PHOTOS, PAGE 1

       Editor and prime reporter is Doug Terry, a veteran television and radio reporter in   Washington, DC, (details below)

NEWT GINGRICH WANTS TO BE YOUR PRESIDENT

It is the intention of The TerryReport to write extensively about Newt Gingrich and his candidacy for the presidential nomination. My take on Gingrich can not be disguised, but I will try as I can to be reasonable and moderated in my comments. (Good luck with that, as they say.) In any case, here’s the opening salvo:

It is hard to imagine anyone who is a serious candidate for president saying more outrageous things than Gingrich. In any other era, he would be DOA as a candidate, but our national politics and our sense of balance and restraint have gone so far off the mark that he is one of three or four candidates who have a shot at the nomination. (Plus, of course, the field is as weak as ten gallons of tea made from one lonely tea bag. Tea party people, take note.)

Here are a few of the things he has against him:

1. He's been out of office for well over a decade. Not many people would be called on to run even a small company who were so long out of practice.

2. He has never held executive office, one of the big complaints the Republicans use about Obama.

3. He was forced out as Speaker of the House by a revolt within his own ranks.

4. The impeachment he and Tom Delay cooked up against Clinton failed to drive Clinton from office, embarrassed the nation world wide, but resulted in Republican gains. Is that enough?

5. He admitted to carrying on an affair while pushing the impeachment of Clinton for Clinton's lack of sexual restraint.

6. He has an established record of extra marital encounters that have been the subject of at least one television documentary (Frontline, 1996).

7. He's been married three times, each time jumping to the next relationship while still married to someone else.

8. Only Donald Trump can top him for apparent self regard and intensity of belief in the beauty and value of his own public statements and writings. With Gingrich, add in broad intellectual pretensions of one who once earned his living as an adjunct professor at a small college.  Gingrich shows every sign of being as drunk on his own words as a sloppy graduate student. He recently took to saying that he had made serious mistakes when Speaker of the House. Okay, now what?

Gingrich strikes me as someone who would have been enormously useful to the Republicans in a non-elective, off camera job if he and his ego could have been kept on a short leash. He rivals Karl Rove as a tactician of blood lust politics, but Rove is smart enough never to run for anything. Gingrich has yet to learn the lesson of his shortcomings, but perhaps 2012 will be his banner year.

Doug Terry 5.11.11

Gingrich, if he is anything, is the master of the provacative quote, the red meat sound bite that sets right wing hearts a flutter. His statements are, at times, masterful strokes of propaganda because they imply wretched qualities of his opponents without actually putting it into exact words. Looked at another way, he doesn’t quite endorse what he himself is saying, leaving a bit of wiggle room for later  recantation, which has happened of late not infrequenlty.  The NY Times has a collection of statements in recent years that could come back to haunt Gingrich as a candidate for the nomination. The link is in the blue box below.

http://tinyurl.com/3qymy23

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