The GOP Field for 2012: Who's on First?
Jules Witcover

May 23, 2011

The legendary baseball coach Casey Stengel once asked of his pathetic New York Mets: "Can't anybody here play this game?" Right now, the Republican Party could ask itself the same question.

In a week in which one long shot for its 2012 presidential nomination, Mike Huckabee, and one impossibility, Donald Trump, quit the race before it had barely begun, the Grand Old Party demonstrated again its shortage of serious contenders. Huckabee basically said he didn't feel he was ready. Trump, characteristically, played the fiction to the end, declaring, "I maintain the strong conviction that if I were to run, I would be able to win the primary and, ultimately, the general election."

Each man will now retreat to the more lucrative playground of the television screen, Huckabee to his talk show on Fox News and Trump to his lame-brained "Celebrity Apprentice" role, leaving the nearly dozen other hopefuls or self-delusional wannabes to struggle for public attention.

Among those grabbing most of the spotlight in the wake of these departures was former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who, also characteristically, soiled his own party's pool. He sharply criticized a prominent Republican non-candidate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, chairman of House Budget Committee, for his health-insurance reform plan, which was already passed by Gingrich's old GOP House colleagues.

While joining the pack in calling for the repeal of President Obama's reforms, Gingrich turned on Ryan by labeling his scheme not only "radical" but also an example of "right-wing social engineering." That's an allegation he customarily reserves for his left-wing targets. Ryan, hearing of the slap, said of Gingrich: "With allies like that, who needs the left?" Gingrich, as he often does, cried that the press had taken his words "dramatically out of context," insisting "I don't have a fight with Paul Ryan."

Even the Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial page could not restrain its voice concerning the shrinkage of the GOP presidential field, and particularly Gingrich's apparent apostasy on health care.

"The Republican presidential campaign is off to a slow start," the editorial said, "but judging by the last week not slow enough. First Mitt Romney defends his ObamaCare prototype in Massachusetts (in a Michigan speech), and now Mr. Gingrich has decided to run against House Republicans on Medicare. They must be loving this at the White House."

The editorial charged that "by using the word radical, Mr. Gingrich deliberately chose to echo the liberal critics who want to write the Ryan plan out of respectable political debate. His remarks had the political effect of undermining his former comrades in the middle of the budget showdown with President Obama."

The Journal pointedly spanked Gingrich for calculated political positioning in the early Republican presidential primary jockeying, observing that he knows the Ryan plan has no chance of passing in the Senate. "Our guess is that a politician as experienced as Mr. Gingrich knew exactly what he was doing," the editorial went on, "and that as he runs for president he wants to appear more moderate than he has sounded over the last, oh, 20 years, by suddenly triangulating against the GOP House he once led."

The reference to "triangulation" was particularly biting. It recalled former President Bill Clinton's second term, when the word described how Clinton positioned himself politically on some issues between his fellow Democrats in Congress and his Republican critics, to make him less of a partisan target.

Ironically, it was this strategy that was widely credited for Clinton's comeback after his first-term slide, during which he felt obliged to declare that, as president, he was still relevant. He later demonstrated the point by calling Gingrich's bluff of a government shutdown, and the House speaker took the blame, eventually leading to his resignation.

Perhaps Gingrich learned something from that bad experience, which probably helped Clinton win reelection by broadening his support. But Gingrich's immediate challenge now is getting nominated, not elected, and being perceived at this point as turning on his own party leadership doesn't look like very smart politics.

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It's hard to name someone who is more disappointed in Donald Trump dropping out of the 2012 Presidential race than Jon Stewart.