Whatever can Newt Gingrich be thinking?
That’s the question a lot of political handicappers are asking now that Newt, as he is universally known in Washington, has decided to enter the 2012 campaign, with an announcement expected on Wednesday. Until recently, most of my colleagues assumed that the former speaker of the House, who flirted with running four years ago, was merely doing the same thing now, just to stay in the news.
I mean, let’s be unsparing about this: Mr. Gingrich has never been elected to anything outside his old Congressional district in Georgia. (The last guy to be elected president without having won statewide or national office was Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he had a few things going for him, like having saved the world.) Newt will turn 68 next month, which could make him a hard sell for a younger generation of voters who remember him as the guy who helped impeach Bill Clinton. And Mr. Gingrich, a bit of a rogue in his personal life, has never been a favorite of his party’s powerful social conservatives, who tend to think of scandalous affairs as the purview of Democrats, and maybe Rudy Giuliani.
And yet, having spent a fair amount of time with Mr. Gingrich for an article I wrote for The New York Times Magazine two years ago, I never had much doubt that he was serious this time around. The thing you have to understand about Newt is that he is, by training and temperament, an avid historian, and he is as true a believer as you will ever find in the concept of destiny.
An Army brat growing up, flat-footed and near-sighted, Mr. Gingrich was the perpetual new kid in school who wasn’t going to star on the football team. But he found an outlet for his passion in the histories he read, especially those concerning great heroes. He imagined himself — and, reasonably or not, still does — as a lead protagonist in the history of his own time, a consequential character in the grand American narrative.
In particular, Mr. Gingrich is a devotee of the historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who meditated on the concept of “departure and return” — the idea that great leaders have to leave (or be banished from) their kingdoms before they can better themselves and return as conquering heroes. One of Newt’s heroes, the French general and statesman Charles de Gaulle, embodies just this kind of romantic narrative, having spent 12 years out of power before returning to lead his country. So does Ronald Reagan, who traveled the country after losing his bid for the Republican nomination in 1976, then came roaring back to win it all four years later.
Like Mr. de Gaulle, Mr. Gingrich has been out of power for about 12 years. And if elected president, Mr. Gingrich, like Mr. Reagan, would be 69 when taking the oath of office. (Mr. de Gaulle was 68.) Coincidence? It might seem that way, but I’m guessing he sees something more portentous in the parallels.
When we talked briefly about the presidency in 2009, Mr. Gingrich said that he had been thinking a lot about Mr. Reagan’s journey and his own. Mr. Reagan, he said, found his way to the presidency after emerging principally as the leader of a re-energized conservative movement. Mr. Gingrich considers his own following on Twitter and Facebook to be an emergent movement, too — although it’s not clear exactly what strand of Republicanism he represents.
It seems to me, though, that if Mr. Gingrich is looking for hopeful historical comparisons, the more apt one might be Richard Nixon. Unlike Mr. Reagan, who even in his lower moments retained a certain celebrity appeal, Mr. Nixon was humiliated and all but exiled after publicly self-destructing in 1962. He then retreated to the sidelines and watched as his party disintegrated, leaving a vacuum of leadership and gravitas on the right that enabled Mr. Nixon to make one of the great comebacks in political history.
Republicans now aren’t exactly in the dysfunctional state they were in then (they did, after all, just take back the House), but there’s a definite shortage of credible and recognizable leaders. And I suppose you could make the case that under such circumstances, a once-disgraced party elder with a reputation as a substantive thinker could make his triumphant, Toynbean return.
It will be up to Republican primary voters to decide whether this is Mr. Gingrich’s destiny, or merely his dream.
I will be responding to your thoughts and queries in a video feature on nytimes.com on Wednesday. Submit any questions have about Newt Gingrich’s candidacy in the comments below.
This post, by the way, is another kind of return — the re-emergence of my Political Times column as a recurring feature here on The Caucus, just in time for the 2012 campaign. I’m looking forward to doing some things online that are harder to do in print — not just columns like this one, but also things like rounding up links and responding to reader mail. Political Times will always be available here on the Times site, but to see the latest posts, you can also follow me on Twitter or Facebook or grab my RSS feeds here and here, so you can do something on your iPad beside playing Angry Birds. Send me your questions and suggestions, and as always I’ll do my best to answer. Thanks for reading.