With the Republican Party in seeming disarray, Newt Gingrich is emerging as someone who might be able to save conservatives — and the GOP — from themselves.
But can a former Speaker of the House do what Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele may not be able to do after effectively abdicating his party leadership role to talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh?
Many party activists insist the GOP doesn’t have a leader right now. But anyone watching Gringrich might think differently.
Take, for example, his address to the annual Conservative Political Action Conference. The former Speaker of the House took the stage to the thumping beat of ”Eye of the Tiger”, then succinctly and articulately did what Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal failed to do more than a week ago.
“I came here today to take a few minutes to answer the president and answer his attorney general and to comment on the machine which currently runs the Congress,” said Gingrich, giving the defacto Republican response to President Obama’s big speech to Congress.
To the folks in that crowd, Gingrich’s words are what they hungered to hear from somebody, anybody inside the Republican Party.
Some key phrases from Gingrich’s speech showed up as talking points on television shows — hammering on the term socialist, for instance, and charging hard against the earmarks in the catch-all spending bill.
“To suggest to us that he is opposed to earmarks when the very next day the Democrats brought up a bill with 8,000 earmarks in it, then to suggest that (this bill) doesn’t count because all the pork was in it before he got here,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect, “I was looking for change we can believe in.”
Bull’s-eye.
Like Bill Clinton, Gingrich used the rhetoric of the opposing party to discount its message.
Pulling another chapter from Clinton’s playbook, Gingrich talked about how the party should expand its base by reaching out to conservative Democrats and independents. And most importantly, he offered a plan.
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