PSST! Hey, you: Newt Gingrich: apparently suggesting that we all need to run out and buy books on Kenyan history and culture to understand President Barack Obama (who happened to be born in the United States but I’m sure you may suggest otherwise) hasn’t aced it for you with a younger generation of Republicans.
File this John Batchelor Daily Beast column in your Hey I Don’t Get No Respect file. Apparently they don’t think of you as a GOP wiseman but have a somewhat different perception:
Newt Gingrich spoke to a closed-door breakfast of the Republicans of the House the other day after the last primaries, and the irony you need to know is that the only members who showed up were the clueless Boehner crew, who are not in on the joke that in the GOP cloakroom they call Newt “Fat Elvis.”
The young House members have spent the last four years living under siege from the Democratic battalions while their ranks thinned and their cash dwindled, and all the while Newt Gingrich was in the pulpit of Fox News castigating them for their gutlessness. The young remember the scoldings and the sermons, and, much like a child who grew up to be a star athlete, they resent having been kicked by Grandpa Gingrich when they were helpless—and yet they are not yet ready to belt back at him now that he comes preening to show how much he loves them.
“The young people who have no ties to him,” an observer explains of Gingrich, “they think, what an asshole.”
The latter quote should be GOOD NEWS for America: it suggests that younger Republicans are highly perceptive.
And there’s more:
Does Gingrich notice that the young do not turn up to celebrate his wisdom? Not much, because Gingrich wanted only the obeisance of being feted at the breakfast as a “special guest,” so he could go on Fox News to boast, as one indifferent observer put it, that “I addressed the House Republicans, and they need me.”
AND:
The best description for this strange family arrangement follows along the satirical description of Gingrich as the “Fat Elvis” of the Republican Party. A wag in the cloakroom observes of Gingrich, “He’s turned Boehner and Cantor into Red and Sonny”—a reference to Red and Sonny West, the Elvis bodyguards during the years of drug abuse, who were charged with fetching Presley’s banana sandwiches and cleaning up after his rampages. “It’s [Gingrich’s] self-satire.”
PERSONAL NOTE: When Gingrich made his comments linking Obama to Kenyan culture — a clear link up to the birthers and coupled with the aroma of racism — I did what I have only done one other time on TMV: I wrote a post and immediately deleted it. I try to avoid writing posts for TMV that are therapy exercises where I just write a “lash out” post with name calling because I’m angry and it feels better to write and post it. There are people (called psychiatrists and hynpotherapists) who you can see to work out your “issues.” I had been particularly irked by the “new” Gingrich because although I had been critical of Gingrich as a bombthrower over the years I had defended him as someone who was an authentic idea man with ideas deeper than the increasingly tiresome talk radio political culture demonization that now permeates radio, television and our political “debate.”
When I deleted it I thought: why get so upset? He is now turning himself into a kind of living caricature who simply cannot be taken seriously by anyone anymore — who is so incredibly transparent in his political moves that he is on the verge of being a joke. I even wrote THIS SATIRE COLUMN that involved him.
But now I see that young House GOPers feel the same way.
And they are .perceptive in their imagery (and characterization).
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.