the latest iteration of a vital conservative insurgency.
The larger issue facing the Republican Party is how it will respond to political market forces, to the pressure of changes in public opinion. The party could open up beyond its core believers to accommodate old-school Republican moderates and hold on to its libertarians and still have decent size, strength and power.
But the country is going through a profound restructuring in moral and economic thinking and the danger for Republicans is that their current coalition might become obsolete. If the party doesn’t adapt, the alternative is that its power centers — the Christian right, anti-immigration forces, and proponents of policies that benefit the affluent at the expense of the less well-off — will refuse to adjust, in which case the party risks going the way of the Studebaker.
Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published earlier this month.
In a letter to his ideological allies, Weyrich declared: “I no longer believe that there is a moral majority. I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values.”
Weyrich declared defeat:
Cultural Marxism is succeeding in its war against our culture. The question becomes, if we are unable to escape the cultural disintegration that is gripping society, then what hope can we have?In the face of this onslaught of moral corruption, Weyrich counseled withdrawal from society at large. A “legitimate strategy for us to follow is to look at ways to separate ourselves from the institutions that have been captured by the ideology of Political Correctness, or by other enemies of our traditional culture,” he wrote. “We need to drop out of this culture, and find places, even if it is where we physically are right now, where we can live godly, righteous and sober lives.”
What would Weyrich, who died in 2008, make of the fact that Newt Gingrich — who was himself having an adulterous affair during the Clinton impeachment proceedings (one of several conducted by the former speaker, according to his own testimony and a number of lengthy journalistic investigations, including this one and that one) — won the 2012 South Carolina Republican primary with a plurality of voters who described themselves as evangelical or born-again Christians?
Exit polls show that Gingrich beat Romney by 44-22 among born-again and evangelical Christians, and by 46-10 among voters who said the religious convictions of the candidates mattered “a great deal.” His margins were equally strong among supporters of (and sympathizers with) the Tea Party, a constituency that closely overlaps with religious conservatives.
In fact, the Gingrich campaign reveals the current state of the Christian right, its status anxieties, its desperation, its frustration and in particular its anger. The extreme volatility of Gingrich’s primary season bid reflects not only the success and failure of his own tactical maneuvers and those of his opponents, but also the ambivalence of the Republican electorate in choosing between ideology and pragmatism — an intra-party struggle dating back to the candidacy of Barry Goldwater in 1964.
In strategic terms, religious conservatives need to be motivated to turn out in high numbers. Republican consultants have developed tools to identify and inflame what they call conservative “anger points.”
“They would love to see a false smarty pants decapitated by a real intellectual. He would tear Obama’s head off.”— Richard Land
But it is Gingrich who is the quintessential “anger points” candidate.
Richard Land, the host of the nationally syndicated radio broadcast “For Faith & Family” and president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, noted as others have that Gingrich won the hearts of many devout voters two weeks ago when he exploded in anger as CNN’s John King asked him to respond to the claim made by his second wife, Marianne, that he had refused to give up his six-year affair with Callista Bisek and offered his wife the option of an “open marriage.”
Gingrich’s reply to King brought the audience to its feet, capturing one of the most deeply felt conservative “anger points” — hostility to the mainstream media:
I think the destructive vicious negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. I’m appalled you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.The way Land sees it, Gingrich’s answer went beyond merely nodding toward the anti-media spirit among conservative Christian voters and reached forward instead to what they imagined would be an apocalyptic, nearly eschatological campaign between Obama and Gingrich. “They would love to see a false smarty pants decapitated by a real intellectual,” Land told me. “He would tear Obama’s head off.”
Evidence in support of Land’s analysis can be found in a webcast on the Internet site of Don Wildmon’s American Family Association. On the site, Matt Barber, an aggressive promoter of a socially conservative agenda, voiced unalloyed joy over a video celebrating the Gingrich-King confrontation like a nature show. Barber describes
footage of a lion chasing down a zebra. And then after the lion kills the zebra and looks up with his fur bloody, they switched back to a picture of Newt Gingrich with blood over his face. He had just made a meal out of John King.Gingrich is the first conservative presidential candidate to campaign on a package of traditional values from which he is exempting issues relating to personal sexual behavior. And there are reasons why this strategy worked on Jan. 21: The moral vision of the religious right is collapsing everywhere, including within its own ranks.
