The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Steal This Book
“Denmark Plans to Reinstate Guards at Borders”–headline, The Wall Street Journal, May 12
The Lonely Lives of Scientists
“Scientists Plan to Chat With Dolphins”–headline, WSJ.com, May 12
Bottom Stories of the Day
“Patrick Kennedy No Longer Working on Memoir, Says He’s Busy With Other Projects”–headline, Associated Press, May 11
Gingrich for President? Nah. (from BOTW archives of May 10th)
Newt Gingrich is “set to give an interview Wednesday night on Fox News Channel, explaining his rationale for a candidacy,” the Associated Press reports. That’s a candidacy for president, folks. “He’ll give his first speech as a full-fledged candidate at the Georgia Republican Party’s convention in Macon on Friday.”
The AP headline reads “Analysis: Gingrich’s Past a Plus, a Minus.” We were going to run this under “Out on a Limb,” but it seems to us that doesn’t quite do it justice. But actually, that would not be in keeping with the sarcastic tone of that feature. To call Gingrich’s past a “plus” really is to go out on a limb. Here’s the best the AP can do to present Gingrich’s past as a plus:
Nostalgia may not be completely troublesome for him.
The economy was humming in the 1990s when he was speaker of the House. And the world seemed a safer place before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The next sentence: “But Gingrich himself has a mixed legacy from those days.” No kidding.
To be sure, Gingrich was arguably the most effective House minority whip in American history. That was the title he held in the 103rd Congress (1993-94), when he masterminded the successful Republican campaign to win a majority in 1994. Since Minority Leader Robert Michel was retiring, Gingrich was in line to become speaker in the 104th Congress. The AP’s Shannon McCafrey, assigned to Gingrich’s campaign, reminds us how that worked out:
He’s remembered as much for his stormy fall–he faced ethics complaints and later resigned–as for his triumphant rise. And questions about his temperament still surface.
One of the best-known images of Gingrich from his days as speaker was the New York Daily News cover depicting him in a diaper pitching a tantrum after being barred from sitting up front with President Bill Clinton on Air Force One while returning from Israel. And his latest outbursts have raised eyebrows, including when he compared a mosque that was to open near ground zero in New York to Nazis putting a sign next to the Holocaust Museum.
We’ve met Gingrich a bunch of times, and we like him–which is to say, we find him engaging and entertaining. But the thought of him in the White House makes us uneasy. For one thing, he has an outsized sense of his own historic destiny (a trait he shares with Barack Obama).
For another, while he is undoubtedly very intelligent, he is erratically so. People on the left love to stereotype conservatives as “incurious,” but Gingrich is too curious–too quick to latch onto ideas and drop them rather than give them thoughtful consideration. Thus the outbursts that raise those eyebrows.
And they aren’t all outbursts. Back in March, National Review’s Jim Geraghty posted a video of Gingrich in a 2008 ad “sitting on a couch with Nancy Pelosi, talking about how he completely agrees with her that ‘our country must take action to address climate change,’ and that ‘if enough of us demand action from our leaders, we can spark the innovation we need.’ “
That looks to us like a winning ad–for any of Gingrich’s rivals in the Republican primaries.
For more “Best of the Web” click here and look for thef “Best of the Web Today” link in the middle column below “Today’s Columnists.”
