Gingrich Is Quitting the Race (Just Give Him a Little Time)

This NYT piece was so funny to me it could have been printed in The Onion.  Highlights are my own.

By MARK LEIBOVICH

MOORESVILLE, N.C. — Newt Gingrich arrived at the Penske Racing plant here on Thursday accompanied by a large security detail protecting him from a big threat — of rain.

Otherwise, Mr. Gingrich, the former speaker of the House and presumptive campaign dropout, pretty much had the run of the place. He was unbothered by persuadable voters, supporters or media fuss. His staff consisted of a young traveling aide. He appeared exhausted, his hair sticking up in the back as he walked with a weary stutter step — literally limping to the finish.

Yet Mr. Gingrich still retained a sense of childlike fascination that has been as much a hallmark of his campaign as his bombastic statements, staff dysfunction and debate star turns.

“I am learning about cars,” Mr. Gingrich explained to a lone reporter on the fringe of an entourage that otherwise included local Republican officials, Penske executives and about 12 people wearing earpieces.

“It’s pretty amazing,” he marveled. “Everywhere we’ve been, we’ve learned something new and different about how complex this country is. This is part of the reason we’re doing this.”

The rest of his rationale for still campaigning is unclear, especially since he indicated after getting trounced in five more primaries this week that he would leave the race. “The campaign will go bye-bye,” he said definitively at a luncheon here Thursday.

But not just yet. He had committed himself to several events in North Carolina, he said. He wanted to honor those and not disappoint anyone who had planned to see him. What’s a few more days?

In financial terms, it costs taxpayers about $40,000 a day to pay for Mr. Gingrich’s Secret Service detail. His campaign was $4.3 million in debt as of the end of March, according to filings. There is also the intangible cost to Mr. Gingrich’s stature and the threat to party unity behind the inevitable nominee, Mitt Romney — whom, Mr. Gingrich says, he will support and campaign for.

Mr. Gingrich seems not to care in the least about the stature and party unity thing. On Thursday, he cared about cars.

“This is absolutely astonishing,” he said, transfixed while caressing a gray engine block in a prototyping lab. He walked slowly across a factory floor that resembled one of those blinding white rooms in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. The place was largely vacant, as many employees had decamped to Brazil for a big race this weekend.

Mr. Gingrich gave a thumbs-up to a guy driving by on a maintenance cart and popped his head into an office. “Hi, I’m Newt,” he said to the startled occupant, Felicia Thomas. “I know who you are,” she said.

He lingered, in no rush at all.

One of the quirky indulgences of modern campaigns is that candidates announce their intent to run for president on multiple occasions — essentially, stunts to milk media attention. They announce the formation of exploratory committees, announce that they intend to run, announce that they are actually running, etc.

Ever the innovator, Mr. Gingrich has applied that ritual to quitting. While he has had no realistic chance of overtaking Mr. Romney for several weeks, he maintained until recently that he would stay in the race all the way to the Republican National Convention.

But at some point, Mr. Gingrich started referring to the race in the past tense. He shed nearly all of his staff members. He pinned his hopes on Tuesday’s primary in tiny Delaware, saying that he would reassess if he lost — which he did, by almost 30 points.

On Wednesday, Mr. Gingrich indicated that he would suspend the campaign next week with a speech. He will offer some form of official endorsement of Mr. Romney.

A familiar analogy is to the Japanese soldiers who turned up in remote areas long after August 1945 and had no idea that World War II had ended. But Mr. Gingrich knows that his war is over, and while not exactly fighting, he is not surrendering yet, either. His wife, Callista, was appearing at events nearby.

How would he characterize his current status?

“I am a citizen,” he said. “And I will continue to be a citizen.”

(As a practical matter, Mr. Gingrich is a citizen who is being protected by that taxpayer-supported Secret Service detail. His campaign spokesman, R. C. Hammond, said, “It is at the discretion of the Department of Homeland Security when they will cease protecting the candidate.” That was expected to occur Thursday night.)

