It sucks to be a Republican right now. The party that foisted George W. Bush on the country twice has fielded the weakest, most problematic slate of presidential candidates in memory. The Christian nationalist wing is unhappy with the three frontrunners, who have all been labled “moderates” — the GOP code word for “liberal” — in the past. Worse, each one has a ding in his bio that the christianists find unappetizing: two of them are admitted adulterers who have been married more than once, and the other is a Mormon.
Republicans, especially the rank and file, yearn for another Ronald Reagan now the way Democrats used to hope for another JFK.
The talibangelists’ restlessness is what prompted former Speaker Newton Leroy Gingrich to float a trial balloon last week, when he confessed to committing adultery while married to his second wife. (Even though Gingrich was sleeping with a much-younger congressional staffer while leading the charge to impeach Pres. Clinton over a sex lie about his affair with a former intern, Newt refused to cop to the additional sin of hypocrisy.)
As a Democrat, I hope Gingrich runs. While he is supposedly a brilliant strategist, and is what passes on the right for a big thinker, he would be abysmal as the face of the Republican Party. For starters, he is very unpopular. As House Speaker, America came to see him as a petty, tyrannical, pontificating stuffed shirt. By the time his party forced him out of office in 1998, Gingrich’s approval was at 28 percent. (Nixon’s was 25 percent when he resigned.) In a recent Fox News poll, 64 percent said they would never vote for him under any circumstances, as did 40 percent of Republicans.
Judging by calls from Republicans this morning on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” Newt’s trial balloon has scared the bejesus out of the party’s base. One name that came up repeatedly was that of “Law & Order” star, and former Sen. Fred Thompson.
Thompson gets bonus points out the gate because he has a quality exalted beyond all others in the GOP: He’s “Reaganesque.” Like Reagan, he is an actor — a better actor than Reagan, actually. And like Reagan, he has been married twice. Unlike Reagan, Thompson is a lawyer and he made a name for himself in the political sphere before going Hollywood — he was the Republicans’ co-counsel during Senate Watergate hearings in the 1970s. He has been in the news lately because of his friendship and support of Scooter Libby, the former senior presidential aide who was convicted on multiple counts of perjury last week.
Thompson appears to have less baggage than the current frontrunners. Still, his Senate resume was not stellar, and while he’s been on a few vice presidential short lists, he has never been battle-tested in a national contest. And who knows if he even has the the belly fire to enter the race, especially knowing that when he does all three frontrunners will turn their guns on him.
