Was the presidential campaign of Newt Gingrich sabotaged by his own subconscious mind? In the wake of the spectacular blunder on last Sunday’s “Meet The Press” in which Gingrich criticized House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-Wisc.) Medicare proposal as being “too big a jump,” one has to wonder.
Gingrich seems to be too intelligent to purposely make such a gaffe. So why did he do it? The best answer your humble correspondent can come up with is that even though Gingrich desires to become president on a conscious level, his subconscious mind wants to protect him from public embarrassment by quickly destroying his presidential campaign before it has a chance to really take off.
What sort of embarrassment? Well, there is the matter of Newt’s history of rocky marriages. On top of that, we now find out that he ran up a six figure jewelry tab at Tiffany’s that put him deeply into debt. Who knows what other secrets are out there to be revealed about Gingrich?
Of course, if you are a favored candidate of the mainstream media – meaning a liberal Democrat – you get a free pass on any skeletons in your closet, unless you really push the scandal envelope as happened with John Edwards. Go to a church for 20 years and claim to have never once heard Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s frequent anti-American diatribes and the MSM meekly accepts that explanation. And woe be upon anybody who would dare to question that story, because he would be flamed by the MSM for engaging in a “witch hunt” or some other such nonsense.
If you ask Gingrich if he is really serious about pursuing his candidacy, you would get a strong affirmative reply. However, the blunder he made was so massive that the best explanation seems to be subconscious self-sabotage. And Gingrich might not be the first presidential candidate to have suffered from this affliction.
Flash back to the summer of 1988. The Democratic nominee for president, Michael Dukakis, was riding high in all the polls and appeared to be heading towards a landslide victory over then-Vice President George H.W, Bush in November. Weeks before his notorious ride aboard an army tank with a funny looking “Snoopy” cap, which was probably entirely accidental, Dukakis did something that any reasonable person would see had to be toxic to his campaign: he power walked in public while swinging weights in his hands.
The second most nerdiest sport on the planet is power walking. And the only thing nerdier than power walking is power walking while swinging weights, aka “heavy hands speed walking.” Perhaps it’s an effective exercise. However, any candidate caught doing this exercise in public has just signed a death warrant for his campaign. Here is a brief description of the Dukakis power walk from the Boston Globe:
You can mark the “jump the shark” moment of the Dukakis presidential campaign from the broadcast of his nerdy exercise on national television. The “Snoopy” cap tank ride merely sealed the deal.
As with Gingrich, the best explanation is subconcious sabotage. Perhaps his subconsciousness said something like this to Dukakis:
So although an angry Iowa Republican called Gingrich to his face an “embarrassment” for his criticism of Paul Ryan, it wasn’t quite as embarrassing as being caught in public power walking with swinging weights.
If Newt somehow does end up with an overwhelming desire to swing a pair of weights while power walking, I would take that as definite confirmation of subconscious sabotage of his own campaign.
