There are many, many, many reasons why Newt Gingrich will not be the 45th President of the United States (assuming, as I do not and actually think pretty unlikely, he wins the GOP nomination) but among them is his habit of saying stuff like this:
That’s from 2008. Here’s my transcription of what he says in this clip:
Why have we not been hit since 9/11? Good question. My first answer is I honestly don’t know. I would have expected another attack, and I particularly thought, I was very, very worried and I talked to the administration when we had the sniper attacks because the sniper attacks were psychologically so frightening to the average person because of their randomness that I was amazed the bad guys didn’t figure out how to send 10 or 12 sniper teams.
I think there are a couple of things, though – this is, by the way, one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration – the more successful they’ve been at intercepting and stopping bad guys the less proof there is that we’re in danger and therefore the better they’ve done at making sure there isn’t an attack the easier it is to say there was never going to be an attack anyway and it’s almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us.
But think about the psychology. Why did we wrap up so many people? Well because we were attacked and again I’m going to be a little controversial. I would divide the FBI into two agencies. I would have an anti-domestic crime FBI which was very cautious, very respectful of civil liberties you are innocent until proven guilty and I would have a small but very aggressive anti-terrorism agency and I would frankly give them extraordinary powers to eavesdrop and my first advice to civil libertarians is simple: don’t plot with terrorists.
Sadly the clip ends there so we don’t get to hear Newt’s second piece of advice to civil libertarians.
Now of course one knows what Newt is kinda getting at here but if he were a Democrat and Lee Atwater or Karl Rove were running a campaign designed to thwart Newt don’t you think they’d find a way of using “it’s almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us.” I rather think they would. Does anyone doubt Democrats can’t do likewise or that an ad based on this clip might be reasonably effective?
In the end, the argument about the GOP 2012 primary comes down to how much confidence you have in the average Republican primary voter. I retain enough of that to assume they won’t actually choose Newt. Of course, as Mencken said No-one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. That’s as good a summary as there is of Newt’s campaign strategy.
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