Befitting his citizenship, Mr. Gingrich then headed to a lunch with fellow citizens at the Charles Mack Citizen Center in downtown Mooresville, a few doors from the Anything’s Possible tattoo parlor.

He pulled up in a caravan of four S.U.V.’s, two North Carolina state trooper patrol cars and other unmarked vehicles. About 20 people showed up inside, many of them the same local dignitaries and party officials who were at the Penske plant. Again, Mr. Gingrich appeared completely unbothered.

“It’s a small enough group that we can really chat,” he said, and proceeded to do nearly all of the chatting for close to an hour. He stood in front of a Gingrich 2012 sign and delivered the same kind of Newt-ian stemwinder that he used to deliver in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. That was back in the zestful days when Mr. Gingrich suddenly found himself at the center of the national conversation. Back when important voters were still listening to him.

At the citizen center Thursday, Mr. Gingrich zigzagged forth on a diverse set of topics: the new Boeing 787 Dreamliner, bladder transplants, his fascination with the human brain, shale gas, the threat of “cyberpenetration,” his visit Wednesday to two impressive charter schools and a few other things. Near the end, he mentioned something about Mr. Romney.

But enough about him. Mr. Gingrich had some final points to make before departing to a small but hearty standing ovation. He said he planned to spend the next few months staying active as a citizen, doing what he could to defeat President Obama. He planned to spend next week working the phones, thanking donors and no doubt hitting some of them up to help him retire his campaign debt. He then has to make some money himself.

“It’s been a long and expensive two years,” he said. “But it’s been fun.”

A Great Dodgers Highlight

The Dodgers re-tweeted me tonight. That was awesome.

View from Kemp's 9th HR RT @steveparkhurst: @dodgers I didn't see who dropped the Kemp HR, but it was hit right here. twitter.com/SteveParkhurst…

— Los Angeles Dodgers (@Dodgers) April 22, 2012

Reagan's Vital Lesson On Reducing Gas Prices Worked

From today's Investor's Business Daily:

Energy: It wasn't anything mysterious that allowed Ronald Reagan to bring gasoline prices down so far, so fast. It was something we could use a commitment to in the executive branch today: economic freedom.

Skyrocketing gas and heating oil prices were the most infuriating development associated with what was mistakenly called the "energy crisis" during the 1970s. Mighty America, it seemed, had lost grasp of world events and the global economy.

It was understandable that presidential leadership in the world would slip badly during Watergate and Vietnam, but when a new Democratic president untainted by war or massive scandal was placed in the driver's seat in the latter half of the decade, what could explain his failure to rein in the price of oil?

Oil, which was about $20 a barrel in constant dollars at the beginning of the decade, exceeded $100 by 1980. The man the American people had elected to be leader of the free world put his incompetence in a nutshell in his May 24, 1979, diary entry:

"I had a depressing breakfast with economic advisers, who don't know what to do about inflation or energy."

That didn't stop Jimmy Carter from embracing a windfall-profits tax on Big Oil. But if he and those he appointed didn't know what to do, liberal Democrats in Congress certainly knew what wasn't going to work. Reagan's decontrolling the market for oil was lambasted and lampooned on the Senate and House floors.

As Steven Hayward puts it in the second volume of his epic history "The Age of Reagan": "In the annals of public policy prognostication it is difficult to find such a wide assembly of wrongheadedness."

Sen. Howard Metzenbaum of Ohio promised in early 1981, "we will see $1.50 gas this spring, and maybe before. And it is just a matter of time until the oil companies and their associates, the OPEC nations, will be driving gasoline pump prices up to $2 a gallon."

Sen. Dale Bumpers of Arkansas claimed, "without rationing, gasoline will soon go to $3 a gallon." Sen. George Mitchell of Maine, later the Senate's Democratic majority leader, warned that "every citizen and every family will find their living standards reduced by this decision."

Instead, when Reagan removed price controls on oil via an executive order issued shortly after his inauguration, the price fell almost immediately and kept dropping so that by the first year of his second term average gas prices were below 90 cents a gallon.

