So long as I'm talking Gingrich (see next post), I love this quote from his former press secretary Lee Howell:
There is the Newt Gingrich who is intellectual, appealing, and fun to be with. And there is the Newt Gingrich who's a bloodthirsty partisan who'd just as soon cut your guts out as look at you. And who, very candidly, is mean, mean as hell.
Newt nostalgia mostly turns on memories of the first guy, the eccentric ideologue who loved dinosaurs, wrote alternative history novels, thought we should blast handicapped folks into space, lived for technology, and was a general cross between a batty poli-sci professor and a 10-year-old. That's the Newt who's been on display since 1998 (save for a mostly-forgotten moment when he basically accused Colin Powell of treason). The other guy, the guy who said the Republican party's problem was a lack of nastiness, who said "Democrats were the enemy of normal people everywhere", who said that following the Democratic foreign policy would mean "tyranny everywhere, and we in America could experience the joys of Soviet-style brutality and murdering of women and children", we've kinda forgotten about him.
That Newt is in there. And the moment he's elected to something again, that Newt will return. Studying up on the old him has given me a lot of respect for the public relations turnaround he's engineered, a store of esteem I can add to my respect for his brilliance and tactical savvy. But all that aside, the guy is fairly horrible when he gets into power and we should try not to forget that.
