A Denial Named Gingrich

“What part of ‘you lost’ do you not understand?” Americans would say upon hearing Newt Gingrich conclude his defeat by Romney in Florida with a presidential declaration of faith. It was a speech of general putsch where the ex-bittern of the Conservative revolution described being in the process of breaking the Obama-era decrees and Executive Orders until the evening of his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2013. Everything: the leftist judges, the “ObamaCare” health insurance, the crippling regulations killing jobs, the politics of war against religion, not to mention the transfer of items from the American embassy in Tel Aviv to Jerusalem – and all this before going to the inauguration ball with his beloved Callista.

Newt authorized a short victory speech less than an hour after having fallen 16 points down to a rival he believed he had knocked out in the battlefields of South Carolina 10 days earlier. If he expects to continue the race until the end, until the Convention in Tampa at the end of August, as he appears to be promising in signs declaring “46 more states!” held by his supporters, the questions now are, “How?” and “Why?”

Mitt Romney continues the February primaries in conquered territory: in Nevada, where 27 percent of Republicans are Mormon like him; in Michigan, where he was born and his father was governor; in Arizona, where his proclamations against illegal immigration coincide with the local fixation. When he emerges from this electoral guard of honor to face the six most difficult polls of Super Tuesday at the beginning of March, Gingrich must be reduced to the role of harmless sidekick.

In principle, his verbal offensive of Jan. 31, the evening of defeat, however, showed refusal to accept defeat in a sickly denial and an astounding aggressiveness. Gingrich sees himself today in the role of the outsider of 1994, able at the time to rally 9 million new voters to his side and bring back a Republican majority to the house after 40 years of Democratic domination. Could he, as he believes, achieve the same feat during these presidential elections? This seems mathematically impossible. The candidate of “true conservatism” can play his populist card in his dreams to round up the Christian Right, the Libertarians, and the blue collars of the right, but one can hardly imagine his authority over Independents and Centrists who decide the elections; unless, of course, he wants to torment Romney until the end, to gain concessions at the Tampa Convention, and capture him.