Some Musings About Newt And Poll Responses

Writing in the Los Angeles Times, Jonah Goldberg muses that Newt Gingrich might be the next great conservative revolutionary, a fact that Goldberg apparently believes would be a good thing.

But there's another possibility: It's true. Moreover, the times may be ripe for precisely the sort of vexing, vainglorious and all-too-human revolutionary Gingrich claims to be. That's the argument a few people have been wrestling with. Gingrich, after all, is the only candidate to actually move the government rightward. While getting wealthy off the old order, he's been plotting for decades how to get rid of it. To paraphrase Lenin, perhaps the K Streeters paid Gingrich to build the gallows he will hang them on?

Meanwhile, South Dakota War College flags a CBS poll that shows that finds that 54% of Americans don't believe that President Obama deserves a second term.

The good folks at SDWC don't mention that the same poll shows Congress's approval rating at 11%.

Congress' job approval rating is far lower than the president's. Eighty-two percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing, while 11 percent approve - just two percentage points above the all-time low of 9 percent recorded last month.


When it comes to the difficulties in reaching agreements and passing legislation in Congress, Americans put more of the blame on the Republicans in Congress than Mr. Obama and the Democrats. Forty-two percent blame Republicans more, while just 26 percent blame Mr. Obama and the Democrats, though 22 percent volunteer both are equally to blame.

One of "the difficulties in reaching agreements and passing legislation in Congress" seems to be the fact that both political parties seem to have imposed a parliamentary discipline on members of a system designed to ensure regional balance.  Tip O'Neil famously created the cliche, "All politics is local."  That axiom has now been turned on its head.

At first blush, Gingrich and his Contract with/for/on America seems to be the person most responsible for turning the House of Representatives into the House of Commons and the political logjams that Americans hate. 

Maybe that's why Goldberg has experiences like this one:

The other night while having drinks with some prominent conservatives, I said I thought there was a significant chance that Gingrich will not only win the nomination but that he might be the next president. Going by their expressions, I might as well have said I put a slow-acting poison in their cocktails.

And maybe Newt's history is a reason for SDWC not to count their electoral chickens before they hatch.

Gingrich, The Tea Party, And Civil Liberties

I'm beginning to hate Conor Friedersdorf; not only is he far younger than I am, he writes better than I do.  This analysis is spot on:

Ron Paul supporting Tea Partiers would be the first to bail from a coalition that reshaped itself around Gingrich. In Reason magazine, Jacob Sullum runs through some of Gingrich's appalling positions on civil liberties: that the War on Terrorism somehow makes null certain rights to free speech and due process; that the government should stop the construction of a mosque until the day when Saudi Arabia permits churches and synagogues to be built; the proposal to escalate the War on Drugs by executing drug smugglers; support for warrantless wiretaps; and extreme hostility toward the co-equal judicial branch. It's true that only a small subset of Tea Party voters actually care about civil liberties with any kind of consistency, but Gingrich will alienate them.