Thanks to Reagan showing the way, it would be many years before rising gas prices would become a problem for Americans, with many gas stations still selling regular for well under 90 cents even in the late 1990s. Somehow the nation's greedy oil companies were found to be uninterested in gouging consumers when they would have little noticed.

As Brian Domitrovic, economic historian at Sam Houston State University noted recently in Forbes, when Reagan's energy, monetary and tax cut policies were in full swing in early 1983, "the whole energy crisis was on the cusp of vanishing from the scene."

Domitrovic points out that somehow all the petroleum "'supply' crises also disappeared for good. This was so even though the world's major economy was embarking on one of its most remarkable modern runs of multidecade growth."

Inflation, somehow, wasn't accompanying the Reagan boom, as economists of the left believed it must.

Apparently what's good for the goose...

... isn't good for the commie gander, when his name is Putin.

(from the front page of the Wall Street Journal)

California Declares War on Suburbia

Planners want to herd millions into densely packed urban corridors. It won't save the planet but will make traffic even worse.

Wendell Cox penned this very interesting piece in the Saturday Wall Street Journal. Basically, this is what happens when planners and radical environmentalists take control. Other 49 states: take heed.

Peggy Noonan Gets It Right...Again

For the second Saturday in a row, Peggy Noonan has written the only thing we actually needed to read, everything else was just gravy.  You may recall, last week I also posted her weekly column in its entirety.

Here is the latest offering from Noonan, published in Saturday's Wall Street Journal (highlights are my own):

Oh, for Some Kennedyesque Grace
Obama makes his campaign strategy clear. It's divide and conquer.

These are things we know after President Obama's speech Tuesday, in Washington, to a luncheon sponsored by the Associated Press:

The coming election fully occupies his mind. It is his subject matter now, and will be that of his administration. Everything they do between now and November will reflect this preoccupation.

He knows exactly what issues he's running on and wants everyone else to know. He is not reserving fire, not launching small forays early in the battle. The strategy will be heavy and ceaseless bombardment. The speech announced his campaign's central theme: The Republican Party is a radical and reactionary force arrayed in defense of one group, the rich and satisfied, while the president and his party struggle to protect the yearning middle class and preserve the American future.

This will be his campaign, minus only the wedge issues—the "war on women," etc.—that will be newly deployed in the fall.

We know what criticisms and avenues of attack have pierced him. At the top of the speech he lauded, at some length and in a new way, local Catholic churches and social service agencies. That suggests internal polling shows he's been damaged by the birth-control mandate. The bulk of the speech was devoted to painting Washington Republicans as extreme, outside the mainstream. This suggests his campaign believes the president has been damaged by charges that his leadership has been not center-left, but left. This is oratorical jujitsu: Launch your attack from where you are weak and hit your foe where he is strong. Mr. Obama said he does not back "class warfare," does not want to "redistribute wealth," and does not support "class envy." It's been a while since an American president felt he had to make such assertions.

The speech was an unusual and unleavened assault on the Republican Party. As such it was gutsy, no doubt sincere and arguably a little mad. The other party in a two-party center-right nation is anathema? There was no good-natured pledging to work together or find common ground, no argument that progress is possible. The GOP "will brook no compromise," it is "peddling" destructive economic nostrums, it has "a radical vision" and wants to "let businesses pollute more," "gut education," and lay off firemen and cops. He said he is not speaking only of groups or factions within the GOP: "This is now the party's governing platform." Its leaders lack "humility." Their claims to concern about the deficit are "laughable."

The speech was not aimed at healing, ameliorating differences, or joining together. The president was not even trying to appear to be pursuing unity. He must think that is not possible for him now, as a stance.

There was a dissonance at the speech's core. It was aimed at the center—he seemed to be arguing that to the extent he has not succeeded as president, it is because he was moderate, high-minded and took the long view—but lacked a centrist tone and spirit.

