Newt Gingrich ridiculed White House hopeful Beto O’Rourke on Wednesday, saying he is “the most charismatically empty candidate” in the field for the Democratic nomination.
The former Speaker of the House and 2012 candidate for the Republican presidential nomination wrote in a Fox News article that the Texan has become chronically self-absorbed.
“My hunch is we will look back on the announcement week as the high-water mark of the O’Rourke campaign, and then it will be ‘bye bye Beto,'” he said.
Roping in some Hollywood history, Gingrich said, “O’Rourke may be the most charismatically empty candidate since Robert Redford played the title role in the 1972 movie ‘The Candidate.’ Like Redford, O’Rourke has lanky good looks, is pleasing to watch for a lot of people, and has a ‘Kennedy-esque’ feel.”
Gingrich, who led the “Republican revolution” of 1994 and was speaker of the House from 1995 to 1999, compared O’Rourke’s Senate bid against incumbent Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz to the failed Senate campaign of Abraham Lincoln before his election to the presidency.
“When Lincoln ran for the Senate he lost narrowly to the incumbent, Stephen Douglas — just as O’Rourke lost narrowly to Cruz. However, in those days, voters elected members of the state Legislature, who then elected U.S. senators,” Gingrich wrote.
Gingrich said the comparisons between the two fall short due to the approach O’Rourke has taken after losing his Senate race as opposed to Lincoln’s approach. “I assumed O’Rourke would recognize that his donor base and name identification were only a springboard — that he would have to define a moral cause large enough to justify an outsider nomination and election to be president. I was wrong,” he said.
He added: “This vacuous lack of moral and historical meaning may explain the windmill effect of O’Rourke’s arms waving non-stop. Apparently, he believes if he waves at you enough, you won’t notice what he is saying, which is vacuous and without definition in any serious way.”
While O’Rourke, 46, said just before announcing his campaign he was “born to run,” — a line that has been knocked by his fellow Democrats — Gingrich argued that Lincoln “shrewdly understood that his candidacy had to be about a cause much larger than himself.”
The latest RealClearPolitics polling average puts O’Rourke in fourth place with 11 percent of the vote. Both former Vice President Joe Biden, who is expected to announce a presidential run, and Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., lead the field with 29.4 percent and 23.4 percent respectively.
