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Conservative pundits turn down Newt  
December 10, 2011 

In the days since Gingrich leaped to the forefront of the Republican presidential race, the nation’s most prominent right-leaning commentators — many of whom have spent the last year pining for alternatives to Mitt Romney — have rendered a swift and caustic judgment on their party’s latest out-of-right-field challenger. 

In columns dripping with disdain, they’ve argued that Gingrich isn’t just undesirable as an opponent for Romney — he’s probably not fit for the presidency altogether. 

“He has every negative character trait that conservatives associate with ’60s excess: narcissism, self-righteousness, self-indulgence and intemperance. He just has those traits in Republican form,” New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote Friday. “It doesn’t matter if a person shares your overall philosophy. If that person doesn’t have the right temperament and character, stay away.” 

Brooks, an on-and-off Barack Obama admirer and no hardcore ideologue, gave this biting assessment of Gingrich’s policy instincts: “Gingrich loves government more than I do.” 

Those are themes that other columnists have developed for more than a week now, recalling Gingrich’s rocky speakership and describing him as an undisciplined, ideologically unreliable egomaniac who likely would lose the general election. 

Ramesh Ponnuru, the National Review editor who recently announced his support for Romney, described the consensus on Gingrich as overwhelming. 

“The people who know Gingrich best — the ones who worked for him, or worked with him, or watched him closely as journalists in the 1990s — have almost all concluded that he is a bad fit for the presidency,” Ponnuru said in an email. “That judgment is shared by conservative and moderate congressmen, by people who support Romney and people who want an alternative to him. The common denominator is alarm at what Gingrich would do to the Republican party as nominee and to the country as president.” 

No one has criticized Gingrich more acidly or consistently than George Will, the conservative commentator who said on ABC’s “This Week” that Gingrich “embodies almost everything disagreeable about modern Washington” and called him a “rental politician.” 

“There is almost artistic vulgarity in Gingrich’s unrepented role as a hired larynx for interests profiting from such government follies as ethanol and cheap mortgages,” Will wrote in The Washington Post. “His Olympian sense of exemption from standards and logic allowed him, fresh from pocketing $1.6 million from Freddie Mac (for services as a ‘historian’), to say, ‘If you want to put people in jail,’ look at ‘the politicians who profited from’ Washington’s environment.” 

Asked about one of Will’s rhetorical cannon blasts last month in New Hampshire, Gingrich told POLITICO reporter: “Poor George.” 

The chilly response to Gingrich isn’t entirely surprising. Elites tend to favor substantive, temperate-sounding politicians — such as the 2012 wish-list candidates Mitch Daniels and Paul Ryan — over flamboyant activist favorites. 

But Gingrich is also not Herman Cain — a crowd-pleasing political novice who makes no claim to understanding government. He’s a self-branded “big ideas” guy whose Washington career stretches more than three decades and has more than passing familiarity with the Beltway’s smart set. 

And yet, even opinion organs that have actively resisted Romney’s slow grind to the GOP have turned away from Gingrich. The Wall Street Journal editorial board, which has criticized Romney repeatedly this year, disparaged Gingrich just as he was emerging as the former Massachusetts governor’s strongest rival. 

“In Mr. Gingrich’s telling, his ideas are bold and even radical, but the irony is that they’re often much less revolutionary than his rhetoric suggests,” the paper’s editorial page opined Thursday, criticizing Gingrich’s plans for reforming Medicare. 

“The contradictions of Mr. Gingrich’s entitlement plan reveal part of his political character, which is that his policies often don’t match the high-decibel, sometimes grandiose nature of his rhetoric,” the powerful conservative editorial page wrote. “He might achieve more if he spoke more softly and carried a bigger stick.” 

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