It was obviously not written for applause, which always comes as a relief now in our political leaders. Without applause they can develop a thought, which is why they like applause. In any case, he couldn't ask a roomful of journalists to embarrass themselves by publicly cheering him. But I suspect the numbers-filled nature of the speech had another purpose: It was meant as a reference document, a fact sheet editors can keep on file to refer to in future coverage. "Jacksonville, Oct. 10—GOP nominee Mitt Romney today charged that the U.S. government has grown under President Obama by 25%. The president has previously responded that in fact the size of government went down during his tenure."

An odd thing about this White House is that they don't know who their friends are. Or perhaps they know but feel their friends never give them enough fealty and loyalty. Either way, that was a room full of friends. And yet the president rapped their knuckles for insufficient support. In the Q-and-A he offered criticism that "bears on your reporting": "I think that there is oftentimes the impulse to suggest that if the two parties are disagreeing, then they're equally at fault and the truth lies somewhere in the middle." An "equivalence is presented" that is unfortunate. It "reinforces . . . cynicism." But the current debate is not "one of those situations where there's an equivalence." Journalists are failing to "put the current debate in some historical context."

That "context," as he sees it, is that Democrats are doing the right thing, Republicans the wrong thing, Democrats are serious, Republicans are "not serious."

It was a remarkable moment. I'm surprised the press isn't complaining and giving little speeches about reporting the facts without fear or favor.

I guess what's most interesting is that it's all us-versus-them. Normally at this point, early in an election year, an incumbent president operates within a rounded, nonthreatening blur. He's sort of in a benign cloud, and then pokes his way out of it with strong, edged statements as the year progresses. Mr. Obama isn't doing this. He wants it all stark and sharply defined early on. Is this good politics? It is unusual politics. Past presidents in crises have been sunny embracers.

The other day an experienced and accomplished Democratic lawyer spoke, with dismay, of the president's earlier remarks on the ObamaCare litigation. Mr. Obama had said: "I'm confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress." He referred to the court as "an unelected group of people" that might "somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law."

It was vaguely menacing, and it garnered broad criticism. In the press it was characterized as a "brushback"—when a pitcher throws the ball close to a batter's head to rattle him, to remind him he can be hurt.

The lawyer had studied under Archibald Cox. Cox, who served as John F. Kennedy's Solicitor General, liked to tell his students of the time in 1962 when the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Engel v. Vitale, a landmark ruling against school prayer.

The president feared a firestorm. The American people would not like it. He asked Cox for advice on what to say. Cox immediately prepared a long memo on the facts of the case, the history and the legal merits. Kennedy read it and threw it away. Dry data wouldn't help.

Kennedy thought. What was the role of a president at such a time?

And this is what he said: We're all going to have to pray more in our homes.

The decision, he said, was a reminder to every American family "that we can attend our churches with a good deal more fidelity," and in this way "we can make the true meaning of prayer much more important in the lives of our children."

He accepted the court's decision, didn't rile the populace, and preserved respect for the court while using its controversial ruling to put forward a good idea.

It was beautiful.

One misses that special grace.

Ryan Lands in VP Spotlight

Republicans and Democrats Alike Put Focus on Author of GOP Budget Plan

From today's Wall Street Journal:

The Republican presidential nominating fight might not wrap up until June, but speculation is already swirling about whom Mitt Romney might pick as his running mate—and both parties are focusing on the same candidate.

Rep. Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, floated to the top of some lists with his performance accompanying Mr. Romney on a recent campaign swing through Mr. Ryan's native Wisconsin. The congressman, who is seen by many as the natural heir to the sunny fiscal conservatism of former vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp, appeared particularly chummy with Mr. Romney.

Democrats are acting as if they also would like to see Mr. Ryan on the GOP ticket. President Barack Obama, in a salvo this week against Republican economic policies, attacked Mr. Romney for supporting a budget blueprint prepared by Mr. Ryan, one that seeks deep cuts in federal spending and a major overhaul of Medicare.

Mr. Romney fed the chatter the next day when he jumped to Mr. Ryan's defense. The focus on the Ryan budget suggests it could become a defining document in the 2012 election.

