NEWT GINGRICH IS A READER. Not long ago, on a Saturday morning, the former speaker of the House spent time reading through all of President Bush’s recent speeches on the war on terror. Gingrich thinks those speeches, along with others, should be collected in a book and made available to all. And Gingrich, who holds a doctorate in history, knows something about books. He’s one of Amazon.com’s top book reviewers. He recently finished historian Ronald White’s The Eloquent President, which he recommends highly. “It’s a study of how Lincoln used language,” Gingrich says.
Gingrich praised White’s book shortly after he concluded a speech of his own. To commemorate the fifth anniversary of September 11, on Monday Gingrich took the podium at the American Enterprise Institute, where he is a senior fellow, and delivered a talk entitled “Lessons From the First Five Years of War: Where Do We Go From Here?” It wasn’t what you would call a “glass-half-full” speech. Gingrich thinks President Bush deserves credit for treating the 9/11 attacks as acts of war and toppling the Taliban and Saddam regimes. But “time is not on our side,” Gingrich said. “We must confront the reality that we are not where we wanted to be nor where we need to be.”
Gingrich’s speech is important because it comes in the midst of what can only be described as a sustained and successful public relations campaign to burnish his image in anticipation of the upcoming 2008 Republican presidential primaries. Officially, Gingrich has said only he’s considering a run and will make a decision next year. But his actions suggest he’s all but made up his mind.
The PR blitz began last year with the publication of his book Winning the Future: A Twenty-First Century Contract with America. It’s been sustained by Gingrich’s frequent appearances as a commentator on Fox News Channel, where he has a contract, and on NBC’s Meet the Press. Speaking engagements that take Gingrich around the country, and visits to Republicans in Iowa and New Hampshire, generate headlines and speculation about his intentions. On Newt.org, Gingrich’s website, you can read about upcoming appearances, download policy papers and op-eds, even listen to podcasts featuring the speaker. The man is everywhere. And his ubiquity only seems to be helping him.
This summer, pollster Frank Luntz conducted focus-groups in which participants were asked about a variety of potential candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, Gingrich included. “We were genuinely surprised by the strongly favorable reaction to his speeches and interviews,” Luntz wrote afterward. Luntz found that voters had forgotten the many controversies associated with Gingrich’s tenure as speaker in the 1990s. “The words he spoke were like nothing they had heard from anyone else. While he didn’t start either session with any measurable support,” Luntz went on, “he ended both Iowa and New Hampshire sessions with the most new converts.”
I asked one Republican public affairs consultant to explain Gingrich’s resurgent popularity. “He’s saying things that people want to hear, with strength and conviction,” the consultant said, “and he’s saying them with a conservative framework.” Gingrich has the background and the imagination, the consultant continued, to make a claim, once more, for leadership of the conservative movement. “The most important thing in politics is to be in motion,” the consultant went on. “And he’s in motion.”
Republican strategists with ties to other nascent presidential campaigns say that they are almost certain Gingrich will run for the presidency. “Gingrich will raise the level and quality of the debates,” one told me earlier this year. “He will only make whoever emerges better.” This strategist cautioned, though, that it was doubtful Gingrich could win the nomination. “His ultimate goal is to get his agenda adopted,” the strategist said. That assessment is now conventional wisdom among capital Republicans.
Gingrich’s policy agenda is no secret. It’s all he talks about. At the American Enterprise Institute, he called for “absolute control of our borders,” “decisive port security,” a “civil defense effort which truly prepares us to minimize casualties in either a nuclear or biological attack,” a “lot more thought and effort given to prepare the immediate responders for the more dangerous world we are facing,” an “integrated system . . . which sets metrics and accountability,” a “‘one war’ model in which everything in a country is done in a coordinated, integrated manner,” a “new war budget,” a “national security senior service . . . which would allow people to move across a range of assignments in the national security field,” a “strategic energy policy which is explicitly aimed at making the Persian Gulf and the dictatorships less wealthy and less important,” a “serious intellectual, educational, and communications strategy,” and a “real role” for Congress to play in the coordination of all this. And that’s only in the continental United States. Gingrich’s speech included policies for Afghanistan (three bullet points), Iraq (four), and North Korea (three).
It also included policies for Iran. Gingrich said he opposes military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities because “I think it is inadequate.” He wants to replace the Iranian regime, using a “Reaganite” strategy involving aid to rebel groups and diplomatic and economic pressure. Armed intervention to remove the mullahs from power is also an option, he said, “but only if these earlier efforts fail.”
It was vintage Gingrich: brassy, confrontational, direct, polarizing, articulate, harsh, disarming, and charismatic. His rivals should take note. The first speech of the 2008 presidential campaign was delivered on the fifth anniversary of September 11, 2001.
Matthew Continetti is associate editor of The Weekly Standard.
