On This Night, Boring Mr. Safe Was Brilliant
By John Podhoretz
NYPost.com
The prospect of being flattened by the Newt Gingrich steamroller wonderfully concentrated Mitt Romney’s mind during last night’s NBC debate in Florida. Romney, suddenly in second place and falling fast after Gingrich slaughtered him in South Carolina, sent a simple and unambiguous message to GOP voters: This guy is trouble.
In the most uncomfortable confrontation yet in these debates, in the first half-hour, Romney and Gingrich cut out the middleman — NBC’s Brian Williams — and went at each other. The problem for Gingrich and his undeniable momentum was that the issue was Gingrich.
Did Gingrich lobby for Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage business that paid him $1.6 million as it was helping to destroy the housing market? If not, why did Freddie Mac pay him $1.6 million? Gingrich denied it huffily, but had no answer when Romney pointed out that the money was actually paid to Gingrich by Freddie Mac’s chief lobbyist.
Romney hammered away at Gingrich’s tenure as speaker of the House from 1994 to 1998, alleging that his rival had “resigned in disgrace.” That’s not precisely true; he resigned because he was going to be ousted from his office by his own caucus. But Gingrich couldn’t answer that charge about his disgraced resignation because to do so would complicate his own account of his supposedly historic success as speaker.
Gingrich never recovered from Romney’s onslaught. He didn’t get a chance to lord it over Williams or the two other reporters who joined him later with one of his master classes in how to take down the tone-deaf media.
The audience in Florida wasn’t allowed to clap and cheer, and Gingrich couldn’t feed on the defiant energy of the crowd that helped make his two clashes in South Carolina — one with Fox News’ Juan Williams, one with CNN’s John King — so electric.
This was not an electric night, and if Romney manages this week to slow or halt Gingrich’s momentum, it will be precisely for that reason.
His chance to turn things around now has to do entirely with making a case that he is electable and Gingrich isn’t, based not on ideology but on temperament — that he has the right temperament to get in the ring with President Obama, and Gingrich has the wrong one.
Politicians court voters, and the problem for Romney is that in recent weeks, he has come to seem like the Ralph Bellamy of the race. Bellamy was the other guy in the classic Cary Grant comedies of the 1930s, “The Awful Truth” and “His Girl Friday” — the fiancé of the heroine, the safe and careful and trustworthy fellow who was the salt of the earth but who would bore you to tears.
I’m not comparing Newt Gingrich to Cary Grant, God knows, but the relation of the GOP electorate to him is weirdly similar to the relation of the heroines of those movies to Grant. He’s the old flame, the ex-husband, the one who dazzled them all those years ago and whom they learned was untrustworthy.
And just when, in a spirit of resignation, they’re about to marry Mitt Bellamy, here comes Newt again with his palaver and his expansiveness and his fluency and his hatred of the media to make them swoon all over again.
Ralph Bellamy didn’t get the girl, didn’t get Irene Dunne in “The Awful Truth” or Rosalind Russell in “His Girl Friday.” But in real life, the Ralph Bellamys often do get the girl after patient courtship. That’s Romney’s ace in the hole.
Choosing Gingrich is choosing excitement with a potentially catastrophic end. Choosing Romney is safe and boring, but there are better odds of him going the distance.