MARVELLING OVER a presidential candidate’s arrogance is like noting that a hockey player wears skates. It states not just the obvious but the necessary. You can’t zip across the ice in Crocs, and you can’t thrash your way to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue if your confidence doesn’t bleed into something gaudier. Arrogance is the grist, and arrogance is the given.
But what flavour? And what measure? That’s where candidates – and the presidents that some of them become – differ, in ways that shape the sorts of messes they’re likely to make. And that’s where Newt Gingrich provokes real concern. You have to take another politician’s ego, double it, and add cheese and a side of fries to get to Gingrich. An especially heaping, unhealthy diet of self-regard slogs through his veins.
His 1990s nemesis Bill Clinton had (and surely still has) no small amount of his own vanity, and it lay largely in his conviction that his charm and cunning enabled him to wriggle out of jams and get away with indulgences that would doom a lesser mortal.
That partly explains the risk he took with Monica Lewinsky, along with his verbal gymnastics upon the discovery of the affair. The scandal’s diminution of his presidency was the price he and we paid for his particular arrogance.
George W Bush was in love with his own gut instinct, which he valued far above actual erudition. By heeding it, he believed, he could exceed the expectations and even surpass the accomplishments of less visceral leaders, namely his father.
It’s not hard to draw a direct line from that brand of arrogance to the Iraq war, which came to an official end last week, after nearly nine years, hundreds of billions of dollars and too many lives lost.
Barack Obama’s arrogance resides in his eloquence – as a writer, thinker, symbol and story. He’s in thrall to the lyric poem of himself, and that accounts for his aloofness and disinclination to engage as deeply as some of his predecessors did in the muck of legislative politics. Yes, we live in a grotesquely partisan moment, the main reason for gridlock, brinkmanship and super- committee ignominy on Capitol Hill. But would Clinton have stood at so far a remove from that committee? Isn’t it possible that a glad-hander more aggressive and warmer than Obama would be making a smidgen of headway? Gingrich isn’t the answer: He’s hot-headed and truculent. And while Obama sees himself (with justification) as historic, Gingrich sees himself as epic. If Obama is The One, Gingrich is The Plus-Size One.
If you watched the debate on Thursday, you could sense, from the clench of his jaw, that Gingrich wasn’t merely biting his tongue but making an unhappy meal of it. Still, Gingrich the Grandiloquent sneaked through.
Asked about his stated resolve to rein in federal courts, he said that “just like Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and FDR, I would be prepared to take on the judiciary.” The company he keeps! Over the years he has directly or indirectly compared himself to Moses, William Wallace (aka Braveheart, thanks to Mel Gibson), the Duke of Wellington, Charles de Gaulle and, repeatedly, Ronald Reagan, as when he recently said, “Because I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, I’m such an unconventional political figure that you really need to design a unique campaign that fits the way I operate.”
In 1985, when he was just a foot soldier in the House, he told the Washington Post,"I want to shift the entire planet," adding, "This is just the beginning of a 20- or 30-year movement. I'll get credit for it." As Maureen Dowd recalled in the Timeslast year, he told the Atlanta Journal- Constitutionin 1994, "People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz." In a Vanity Fairprofile in 1995, he referred to himself as "a mythical person" and was quoted saying, "I had a period of thinking that I would have been called 'Newt the McPherson,' as in 'Robert the Bruce'." His biological father's surname was McPherson, and Robert the Bruce was a Scottish warrior of William Wallace's era and ilk.
Gingrich also considered himself a “definer of civilisation” and “teacher of the rules of civilisation”, phrases he scribbled in House office notes that came to light in 1997. He thinks a lot about himself and thinks of himself a lot. In 2007, talking about climate change, which he still believed in then, he singled out polar bears for concern, explaining that his name, Newt, “comes from the Danish ‘Knut’, and there’s been a major crisis in Germany over a polar bear named Knut.”
One of the great spectator sports of this political season has been watching one observer after another strive to trace the full contours of his ego, an arms race of arrogance assessments. "Modern-day Narcissus", wrote Kirsten Powers in the Daily Beast."Intellectual hubris distilled," contributed George F Will in the Washington Post."A lead zeppelin with more baggage than the Hindenburg," said Mark Steyn in the National Review,and while that's not precisely about arrogance, it's too funny to pass up.
A grandiose man, Gingrich speaks in grandiose ways, always characterising situations too broadly and with too much needless heat, then losing chunks of valuable time and precious credibility to inevitable damage control. He didn’t simply register disagreement with Paul Ryan’s entitlement reform proposals. He called them radical “right-wing social engineering”. He didn’t simply raise questions about child labour laws. He called them “truly stupid”. He didn’t simply contest the Palestinians’ claim to disputed land. He called the Palestinians an “invented” people. That’s an intellectually intriguing, attention- commanding expression: Gingrich no doubt loved the nasty music of it tumbling from his lips. But it’s also gratuitously inflammatory. Mitt the Romney was right to call it that and call him out for it.
Romney has utter, exaggerated faith in his managerial know-how, his technocratic mettle. That’s the flavour of his arrogance. Gingrich’s is sourer – and scarier.
That self-adoration made him an infuriating House speaker. It would make him a dangerous president. – (New York Times)