The Daily Caller

Resurrection: Why voters are giving Gingrich a second look 

A few months ago, Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign looked all but dead.

The former House Speaker had alienated conservatives by calling House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget plan “right wing social engineering”; he was lampooned for running up a $500,000 credit line with Tiffany’s; and he had been ridiculed for taking time off of the campaign trail to cruise around the Greek isles with his wife.

Most of his campaign staff ultimately abandoned him, his campaign had racked up $1.2 million in debt (with less than a third of that sum of cash on hand), his poll numbers were in single digits, and one Iowa Republican even told Gingrich to his face that he ought to get out of the race before he made an “even bigger fool of yourself.”

Now, things appear to be changing for Gingrich. Last week several polls showed him rising into the top tier. His supporters have started a Super PAC and his campaign brought in $1 million in the past week. Republican primary voters are clearly giving Gingrich a second look, and many like what they see.

Just how did Newt overcome his problematic summer?

Gingrich communications director R.C. Hammond told The Daily Caller that the public never even really cared about any of his boss’s alleged faux pas.

“It never came up when it was a big deal,” insisted Hammond. “The only people that ever cared about it were the reporters.”

“I think there’s a bit of a forgetful nature to voters,” said Galen.

Now, it seems, many GOP voters have forgotten — or at least allowed Gingrich back into the game. And for those who haven’t, Galen noted, “Newt is so masterful on the pivot,” meaning that he can spin the prior gaffes into “’you in the media doing this simply to destroy me, to continue to bring up issues that don’t matter to the American public. This is all about you trying to sell a newspaper.’”

And the scaled-down and revamped Gingrich campaign that followed his summer implosion has turned out to be a better fit for the candidate, said Galen. He likened it to Arizona Sen. John McCain 2008 presidential campaign, which had its own summer primary meltdown before McCain went on to win the Republican nomination.

“I think the idea that Newt, who has been defined as an unconventional individual and an unconventional politician, was ever going to fit within or, frankly, allow a conventional campaign of someone else’s design was probably never going to happen,” he added.

“Newt’s campaign may be in debt, but, at the same time, he has no overhead any more. He only needs to raise enough money to continue getting plane tickets to Iowa, or wherever the next debate is,” said Galen.

In the intervening months since his campaign’s summer collapse, Newt has played to his strengths, said New Hampshire Republican strategist Mike Dennehy.

“Since the spring, he has slowly rehabilitated his image, has performed magically in the debates, and quietly campaigned in the early primary states making a positive impact,” Dennehy told TheDC.

Now that the primary season has voters’ attention, debates have become almost a weekly occurrence. Gingrich, generally an excellent debater, has subsequently had plenty of opportunities to shine.

“Without a doubt, Gingrich is the smartest guy on the stage,” said Judson Phillips, founder of Tea Party Nation, who endorsed Gingrich in September. “No matter what they throw at him, he’s like Babe Ruth: He is belting every one of them out of the park.”

“I think people have been impressed with his breadth of knowledge via the debates,” said Steve Scheffler, Republican national committeeman from Iowa and chairman of the Iowa Faith and Freedom Coalition. “Some people are thinking, maybe, that we need a candidate that could clean Obama’s clock in a debate.”

Iowa voters are “taking another look at him,” said Scheffler, adding that now that voters paying attention, “people are seeing [in Gingrich] some good qualities … that might make good qualities in presidential candidates that maybe they had not seen before.”

Gingrich has also attracted supporters by attacking the media, Galen argued.

“Every time he whacks the moderator, he picks up another ten votes from someplace, because they detest the media so much,” he said, referring to Republican primary voters.

Gingrich has also benefited from the fact that the other candidates have not attacked him directly, said Galen.

Polls show that much of Gingrich’s support comes from tea party voters, which is not a new development, said Sal Russo, co-founder of Tea Party Express.

“We have been polling tea party express donors continuously for the last few months,” he emailed. “Generally, they are bunched together, but one candidate will rise and fall each time. When we first started the polling, Newt was the favorite of the tea party express donors. He led the polls.”

Tea partiers, Russo said, “are looking for someone who is electable” more than anything else, a sentiment echoed by Phillips.

As a result of his popularity among tea partiers, Gingrich is poised to benefit if former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain loses support as a result of the sexual harassment allegations against him — or for any other reason.

“Herman Cain is doing well right now largely because of tea party support, and tea party voters like Gingrich a whole lot more than they do [former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt] Romney or [Texas Gov. Rick] Perry,” emailed Tom Jensen, director of Public Policy Polling. He pointed to polling data from several states, which found Gingrich the second-choice candidate of a plurality of Cain supporters.

Phillips argued that even Gingrich’s history as a Washington insider has become an attractive credential.

“You can’t just have somebody walk in from totally outside of Washington and expect to just change things over night,” Phillips said. “There’s a learning curve that comes with being president of the United States. Given the dangerous times we live in, I’d prefer the president to have as short a learning curve as possible.”

When it comes to which candidate “can take on president Obama and beat the Obama machine,” said Hammond, the former House Speaker’s communications guru, voters are realizing that “the best person we have who could take him on is Newt Gingrich.”

“I believe Gingrich will be a major factor on election day in New Hampshire and in all of the early primary states,” said Dennehy, agreeing. “His depth of knowledge on the issues and his experience is difficult to compete with, which makes him formidable.”

If he does make a play, Galen said, it won’t be in the traditional way.

