This February at CPAC, I remember watching Newt Gingrich bounce onstage to tell an audience full of the conservative faithful that they faced a looming electoral catastrophe. "There is something big happening in this country," he said. "We don’t understand it. We’re not responding to it." And unless the party changed, he said, conservatives should expect defeat.
Now though as the election approaches, it looks like Gingrich is feeling ever-queasier about whether anyone's getting his message. Today, he sent out a mass "plea" to supporters asking them to please, please try and turn around the GOP ship before November. As he put it, the 2006 drubbing of six incumbent GOP Senators and Cazayoux and Foster's recent victories in Louisiana and Illinois are a sign than an "anti-Obama, anti-Reverend Wright, or (if Senator Clinton wins), anti-Clinton campaign" won't work. And so Gingrich has sallied forth to present a new plan--titled, somewhat limply, "Nine Acts of Real Change That Could Restore the GOP Brand."
But it seems Gingrich scraped the barrel and still came up empty-handed. Overhaul the census? Create a GPS-style air traffic control system? Are these really going to draw votes from the Dems or make for damning political ads? In the middle of two wars, a foreclosure crisis, and a teetering economy, is Gingrich really proposing that the GOP tie up the limited remainder of this Congressional session with English-only initiatives and earmark reform (which both chambers already spent recent weeks rejecting)?
The plan lacks the Contract With America's cohesion or rhetorical clarity (and that's saying something), and not surprisingly, either. When you're trying desperately to pull a collapsing party from the ashes of its own creation, it's pretty hard to come off like you're concocting a revolution. Besides, as Gingrich notes, what issues are out there that the Democrats don't already have better poll numbers on, anyway? Newt's latest plan makes the GOP look more out of touch than ever.
--Te-Ping Chen
