At this point it is no surprise that David Frum is bad-mouthing Newt Gingrich. Frum has gone over to the professionally disgruntled and alienated. But Michael Gerson is also talking in awfully harsh tones. This is the kind of stuff you can’t take back later if Gingrich actually winds up being the nominee.
Gingrich’s language is often intemperate. He is seized by temporary enthusiasms. He combines absolute certainty in any given moment with continual reinvention over time.
These traits are suited to a provocateur, an author, a commentator, a consultant. They are not the normal makings of a chief executive.
Everyone deserves forgiveness for the failures of their past. But the grant of absolution does not require the suspension of critical judgment. Gingrich’s problem is not the weakness of a moment, it is the pattern of lifetime.
It’s understandable that all the people who both dislike Gingrich and have a big megaphone are going to speak up over the next four weeks and try to help some other candidate. But there are different ways to go about that. You can explain why Romney or Paul or Perry or Bachmann are more conservative or more electable or have better temperaments. But you don’t have to say Gingrich is totally unfit to be president. You don’t have to provide ammunition for the Democrats. Yet, Frum is probably right:
That weakness in Gingrich will not now abruptly change. The chaos that surrounded him as Speaker, the chaos that engulfed his presidential campaign earlier this year – that chaos will replicate itself again. But when? It’s less than 5 weeks to the New Hampshire primary. Perhaps Gingrich can behave himself till then, in which case Mitt Romney has a big problem on his hands. But it’s more than 8 full months to the Republican convention in Tampa.
Prediction: if Gingrich has emerged as the nominee by then, the mood of that convention will be full unconcealed panic.
So, in other words, knowledgable Republican commentators should panic now.
