Welcome back, Mr. Gingrich
So who “lost” Connecticut for the Republican party? George H.W. Bush? Lowell Weicker Jr.? John Rowland?
Newt Gingrich?
As Gingrich nears the end of his presidential bid as “the last conservative standing,” as proclaimed on his campaign website, he is taking a tour of sorts through the states he did so much to energize and embattle during his term as speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, engineering the “contract with America” that shoved President Clinton squarely back toward the center.
If Clinton saved his own political career, in moving mainstream he was forced to shelve plans for a massive, government-run health care system and who knows what other big-government plans he had in store.
Clinton was fresh off snapping a streak of five straight Republican presidential candidate wins for Connecticut”™s electoral-college vote, dating back to the Nixon era.
In Gingrich and former U.S. Sen. Trent Lott, however, he encountered a formidable leadership team to a Republican controlled Congress that seized control of public sentiment.
Lott always came across as a pork-barrel politician ”“ particularly in Connecticut, with Lott supporting submarine work for the Virginia shipyard owned today by Huntington Ingalls, which also has a major facility in Lott”™s home state of Mississippi, at the expense of work for Electric Boat in Groton.
Gingrich, however, came across as a visionary then and continues to do so today, cemented by his work teaching and running think tanks following his ouster as House speaker. In fact, the argument could be made that he did more to give the Republican Party strategic direction than any politician since Ronald Reagan.
In 2002, in the wake of a Gingrich address to the Connecticut Forum in Hartford, Gingrich told Time magazine his other image ”“ as a strident reactionary ”“ was unfounded.
“Go back to that period and look at the 125,000 negative ads run by the other side,” Gingrich told Time. “The cover your magazine did of me after I was elected speaker showed me as Scrooge holding Tiny Tim”™s broken crutch. That was over the top.”
Gingrich limps back into Connecticut even as the state GOP booked Ann Romney as the featured speaker for the annual Prescott Bush Awards Dinner April 23 at the Stamford Marriott Hotel on the eve of the Republican primary here. Only in 2009, Gingrich was the speaker at the Bush dinner.
With Romney considering vice presidential candidates in anticipation of victory, it bears reminding that the frontrunner bested Gingrich by a single percentage point in a January straw poll cobbled together by the Connecticut Republican Party.
Maybe Gingrich was a little more popular than some of us might have thought, in a state that values sharp thinking. Maybe Mitt Romney is going to need all the help he can get in his campaign to oust an incumbent president.
Welcome back, Mr. Gingrich.