Rabinowitz: “Why Gingrich could win”

By Bernie Quigley

For The Hill on 11/9/11

New York money comes out now behind Romney from the old school of power, starched collars, stiff necks and hubris which tried it's best to replace him with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, but the Herman Cain condition brings the moment of turning. He will go now hard and fast or maybe with a whimper but he will go. And either Rick Perry or Newt Gingrich will replace him as the anti-Eastern Establishment candidate. Romney's support is soft. No one is crazy about him outside of New Hampshire and he lives here. The Wall Street Journal's best mind, Dorothy Rabinowitz, says today in her column that in the end Newt Gingrich could take this and she makes a very good case for it.

Gingrich’s attack on Charlie Rose at the Dartmouth debate would be the awakening moment in the shifting geist; the zen moment on which history will turn and the century rise. Rose was the perfect personification of full spectrum East Coast Establishment – the Kennedy/Bush dominatrix - and Gingrich represented the terrifying Rising Other. For what it's worth I was at the Dartmouth debate and my comment here on Gingrich’s assault on Rose was: “I never liked Gingrich before. Now I do.” Others too, as from that debate he jumped into the 10% bracket and became a contender.

Newt Gingrich's rise in the polls—from near zero to the third slot in several polls—should come as no surprise to people who have been watching the Republican debates, writes Rabinowitz. His talk at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition forum last month would ignite a huge response.

“The Gingrich list was interrupted by thunderous applause at every turn. The difference was, as always, in the details—in the informed, scathing descriptions of the Obama policies to be dispatched and replaced, the convincing tone that suggested such a transformation was likely—even imminent.”

Complaint was made at the beginning of the Tea Party movement that Gingrich and friends had commandeered the movement and distracted from key elements like states rights and the Kentucky Resolutions. But on the other hand his first efforts in the Clinton administration did bring a prelude to current events.

Today, writes the Tenth Amendment Center, “on the eve of the 213th anniversary of the passage of Thomas Jefferson’s Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, laying the intellectual groundwork of nullification, the people of Ohio exercised their power and nullified the insurance mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”

Rabinowitz says Gingrich began his Iowa speech with the declaration that Americans were confronting the most important election choice since 1860. “America would have the chance in 2012, Mr. Gingrich said, to repudiate decisively decades of leftward drift in our universities and colleges, our newsrooms, our judicial system and bureaucracies.”

Could be that Tea Party action and passion these past two years was all a prelude to Newt.