From the Past, against Obama

A man from the past announced that he wants to “win the future.” Leader of the so-called “Republican Revolution” in 1994, he gifted Congress to the Republicans during Clinton’s presidency. After 13 years out of public office, Newt Gingrich, who will be 68 years old next month, announced — via Twitter, Facebook and Fox News Channel — his candidacy for the 2012 presidential nomination of the Republican Party.

For the last 13 years, Gingrich has not held any public office. His nomination awakens memories of a past time when young Bill Clinton was in the White House and, as a Georgia congressman at that time, Gingrich was leading the Republican counterattack in the United States House of Representatives in the middle of the presidential term of office. Gingrich also led the attack on Clinton for his affair with Monica Lewinsky — something that later turned against him when it became public that, around the same time, he was cheating on his second wife with Callista Bisek, a woman 20 years his junior, whom he later married. Around the same time, his first wife revealed that Gingrich had visited her at the hospital where she was recovering from a cancer operation to ask her to get a divorce so that he could marry his second wife.

At the moment, Gingrich is third or fourth, according to a Gallup poll of Republicans, behind Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney, the former governors of Massachusetts and Arkansas. But he has a big advantage against his opponents: a large hoard of money.

Since 1998, when he resigned from Congress, Gingrich has created a series of conservative “think tanks” and lobbies, has written books and has founded a company that produces political movies. All of these things offer him today “a publicity and policy machine without parallel,” according to the Wall Street Journal. In addition, he has a campaign chest of $32 million, which is more than what the rest of the candidates for the Republican nomination have combined.

An admirer of the historian Arnold Toynbee, who formulated the concept of “departure and return” — the idea that the big leaders should depart (or be ostracized) from their kingdoms to improve themselves and then return as heroes (de Gaulle for example) — Gingrich bets on the fears of conservative Americans that Obama wants to transform America into a kind of “socialist utopia.” “If we were not in a period like the one we are in, if we were not facing unbelievable dangers on all fronts,” he said recently, “my nomination would not have any meaning at all.”*

“He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don’t have to be connected,” his ex-wife Marianne Gingrich said recently. “If you believe that, then yeah, you can run for president.” Of course, she could just call him a hypocrite …

*Editor’s note: This quote, although accurately translated, could not be independently verified.