Christian Ferry, a senior adviser to the previous Republican nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, called Mr. Ryan "an intriguing possibility" because he "is actually making substantive policy suggestions for urgent problems the country faces rather than worrying about the day-to-day politics."

With the primaries still grinding along, Mr. Romney and his staff brush aside talk of potential running mates, saying it is too early to begin speculating. On Thursday, Mr. Romney told Fox News Radio he had "no predictions on who No. 2 would be" because "I'm still trying to make sure I'm the No. 1."

Those demurrals won't keep a lid on Washington's favorite parlor game, a quadrennial exercise that is long on conjecture and short on facts. The list of potential candidates often floated by the news media includes such rising stars as New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and lesser-known politicians, such as New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and Ohio Sen. Rob Portman. Others are sure to surface.

Should Mr. Romney win the nomination, he could look for a pick who addresses his perceived weakness with women or Hispanics, or go for a conservative favorite with the résumé and personal appeal to convert those Republicans who have been reluctant to support him.

"The most basic requirement is the only important one: The person chosen has to be able to be president of the United States, without question," said Mike DuHaime, an adviser to Mr. Christie who has worked on multiple presidential campaigns.

While Mr. Ryan says he isn't angling for the job, he tells reporters he would consider the offer if asked. At age 42, Mr. Ryan would bring a rare combination of youth and experience to the ticket, but he also would bring something less enticing: more than a decade in Congress, which is held in low esteem by many voters.

Democrats have seized on the apparent bond between the two Republicans to criticize Mr. Romney. The Obama campaign has circulated a side-by-side comparison of the two men's economic policies. Both call for reductions in personal and corporate tax rates, deep cuts in agency spending and an overhaul of Medicare that would give future retirees the chance to purchase private insurance with government subsidies.

Ryan allies say Mr. Romney would be wise to pick the man who wrote his party's main budget blueprint. "Why wouldn't Romney put the guy with the most expertise on the ticket with him?" said Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), who worked with Mr. Ryan on early versions of his budget and prodded him to run for president.

Other prospective picks have put in far more time and effort for Mr. Romney. Mr. Christie, who toyed with his own presidential bid, held a major fundraiser for the candidate in New Jersey and campaigned for him ahead of contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Florida and Illinois. Mr. Portman unleashed his political operation to drive turnout to help Mr. Romney pull off a crucial win in Ohio. And Mr. McDonnell, who does regular television appearances for Mr. Romney and also campaigned in early primary states, made a speech selling the former Massachusetts governor to an audience of reluctant conservatives.

But Mr. Ryan stole the show during the front-runner's campaign swing through Wisconsin. The two men struck up an easy banter at events and made frequent cracks about the two decades that separate them in age. Mr. Ryan also helped pull off an April Fool's prank on Mr. Romney when he introduced the governor to an empty room. And he introduced the candidate during his victory speech in Milwaukee on the night he won.

Compatibility will be a crucial ingredient in Mr. Romney's selection, according to people close to his campaign. Mr. Romney also trusts the 42-year-old congressman to field policy questions on his behalf—a rarity for the former governor who prides himself on his command of policy details. When Mr. Romney received a question on the convoluted tax code at a Wisconsin town hall, he turned to Mr. Ryan.

"I'm going to have him describe, just for a moment, his plans on the tax code, which are very, very similar to my own," Mr. Romney said.

Aides acknowledge the two have a friendly relationship. Stuart Stevens, chief strategist for the Romney campaign, called Mr. Ryan "terrific." But he was quick to caution, "It wasn't an audition."

It's Mitt vs. Barack

It's Our Future vs. Excuses.

It's taken me a while to come around, but Romney is winning everything. Gingrich and Santorum are no longer affecting the GOP nomination. It's time to line up behind Mitt Romney. Obama, the democrats and their agenda is the real enemy. Keep the eyes on the prize. Let's get to work.

My Latest Interview

On Monday I was interviewed again on The Price of Business on Houston's KNTH AM 1070.

Segment 1


Segment 2