Newt Gingrich is a very intelligent man, if he says so himself.
I first encountered the newly de clared presidential candidate in 1985, as he was breaking out as an insurgent Republican in the House.
What I remember most about the interview in his office (which, he proudly noted, had no desk — with the unfortunate consequence that there were ungodly piles of paper all over the floor and coffee table) was that Gingrich kept telling me he was an educator, a historian, that he had a PhD.
I had never before met an educated person who was so determined to make reference to how educated he was.
Then, Gingrich said something unusual for a self-proclaimed educator-historian-PhD. The thinker who meant the most to him, he declared, was Alvin Toffler, author of the 1970 pop bestseller “Future Shock.”
Not Aristotle; not Plato; not Edward Gibbon, the greatest historian in the English language; not Shakespeare or Tolstoy or John Locke. Alvin Toffler.
Newt Gingrich has a restless and outsized intelligence that is tragically unleavened by any kind of critical sensibility.
Without question, he is able to see interesting things others can’t. For example, at a meeting here at The Post a dozen years ago, he offered the brilliant observation that something significant had changed when people began to trust bank machines with their paychecks rather than handing them to actual people — and that we should expect the commercial use of the Internet to explode as a result.
When he’s seized by an idea, he believes in it wholeheartedly and makes a very good case for it. Unfortunately, it’s often immaterial whether the idea itself is sound or wacko. Thus, during that 1985 interview with me, what he wanted to talk about most was how space colonies might become states of the union.
He was remarkably uninterested in discussing the ways he was organizing young conservatives in the House and how he had seen an enormous opportunity in the fact that C-SPAN offered them unprecedented access to the American people through its unedited coverage of House activities.
Yet that was the first step in one of the great tactical accomplishments in American political history. For seven years, from 1987 to 1994, he succeeded in decapitating the Democratic leadership in Congress, exposing the casual corruption its decades in power had instituted, and designing a strategy for a Republican takeover.
But like a born actor who only really wants to direct, Gingrich has always been unsatisfied with what he’s brilliant at. He can’t still his hunger to deliver grand pronouncements on life, liberalism, conservatism, religion and whatever else swims into his consciousness.
And while he may understand the kinds of hot-button issues that get to people, what he does not understand is how he, Newt Gingrich, comes across to people. The answer: not well.
His career as a public figure has been marked by the kinds of tin-eared pronouncements, mostly about the personal misconduct of others, that can only be likened to a brilliant professional golfer who consistently knocks the ball into the same water hazard again and again.
He has a weakness for wildly inappropriate Nazi analogies. “People like me,” he said in 1994, “are what stand between us and Auschwitz.” During a bare-knuckled 1985 fight with Democrats over an Indiana House seat, he likened those who wouldn’t speak out about that supposed infamy to German Pastor Martin Neimoller, who famously said that when “they came for the Jews, I did nothing, and when they came for me, there was no one left.’ ”
The two most famous instances of his foot-in-mouth disease came when he 1) likened the Democratic Party to Woody Allen’s affair with his own pseudo-stepdaughter and 2) suggested that if you were upset by the fact that Susan Smith drowned her two children so she could run off with her boyfriend, you needed to vote Republican.
Yet, while he felt free to hold others’ personal conduct in moral contempt, he only recently offered an (almost comically self-aggrandizing) excuse for his own personal weaknesses in an interview with a Christian broadcaster: “There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”
Yes, he actually said he misbehaved because he loved his country too much.
Newt Gingrich never received more than 100,000 votes in his life. He’ll never be president. The only positive way to frame his foolish bid is to quote the rueful lyric from “Thanks for the Memories,” Bob Hope’s signature song:
“You may have been a headache, but you never were a bore.”
johnpodhoretz@gmail.com