Should Newt Gingrich refrain from 2012 presidential combat, our body politic will be just a little bit sadder, a bit more despairing, for each morning its romper-room republic will be a less inviting place in which to rise, stretch, yawn and ask with eager eyes: So, what extraordinary imbecility has candidate Newt uttered lately?
Just days away from quite possibly announcing his intention to replace President Obama, he suddenly decides it would be far more judicious to simply remove President Obama. This, I gather, is one of those "Big Ideas" for which Newt is forever exalted by small-minded people.
While molesting the towering legal difference between "not defending" and "not enforcing" (one unconstitutional section of) the Defense of Marriage Act, Newt pondered the horror of Obama's despotic decision with Newsmax: Impeachment is "something you get into much later, but it is clearly a dereliction of duty and is a violation of his constitutional oath."
Clearly.
On the other hand, said Newt in a clear and subsequent statement, "[I]mpeachment is clearly not an appropriate action."
Confused? Don't be. For this is but another manifestation of semi-candidate Newt's political Tourette's, which, as president, would on a weekly if not daily basis send markets tumbling, populations scattering and armies mobilizing.
But, he made the news and that was the real point. Newt seems to have learned long ago that, when passably thoughtful and thus self-muzzled, he's as dull as a Senate confirmation hearing. Let Newt be Newt, however -- which means, let his silly, inner unseriousness gush forth -- and his magnificent absurdities are invariably construed by the base as the splendor of Big Ideas.
Less dog-whistle than gong politics, Newt knows how to deliver; he knows his business; he knows that insulated Republican primary voters watch Newsmax interviews and devour the Drudge Report but never read his inexorable, saner clarifications in, say, the New York Times afterward. It's as though our politics no longer dwell in the serious substance of two differing parties, but rather two altogether different universes.
Hence the hell of it is, within the contemporary GOP's universe the only manner in which a candidate can soar is to stoop as low as possible -- pandering to the inanities of birthers, catering to hard-currency whackos and Fed-slayers, caressing the religiously paranoid, emboldening the jingoistically delusional, proposing the removal of valid officeholders.
It wasn't that long ago that this sort of "strategic" approach to high office was the pure, lunatic territory of purely third-party zaniness: the risible history of single-issue or singularly demented American political parties is legion. Many of these parties once envisioned or still envision themselves as someday supplanting one of the two major parties, whereas, rather curiously, the GOP seems hellbent only on supplanting one of the thirds.