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WASHINGTON – Republicans don’t vote for a man who can’t control his wife. It’s the unspoken bylaw of GOP politics. They simply humor female politicians, because they have no intention of allowing one to gain power. As for a strong-willed, shrewd woman allegedly neutering Newt, rhetorically speaking, of course. Are you kidding me?
This is about Mr. Gingrich not being strong enough to tell her to butt out. Anybody who still believes this man is worthy to be commander in chief can’t be trusted.
For the last 20 years, Newt Gingrich has been dragged around by his little newt. It’s now coming back to haunt him and the populace at large if we continue to accept this deplorable spectacle.
None of that is Mrs. Gingrich’s fault. Think Joan Crawford… no, Bette Davis, and I don’t write that in derision. She needed a weak man with an access to power she could exploit and she found him. But we’re supposed to believe Poor Newt fell victim to some “V” like venomous reptile that ran wild with his entire presidential campaign to the point that Newt’s entire staff committed historical political mutiny.
Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign was crippled by behind-the-scenes blow-ups over the role of his wife, Callista, including her insistence that the campaign arrange for screenings of the couple’s movies made by their for-profit production company, according to current and former campaign staffers and advisers.
The use of campaign resources to promote the Gingrich’s private movie ventures made some senior staffers uncomfortable and led to repeated confrontations over the issue, they said. The campaign even carved out space on the home page of the Gingrich campaign Web site, Newt.org, where a section dubbed “Callista’s Canvas” promoted the movies, with titles such as “Rediscovering God in America” and “A City Upon a Hill,” about American “exceptionalism.”
[…] In another case, sources said, staffers in South Carolina also refused to arrange a movie screening. This prompted Callista Gingrich to insist that she and her husband fly back from the state on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend — and miss a planned campaign event in Myrtle Beach —so the couple could attend the opera “Don Pasquale” at the Kennedy Center that night, the sources said.
The ending’s just going to be very painful in the short-term for them both. Then they’ll go back to Gingrich Inc. or Calista & Company, aggrieved and entrepreneurial. God bless America and I mean it.
When fundraising numbers are released he’s going to be embarrassed, as Romney will have solid frontrunner numbers, and Michele Bachmann will likely beat him.
The awkward payments between intermingling of campaign resources and private moneymaking ventures, to quote Isikoff, between Newt Communications and his charities is a head-spinner. But all this happening to Newt isn’t because of Calista.
It’s the character weakness of this man.
Taylor Marsh is a Washington based political analyst, writer and commentator on national politics, foreign policy, and women in power. A veteran national politics writer, Taylor’s been writing on the web since 1996. She has reported from the White House, been profiled in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and has been seen on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, as well as on radio across the dial and on satellite, including the BBC. Marsh lives in the Washington, D.C. area. This column is cross posted from her blog.