Newt Gingrich likes these debates. He’s offering them to everyone. He’s already threatened to try and debate the President 20 times before the election. (OK, I’m exaggerating but not by much.) And I think Andrew Sullivan was saying the other day that there is a wing of the GOP electorate that savors the prospect that Newt will mop the floor with the President during debates and backs Newt for that reason.
To which I have a couple of objections. First, these people get that the election isn’t decided by debates, right? Were there an objective debate judge out there in the ether, John Kerry would have been deemed to have edged out President Bush during their 2004 debates. I remember those debates; Kerry was forceful and he unnerved President Bush on a couple of occasions. (A favorite was President Bush getting hot-and-bothered over Kerry dissing Poland as an ally of consequence in the Iraq War.) And guess what, although Kerry received a little bit of a poll bump, he still ultimately lost to a less-than-popular incumbent President. So, do debates matter? Sure, they particularly help challengers get over the Could-I-See-This-Person-As-President bar. So, although debates could help Gingrich, the idea that Newt would win the election because he would win a series of debates strikes me as a stretch using past elections as a template.
And then there would be the debates themselves - would he be a favorite to win them? I’ve said this before. Newt Gingrich strikes me as an undisciplined bullshitter. Prone to making audacious claims which, once fact-checked, don’t look as good or valid. He’s also prone to just say some flat-out weird stuff. His most recent discourse on child labor laws is an example. Simply put, he’s a loose cannon. One week he makes a big deal about Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac and how Barney Frank was tainted by his ties to the groups. Then, it’s revealed that he was on Fannie Mae’s payroll for over a million bucks. If he offered up his “I acted as a citizen not a lobbyist” line in a debate and then went into some constitutional discourse on the First Amendment? A debate spin room would explode. Another way to look at it is that Newt Gingrich is that Constitutional Law Professor that President Obama managed to turn off during the 2008 debates.
Why would you even want to take the candidate who is prone to blow up in the debate you’re hoping he’ll win as a springboard to the presidency? In an era where most people don’t even think the debates matter any more? I could buy Newt winning because he is (wrongly) seen as the most reliably conservative of the electable candidates. I could even see the debate thing as a tiebreaker. But not as a primary reason.
PS The converse of this post is not something I believe in. What I mean is that if a candidate is terrible at debating, it CAN matter. Indeed, while I think Gingrich might have more debate upside than Romney, I also think he’s got a debates downside (see above) which is lacking in Romney. And Perry I see as a candidate with a lot more debate downside, so much so that it could make sense to exclude him because of what the debates imply about his preparation and knowledge base.
PPS Since I drafted this, I found this AWESOME list of people to whom Gingrich has compared himself. It’s a great, audacious list. Humble will never be used to describe Newt Gingrich.
|#