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Jewish World Review Nov 28, 2011 / 2 Kislev, 5772 For GOPers, the winds are beginning to pick up, the horizon is darkening By David M. Shribman
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | HART'S LOCATION, N.H. -- This is a small place (the tiniest town in New Hampshire). A river runs through it (the Saco). It is unadorned (weeks ago the leaves left their branches). It is sleepy in late autumn (no tourists in sight, and only one hiker). It may be the perfect place to contemplate what is going on in this state (site of the first presidential primary) at this time (six weeks before the balloting). This is the report from the hillside: The old rhythms are prevailing. The moose have fled to the higher elevations, as they do every winter. The cascade basin on Mount Webster is dry and will remain empty till late spring. The lamb's ears along the paths are a faint green and won't regain their purplish hue till summer. The sky is a gun gray and soon will darken further. All that change and still Mitt Romney is the strong favorite in the January primary. The geologists and meteorologists who study New Hampshire's White Mountains are much like the political scientists who examine the Granite State's politics. They warn that this is a region of peculiarly swift, sometimes even violent, change. Evidence of rock slides is everywhere along the trails and mountain highways. The signs on the paths leading to the top of nearby Mount Washington warn of dramatic weather changes. Last Sunday morning, for example, the skies were blue, the breezes gentle, the weather warm down in the Mount Washington Valley. Yet here in Crawford Notch on a shoulder of Mt. Willey, the winter winds blew down hard, even heartlessly. So, too, in the political world are great forces at work. This season they have put forward a series of challenges to the position of the former Massachusetts governor. One after another they have come -- first former Gov. Tim Pawlenty, the hope of the Upper Midwest; then Rep. Michele Bachmann, with her stunning summer straw-vote performance on the Iowa plains; then Gov. Rick Perry, rushing in on a white horse, his Colt .45 misfiring every time he removed it from his leather holster; then businessman Herman Cain, armed with a tax plan based on the numerology of nine that somehow didn't add up. Now comes Newt Gingrich, the historian who bent history by ending 40 years of Democratic rule in the House, the master of the past who portrays himself as a futurist, the former House speaker who casts himself as an outsider. Mr. Gingrich may be the pariah of polite society in the capital but he is no outsider, unless you consider consulting contracts with the Chamber of Commerce ($840,000) and Freddie Mac (more than $1.6 million) badges of independence from Washington power centers. Both these groups paid Mr. Gingrich handsomely for his advice; in fact, quite a lot of money for quite little advice. In the 1980s and 1990s Mr. Gingrich displayed a remarkable instinct for seeing the weaknesses in men who seemed strong and in institutions that seemed impregnable. He understood what almost no one else did, that the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill was based on an illusion, which was that the mid-1950s power calculus that made congressional Democrats kings and congressional Republicans vassals would continue forever. But though Mr. Gingrich gave speeches to virtually every forum hungry to rearrange Washington, his was an inside game -- here a nudge at a Democratic potentate, there a vow to overturn an obvious example of Democratic abuse. It was a relentless, remorseless effort, both in the House chamber, where he accused the Democratic leadership of moral corruption, and in the Republican caucus, where he accused his own leaders of moral weakness. He described the most revered Republican lawmaker of the age, Sen. Robert J. Dole, as the tax collector for the welfare state. He portrayed the most beloved Republican figure of the time, House minority leader Robert Michel, as a feckless tool of the Democrats, even as a clueless fool. Now Mr. Gingrich is running as an outsider and playing an outdoor game. His audience isn't dinner-jacket crowds in banquet halls hired by the National Association of Beer Wholesalers or the National Federation of Independent Business, lobby groups with leaders alert enough to understand that Mr. Gingrich was onto something in the last years of Democratic rule in the House. His audience is Republican primary voters here in New Hampshire and GOP caucus-goers in Iowa. Now he is in a statistical four-way tie in Iowa with Mr. Cain, Mr. Romney and Rep. Ron Paul of Texas -- and in third place in New Hampshire, with 11 percent, behind Mr. Romney (who stands at 40 percent, according to the latest Bloomberg News poll) and Dr. Paul (17 percent). No one else is close. It is an uphill battle for Mr. Gingrich here, given Mr. Romney's strong organization, his strong identification with the state and his familiarity to voters -- he was a neighboring governor from 2003 to 2007 and finished second here in the 2008 presidential primary, less than 6 percentage points behind the winner, Sen. John McCain. But Mr. Gingrich is a shrewd man. Look at his retinue: His new director of operations here came from the staff of Mrs. Bachmann, a tea-party favorite. His new volunteer coordinator was a coordinator for NH912, a tea-party group. The tea party has not mixed a brew here as strong as in other places, but it remains a significant unknown. This, however, is known: Mr. Romney will get almost no support from that quarter. Mr. Gingrich, the onetime insider, nonetheless has positioned himself to pick up the tea leaves in this state, particularly if the other tea-sipping candidates continue to fade. And so what if 56 percent of the public, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll, places the principal blame for the nation's troubles on Republicans in Congress -- arguably the progeny of Mr. Gingrich. Right now the winds are beginning to pick up, the horizon is darkening. Great changes are coming to New Hampshire. It has been Mr. Romney's remarkable achievement to weather change thus far, so much so that 45 percent of Republicans now believe he's the most likely Republican nominee, according to the Journal/NBC national poll. But his greatest test is weeks away and the skies, and maybe Mr. Gingrich, maybe someone else, are closing in.
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David Shribman, a Pulitzer Prize winner in journalism, is executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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