Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has surged to the largest national lead held by any candidate so far in the race for the Republican Presidential Nomination.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of Likely Republican Primary Voters finds Gingrich on top with 38% of the vote. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney is a distant second at 17%. No other candidate reaches double-digits.
Looks like Newton Leroy Gingrich is the newest GOP Flavor of the Moment™, and that flavor's a big hit with the "Anyone but a Mormon" crowd, especially the evangelicals around the country.
Newsmax/InsiderAdvantage polls of Iowa and New Hampshire voters conducted Nov. 28 showed Gingrich in the lead in Iowa with 28 percent, followed by Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, at 13 percent and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney in third place at 12 percent. In New Hampshire, Romney leads Gingrich 31 to 27 percent.
An InsiderAdvantage poll conducted in South Carolina for the Augusta Chronicle showed Gingrich besting Romney by 23 points, 38 to 15 percent.
“This has gone from being an anyone but Romney race to a Gingrich versus someone race,” InsiderAdvantage head Matt Towery tells Newsmax.
Any rational human being would have to wonder what do Republican voters see in a thrice-married adulterer who literally walked out on his first wife as she was knee-deep in a battle against cancer. Especially a guy who was known for "indiscretions" that would have a Democrat burned at the stake:
Kip Carter, his former campaign treasurer, was walking Newt's daughters back from a football game one day and cut across a driveway where he saw a car. "As I got to the car, I saw Newt in the passenger seat and one of the guys' wives with her head in his lap going up and down. Newt kind of turned and gave me this little-boy smile. Fortunately, Jackie Sue and Kathy were a lot younger and shorter then."
Perhaps Republicans are more forgiving when its one of their own (or when it's politically expedient):
One senses him trying. "I see a lot of parallels between King David and Newt Gingrich, two extraordinary men gifted by God, whose lives include very high highs and very low lows," Deace says. David, after all, committed adultery with the ravishing Bathsheba, then had her husband killed, among other transgressions. The Bible makes room for complicated, morally compromised heroes. Now Christian conservatives, desperate for an alternative to Mitt Romney, are learning to do so as well.
Unless they're Democrats. That's when Heaven starts getting orders faxed from RNC headquarters for fire and brimstone to be showered upon those scoundrels.
Another reason for this spent gaseous body's sudden resurgence is his knack for tapping into the pleasure centers of the average wingnut. He can walk and talk the way the 27 percenters and Teabaggers like to see and hear. Take the following, for example:
“Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works so they have no habit of showing up on Monday,” Gingrich claimed.
“They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of I do this and you give me cash unless it is illegal,” he added.
I know people who were raised in those really poor neighborhoods, and yet they had strong work ethics instilled in them from the get-go thanks to seeing mom and pop (or in many cases, just mom) scraping up a few nickels here and a few dimes there in an attempt to fulfill their duties as the breadwinners of the family.
I also know people who were raised in homes where the mother didn't have to do anything, nor actually aspired to anything more than what the state and feds gave her in welfare and food stamps, plus whatever the man in her life threw in now and again, where the constant everyday refrain was that you couldn't get ahead in life or get the cars, clothes and riches unless you were out on the streets "grindin'" and "hustlin'" everyd.....damnit. My inner Freeper's out of the closet again. Pardon me a moment while I stuff him back in...
This is Leroy's forte, delivering coded speech and rhetoric to the perpetually color aroused and hate afflicted "Real" Americans throughout the country, preying on their drive to see that uppity Negro Barack Obama driven out of the White House and put in his place, preferably in chains somewhere, in order to secure himself a political legacy, along with insane amounts of money and influence. A presidency and political legacy, built on the backs of minorities and poors, and fueled by the hateful and the willfully stupid.
So will Leroy ever get his hands on the nomination? I doubt it. Although the Teabaggers and "Real" Americans are down for pulling hard and long for an anti-Romney candidate, the GOP Establishment would rather have a known quantity who sticks to the script, rather than have a Tea Party-endorsed loose cannon who happens to have more brains than any of the previous contenders. I wouldn't assume he would not win the nomination, although chances are he'll prove to be as disposable as Cain, Bachmann, Perry and Santorum were.
