The GOP establishment better get used to Newt

A rhyming commentariat chorus inside the GOP wrote Gingrich off. But now he's back — and he's not going away

Newt Gingrich gives hope to baby boomers everywhere. Perhaps they, too, can have yet another career. Historian, speaker of the House, novelist, quasi-lobbyist, consultant, commentator — and now Newt may be on a glide path to the Republican nomination. Perhaps I can aspire to conduct the Metropolitan Opera. 

That's as far-fetched as Gingrich's chances seemed last summer, when his advisers presciently deserted him for the fast-rising and, as it turned out, slow-witted Rick Perry. Newt was rated down, ridiculed, and written off by a rhyming commentariat chorus inside and outside the GOP — by everyone except... well, his wife, Callista. When the LGBT leader and veteran progressive activist David Mixner wrote months back of a Gingrich comeback, his friends wondered and warned: What was he seeing that everyone else was missing? Seldom if ever has anyone been so dismissed, so many times as the Tea Partier from Tiffany's  — and risen so fast from the ashes of the op-ed pages. 

The odds are that if Mitt don't fit, Newt must be it.

Now the no-to-Newt narrative has shifted; columnists who constitute the conservative college of cardinals rage against his brilliant self-resurrection: He's unthinkable, unfaithful, unstable, and unelectable. Just ask George Will, Peggy Noonan, Charles Krauthammer, or even Andrew Napolitano, who's more postulant than right-wing prelate, and who on Fox's Freedom Watch paired Gingrich with Obama as "enemies of freedom." They're crazed about Newt — and so he's branded as crazy. 

Thus the GOP establishment's immune system has swarmed against an invader who doesn't belong in their body of acceptable contenders. But this year, it's not the cardinals — politicians or journalistic keepers of the conservative faith — who get to send up the white smoke of election, or the black smoke of rejection. Instead, it's increasingly plain that primary voters aren't taking instructions from their betters, but deciding for themselves. The last vestiges of the orderly, obedient Republican Party are being swept away. 

The tide gathered new force after this past weekend's ABC debate. Romney, whom doubters among the establishment once disdained but would now settle for, is limping and losing ground. He shot himself in the foot when he was supposed to trip up and slow down Gingrich. Stuart Stevens, the adviser with tight control over the wind-up Romney, had to spin an awkward defense when his candidate blithely slipped the leash and challenged Rick Perry to a $10,000 bet as if it was a two-buck wager. It was an instinctive reflex for Mr. 1 Percent, showing how out of touch he is with the other 99. Stevens offered that it was "a very human thing to do." To virtually everyone else, it was a very rich thing to do — and very stupid.

Romney's pratfall confirmed his fade — and Gingrich's strong performance ratified his rise.

And it is not just the course of the debate, but an underlying reality that has brought the Republican Party to this improbable moment. Simply put, the millions of true believers who almost certainly will pick the nominee are convinced that Gingrich at heart is a conservative, and Romney is a contrivance. Newt may have sat on a couch with Nancy Pelosi to discuss climate change, but that transgression pales in comparison to his status as the architect of the GOP revolution that in 1994 captured the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years — and then reformed welfare and, in an act of theft from Bill Clinton, can claim credit for balancing the budget. Beyond this, to an almost preternatural degree, Gingrich the candidate now speaks and resonates with the driving impulses of the primary electorate. He connects — and Romney is a well-financed, well-rehearsed, well-coifed disconnect.

With barely three weeks left before Iowa, the ABN movement — Anybody But Newt — is left with wishes and arguments that may prove as weak as they are obvious.