Posted by
Bill Crawford on Sunday, January 23, 2011 8:02:26 PM
Presidential politics becomes more and more prdictable as you inch toward the finish line. In it's early stages, it is near impossible to do anything but guess. That is because it is so personal.
It is the end result of a couple of dozen players looking in the mirror and wondering if they have the thick skin, the family support, the fund raising ability, the moxie and the strategy to make anything happen. One of the constants is the old FDR aphorism about "Presidential fever being a disease only cured by repeated injections of formaldehyde".
Take Sarah Palin, for instance. I don't think she is plainning to run at this point, I think she is merely trying to set herself up so that she could jump in at any time, if she decided the field was not going to be competitive. However, I don't know her, and I don't presume to do anything more than guess. She may have already decided to jump in at a certain point, I don't know. The less variable end of it is that it is fairly certain that, if she has good people around her, they are probably telling her that she has some horrendous negatives- very expensive and time consuming to overcome.
Newt is simpler to summarize, and it is because the overriding factor is not him. It is the political world around him, and how it has changed since 1995.
Newt still thinks of himself as an idea man, and this has a clear basis in reality- whether you agree with the ideas or not. He was the point man and the resident genius that turned the reaction against the '94 Congress into a Republican rout. It was his notions of 'majoritarian insurgency' that drove that Congress in it's early months. When Clinton punted the budget with projected deficits into 2005, it was Newt who convinced John Kasich to take it on and actually balance it.
After that he lost control of the direction, it became a functionary 'we spend less than they do' creature of Trent Lott and Tom Delay, and the rest is history.
Well, here's the thing, folks. The Tea Party movement last year took over the mantle of "idea man", because they all think the Republicans cowed away from it. The ideas now bubble up from the voters to the political class, and they are (at this point) not shy at all about telling the people they helped elect to stick to them ,or they will find somebody else who will.
In a world where the program bubbles up from the grass roots, Newt is left to trying to provide original suggestions for enacting them, and there are others with less baggage who can do that, or will be more than willing to try. Newt has become a redundant force.
And that's why he will go nowhere. Nobody needs him any more.