There are fewer and fewer “traditional” families in the United States; the number of secular voters is growing at a faster rate than the number of those who are religiously observant; women’s rights and homosexual rights have become broadly accepted; births outside of marriage are now routine among whites, Hispanics and African Americans.
While some religious conservatives are backing the former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, many partisans on the moral values right have lined up behind Gingrich, including a good number who formerly sympathized with Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain. Joining Gingrich’s National Faith Coalition are Tim and Beverly LaHaye (Tim LaHaye is the author of “Battle for the Family” and Beverly LaHaye is the founder of Concerned Women for America, the largest women’s pro-family advocacy group in America); Dr. Jim Garlow, the California pastor who presides over the website ProtectMarriage.com, which backed the Proposition 8 campaign against gay marriage; and Don Wildmon, whose American Family Association website features his unshakeable commitment to “Strengthening Today’s Marriage and Family Movement.”
In South Carolina, we saw the consequences of this. Gingrich’s strength as the tribune of conservative rage at liberal elites trumped his long history of personal failings. He violated the very family values and the sanctity of marriage that social conservatives profess to believe in, but it was much more important that Gingrich was the enemy of their enemy.
It may well be that in this period of unprecedented moral upheaval, voters in Florida will decide differently from those in South Carolina. Under assault from his competitors on the topic of his multiple marriages, his ethical failings and his role as a Washington influence-peddler, Gingrich pulled in his horns. He seemed almost quiet. He has not been as effective a spokesman for the right’s “anger points,” which have propelled his success so far.
In the immediate aftermath of his South Carolina victory, Gingrich was riding high in Florida, where the next primary will be held on Tuesday. In three separate polls conducted on Jan. 23 and 24, Gingrich had a seemingly firm advantage, running ahead of Romney by margins of 8, 9 and 5 points.
Seeking to mute the building crescendo of assaults from his competitors, Gingrich abandoned the tactics of an insurgent in favor of those of a front-runner. Gone was the almost violently aggressive debate posture in favor of a surprisingly passive strategy.
“You know, there is a point in the process where it gets unnecessarily personal and nasty. And that’s sad,” Gingrich declared in the Jan. 23 debate in Tampa.
That is not what his potential supporters want to hear. They want red meat. The more Gingrich backed away, the less he stoked voter anger and the more his numbers dropped.
In the eight most recent polls reported by Real Clear Politics on Jan. 26, Jan. 27 and Jan. 28, Romney has pulled ahead, by 7 to 9 points, rising to an 11 to 16 point advantage on the 28th.
What does this political volatility say about the conservative movement and the Republican Party?
First, that although the Christian right is now in decline, it remains powerful, making up roughly 35 to 40 percent of the Republican primary electorate. But its preoccupations are less and less those of Americans taken as a whole. The Christian right might become increasingly marginalized and as the movement shifts to the periphery, it becomes more of a liability to the party than an asset.
Second, the Republican Party will, over time, struggle to develop a coherent moral stance that does not conflict with the leftward drift, both in values and behavior, of the electorate.
Gingrich’s swings from low to high to low to high to low — his success in South Carolina and his increasing desperation in Florida — suggest that his candidacy is more a burst of light before the candle dims than the latest iteration of a vital conservative insurgency.
The larger issue facing the Republican Party is how it will respond to political market forces, to the pressure of changes in public opinion. The party could open up beyond its core believers to accommodate old-school Republican moderates and hold on to its libertarians and still have decent size, strength and power.
But the country is going through a profound restructuring in moral and economic thinking and the danger for Republicans is that their current coalition might become obsolete. If the party doesn’t adapt, the alternative is that its power centers — the Christian right, anti-immigration forces, and proponents of policies that benefit the affluent at the expense of the less well-off — will refuse to adjust, in which case the party risks going the way of the Studebaker.
Thomas B. Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics,” which was published earlier this month.
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