Gingrich, this afternoon:
Meanwhile, this was happening.
Every once in a while, a political candidate appears who, for his or her constituency, summarizes the demographic and cultural story and baggage of the constituency--its zeitgeist. The right has just found their's.
Newt is all too much like a median Republican. He's an older, new money, Southern, white, angry man. Looking and sounding like your base matters. I'm not saying that these traits are destiny, merely that Gingrich reflects these times so well. Did you hear the roaring applause at the end of the clip? The reason why Gingrich will remain competitive, at least for now, is that there is no viable alternative who can express the dreams and feelings of base voters like Newt. Romney certainly doesn't, nor Perry, and even Cain has his weaknesses.
Shocker: everything Gingrich says is pretty much a lie, or at least highly disengenous. Those UC Davis students need to take a bath, (drop out?) and get a job? Should they take lobbying work like Newt did? Is the income taxes paid on his cruise-job consulting work the kind of resources Newt's pretending like he worked hard for? O-kay.
This is a culture war, and I've lived in it my entire life. We've not emerged from Nixonland. As much as some on the left claim that we're not in a generational war, we very much are. Here we see a man who speaks for those older Americans terrified of losing their medicare and social security. Some of that constituency has paranoid fantasies about ungrateful, lazy, young brown people. And they just cannot abide the prospect of a few half-assed people gaming a social welfare state, even as the same struggling people don't seem especially concerned with the rich plundering trillions. In other words, not only does Newt know what he's saying isn't true, he's speaking to the primal, deep-seated feelings of conservatives quite concertedly. He appeals to their Horatio Alger fantasies. As much as we see the negativity of the Republican Party, it's actually a deeply idealistic one. We see the lie of hard-working Americans being somehow thwarted by taxes (especially dubious when you don't have a job) but what these snake oil men are also suggesting, in the same breath, is that anyone will succeed if they work hard enough and Comrade Obama and his big bad government gets out of the way. We see Newt's bitterness and obnoxious generalizations, but it's a bitterness shared by millions of Americans who refuse to live in a complex modern world and blame economic struggle on hippies.
If a candidate is going to win the Republican primary process, I'd suspect it would be the one Republicans are excited for. For now...
From Mother Mags, who wrote this in the comments:
I missed that part where he told the (1+ / 0-)
tea party protestors to get a job.