Newt Gingrich’s ‘People’s Campaign’ – the coming ‘GOPocalypse’

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Let's be honest. Disgraced former House Speaker and preeminent housing historian Newt Gingrich is a megalomaniac. Newt frames every issue in apocalyptic terms: this is the end of civilization as we know it unless we follow him, the great thinker of big ideas.

Newt is an historian only because it allows him to cast himself among the pantheon of great historical figures. Newt sounds like the ominous voice-over trailer to every action movie ever made: "Only one man can save the world…" Newt. That is seriously delusional.

Newt Gingrich lost badly in the GOP primary in Florida on Tuesday night. But you would never know it from his speech to supporters last night. There was no gracious concession to the winner, Willard "Mittens" Romney. Oh no, not after "Mr. .006 percent" used his substantial financial advantage to savage Newt Gingrich in a blizzard of negative advertisements, using "the politics of personal destruction" that Newt Gingrich himself perfected at GOPAC.

Newt Gingrich used his speech last night to declare "uncivil" war against Mittens. As the ominous voice-over trailer to the action movie always intones, "This time it's personal."

Howard Fineman at the Huffington Post comments on the coming "GOPocalypse." Is Newt Gingrich Threatening To Go Rogue And Leave The Party?:

If you listened carefully to Newt Gingrich's "concession" speech tonight, you heard the first strains of what could be an independent, third-party run for the White House if he doesn't get the Republican nomination.

Gingrich vowed that he would not henceforth run a "Republican campaign but a people's campaign" — raising the specter, at least rhetorically, that his vision of his role in American history is too large and personal to be contained by a mere political party.

The former House speaker gave his fans a detailed — very detailed — vision of what he would do in the first hours and minutes of his presidency. It was as if all the grubby business of running for president were secondary to his imaginative thoughts about how he would run the world starting on January 20, 2013.

Gingrich depicted his march to power as a matter of a personal, direct relationship between him and the voters.

"If I become your president, I pledge to you my life, my fortune and my sacred honor."

Gingrich's vaulting ambition knows no bounds, and so, perhaps, does his plan have no limits for how he is going to get from here to there in the presidential race.

This is a fight for the heart and soul of the Tea-Publican Party, an "uncivil" war between the old money Wall Street and Country Club patrician establishment, and the wild-eyed radical Birthers-Birchers-Secessionists of the Tea Party. . . the "GOPocalypse" that could bring about the end of the uneasy coalitions of the GOP.