Democrats may be taking Newt seriously as a potential nominee. But boy will he spend a lot of time on the defensive in the weeks and perhaps months to come. Alex Massie flags just one vivid example of why this is the case: a 2008 talk in which Gingrich warns that the Bush administration’s success in preventing a 9/11 repeat is breeding …
What strikes me most about the Iowa poll numbers Adam flagged earlier is this:
In seeking to draw a contrast with his competitors, especially Gingrich, Romney has repeatedly noted that the former Speaker was a “career politician,” while he spent most of his life in business. That message might be getting through, but the Post poll
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The Republican Presidential candidates will gather tonight for their eleventh televised debate, and as usual the media mob is teeming with predictions and storylines to watch. I can’t help but wonder if the power of debates has …
This June 2005 quote from the former House Speaker, spoken at a joint appearance with none other than Hillary Clinton (Newt was in a moderate-friend-of-Democrats phase at the time) proved less than prescient:
“We may be at the end of a 40-year cycle of bitterness,” Gingrich said. “I’ve spent enough of my life fighting. It would be nice
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In my magazine story this week, Newt Gingrich told me he plans to run a positive campaign, modeled after Ronald Reagan’s 1980 primary candidacy. This may come as a relief to Mitt Romney, who surely doesn’t relish being the victim of Newt’s political martial arts. But it’s possible that someone else will do that dirty work for Newt, …
Beware the eye of Newt! Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is a fearsome practitioner of attack politics–just ask the Democratic House Speaker he almost single-handedly toppled in the 1980s, the Democratic barons who lost their power when Newt’s Republicans took back the House in 1994, and Bill Clinton, who outdueled Newt in the …
JEFFERSON, IOWA — Newt Gingrich is having his I-told-you-so moment. Within mere days of announcing his presidential campaign in May, the former House Republican Speaker from Georgia suffered a spectacular political meltdown that …
After a long series of Republican debates that focused almost exclusively, and rather predictably, on domestic policy–repeal ObamaCare? check. No new taxes? Check. Stimulus failed? Check–last night’s CBS debate devoted to …
With his just-announced departure from the Obama White House next month, Dennis Ross will be the last of the “special envoys” installed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in early 2009. Although Obama has enjoyed his share of important foreign policy successes–the deaths of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, the new Strategic Arms …
Rick Perry’s astonishing and tragic brain freeze was last night’s most enduring debate moment. But given that it makes Mitt Romney all the more likely to be the Republican nominee, it’s worth returning to an answer he gave about perhaps his greatest vulnerability–that he’s a shameless flip-flopper–and which told us a lot about his …
Revealing anecdote from a Politico profile of Grover Norquist, who may be Washington’s most powerful conservative and is a towering obstacle to a Congressional tax reform deal:
Sometimes, he said, he has to yank a wandering leader back into line, as he said he did with Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) in May. Kyl publicly ruled
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In his lame excuse for a no-holds-barred press conference late Tuesday afternoon, Herman Cain said he relishes talking directly to the American people. But despite the new ways in which candidates can circumvent the national …
At the height of the Tom DeLay-era, Jack Abramoff was probably Washington’s most influential and lucratively paid lobbyist. He was brash and brazen, displaying a Hollywood swagger long before they made a movie about him. Then Abramoff was exposed as a fraud, a liar and a creep of the first order–someone who effectively stole millions of …
