Back to the Future

It took a bit longer before Republican heavyweights signaled their intentions to run for the White House and then make it official. Now former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has announced his intention to run against Barack Obama in 2012.

In the 1990s, he was considered a Republican icon and even then wanted to drive a sitting Democratic president out of the White House. He failed against Bill Clinton, and observers don’t think he’ll do much better against Barack Obama. The 67-year-old will have to buck headwinds from the conservative Christian right wing of his own party. Gingrich has been married three times: at age 19, he married his high school teacher, who was seven years his elder; this was followed by marriage to a woman eight years his junior in 1981 from whom he was divorced in 2000 shortly after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He then married a 34-year old former employee with whom he had an ongoing relationship for six years.

So Gingrich hardly counts as the defender of Christian values. As a conservative thinker, the historian has much more influence. He entered the House for the first time in 1979 and began working on a strategy designed to bring Republicans back to power in a Congress then dominated by Democrats. The Republican right adopted a strategy of obstruction during Clinton’s administration that has been revived in today’s debate over the budget. After the conservative victory of 1994, Gingrich styled himself as the anti-president in forcing his 10-point “Contract with America” through Congress. Time magazine even featured him as their “Man of the Year.” But Gingrich, a well-paid author, went too far. After his government shutdown resulted in the furloughing of hundreds of thousands of federal employees, his star began to sink. His so-called “Republican Revolution” failed, Clinton was reelected and the Republican base lost confidence in Gingrich’s ability to bring the feuding party factions together.

Following Republican losses suffered in the 1998 midterm elections, Gingrich resigned his House seat and became active in right-wing think tanks, becoming a regular guest on political debate shows on U.S. television. Now the impassioned sojourner, who has previously appeared as a nutrition and stress management expert, is promising full employment and real security. In a series of primary elections, Republicans must now decide who will represent them in 2012 as Obama’s opponent. According to a CNN survey, 44 percent of Americans have a negative view of Gingrich while only 30 percent hold a positive view of him.