New Establishment Media Themes Emerge
In light of Newt Gingrich’s victory in the South Carolina primary on Saturday, two new themes have emerged that I am certain we will hear and read in the news throughout the the remainder of the week, and they’re both constructed to diminish Gingrich. The first is that his personal favorability is low, and that people generally don’t have a positive impression of Gingrich, but the second is important only to those who are inside the Washington DC cloakrooms, who are not happy that Gingrich might win the primaries, and possibly win the Republican nomination. Plans have begun to hatch all over Washington DC on how to derail Gingrich, particularly if he does well in Florida, and you can count on the GOP’s establishment types to be hustled before the cameras with fresh endorsements of Mitt Romney. The insiders just don’t like Newt, and they don’t think he can defeat Obama, but more, they don’t like the fact that he may undo some of their favorite things if he were to win not only the nomination, but also the general election. The hew and cry will go out as the establishment will say “Newt must now be stopped!”
It’s bad enough that they have concocted a theme regarding Newt’s “unreliability” and “zany” behavior, a charge often made of his public expressions of ideas that may be off-key, novel, or simply outside the conventional wisdom. Now they are going to press forward with the idea that because people don’t like him, on a personal level, that prevents him from rising to electoral viability. These are the same people who can’t wait to tell you how well-liked President Obama has been throughout his presidency. I can imagine the Gingrich retort, and it should be simply this: “People like to point out that my personal favorability is low, and that Barack Obama’s is high, but these same people fail to mention that the well-liked President is leading us off a cliff. Does the elite media want the American people to believe that they should choose well-liked but incompetent over competent but not so well-liked? This is typical of how out of touch Washington DC’s elites are with the real world Americans face.” Or something like that.
On the matter of the Washington elite not liking Gingrich, it’s very nearly the best selling point about Gingrich that you could raise in this election. In a similar fashion, I expect this theme to be destroyed as quickly as it is set up, but that won’t change the fact that behind the scenes, the elite in the GOP will continue to work to undermine him as best they can. The insiders took a bit of a drubbing in South Carolina when you consider the other scorecard, so now they will focus on the notion of Gingrich “electability.”
No comments:
Post a Comment