“He knows that if he’s going to win, it is going to be on the strength of his ideas and his ability to communicate with voters on a macro level, through earned media, or whatever, or I saw there’s now a Super PAC,” Galen explained. “He’s not going to win because he drove more old ladies to the caucus place than the Bachmann campaign did.”

Despite all of this, cautions Galen, the path to the nomination for Gingrich remains bumpy and uncertain.

“I think that’s a very high hill to climb,” he said. “Do I think he will make it competitive, and do I think he is doing what he is always best for, which is raising the discourse of the primary and making the other candidates better? I think he is absolutely doing that. Because when Newt talks, everybody listens.”

    The Daily Caller

Occupy Wall Street’s greedy celebrity hypocrites

Amid the public defecators, the American haters, the exhibitionist masturbators, the serial sexual predators, the outspoken anti-Semites, the socialists and the misguided do-gooders of Occupy Wall Street are the Hollywood hypocrites.

You have Susan Sarandon, Michael Moore, Princeton professor Cornel West, Russell Simmons, Rosanne Barr, and the list goes on.

They have all joined the “occupiers” in support of fighting greed. But by any definition, they epitomize it.

Not that there is necessarily a problem with greed. Greed, if defined as acting in one’s self interest in the pursuit of material goods, can be enormously important and beneficial. It makes our economy work. It motivates entrepreneurs to create inventions and innovations that make our lives easier and more enjoyable.

But the rank hypocrisy of these celebrities is a bit much to bear. Take Cornel West, for instance.

I like West. He is willing to debate people he disagrees with, which is a sign of intellectual engagement, and he does so with flair. But his histrionics over “corporate greed” seem a little over the top considering he commands between $30,000 to $50,000 for a speech, according to the International Speakers Bureau.

That’s an astounding figure. I hardly begrudge him for demanding such an exorbitant fee, of course. If people are willing to pay it, God bless him. But to go around lambasting others for greed when you are demanding $1,000 a minute to speak takes some gall.

Susan Sarandon and Rosanne Barr have lent their support by visiting Occupy Wall Street’s protests and speaking out for its cause, while George Clooney and others have more passively backed the protests in interviews.

While it is difficult to glean exactly what Occupy Wall Street’s main gripes are — after all, many of their supporters tend to be preliterate — one clear point of contention is the high rate of compensation CEOs earn, compared to the average worker. But I have never heard Clooney or Sarandon complain about the high rate of compensation top-market actors receive compared to garden-variety struggling thespians.

According to one recent report from the Washington-based Institute for Policy Studies, the income gap between an average CEO and an average worker is about 325 to 1. George Clooney has made as much as $15 million for a single film. Maybe more. That is more than 325 times the wage of an average American and probably even a greater multiple over the the average working actor’s wages.

And I remind you, that is for a single movie.

I wonder when Clooney will begin to start spreading the wealth around to reduce income inequality among actors? Can anyone say Occupy the Clooney Lake Como villa?

Kanye West visited Occupy Wall Street for a day, wearing a $300 t-shirt and numerous gold chains. If we can agree on one thing, we can agree that nothing represents the 99 percent quite like the singer of “Gold Digger.” But in fairness, he was brought to the protest by hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, so perhaps he was just tagging along and not there to lend his own endorsement.

Simmons, who is one of the movement’s loudest celebrity supporters and is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, owns a debit card company. In other words, he is a part of the very Wall Street the protesters have supposedly come out against. But somehow he doesn’t see any conflict between his public position and his private profit.

Let me be clear: I am not a particularly big fan of Wall Street. The financial industry has made many mistakes and there are many reforms that probably should be implemented — including the re-imposition of the Glass–Steagall Act. But the protesters aren’t ordinary Americans enraged by a sudden onslaught of corporate greed. They are more often than not political radicals. I know their kind: I used to see them on my college campus trying to live our their parents’ 1960s.

Yet celebrity activists prance to their protests in their finest clothes, undeterred by the radicalism of the movement. They declare their solidarity and their rage at the villainous one percent before hopping into their limos or on their private jets, en route to their next cocktail party or foreign movie festival. Fine with me, but let’s at least acknowledge the bad optics and the hypocrisy.

Between the recurring rapes and regular violence, I suppose celebrity hypocrisy is, in the end, the least of the “occupy” movement’s image problems.

    The Daily Caller

A fourth woman alleging that GOP presidential front-runner Herman Cain sexually harassed her will be detailing the experience during a press conference Monday afternoon in New York City, RadarOnline is reporting. The is represented by famed attorney Gloria Allred

Allred’s client will be the first to speak publicly about Cain, who has been the subject of intense media scrutiny after three other women anonymously alleged that he sexually harassed them in the 1990s while CEO of the National Restaurant Association, as first reported by Politico.

This fourth woman says she was harassed, according to RadarOnline, when she approached Cain for help with an employment issue.

Politico initially reported that two other anonymous women had received cash settlements from the association, and signed agreements barring them from speaking publicly about the episode. On Friday the restaurant association released one of the women from her non-disclosure restriction, but she declined to discuss the matter publicly.

The Associated Press has reported that a third woman considered filing a complaint against Cain when they worked together in the late 1990s.

    Daily Caller

Obama administration pulls references to Islam from terror training materials, official says

Deputy U.S. Attorney General James Cole confirmed on Wednesday that the Obama administration was pulling back all training materials used for the law enforcement and national security communities, in order to eliminate all references to Islam that some Muslim groups have claimed are offensive.

“I recently directed all components of the Department of Justice to re-evaluate their training efforts in a range of areas, from community outreach to national security,” Cole told a panel at the George Washington University law school.

The move comes after complaints from advocacy organizations including the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) and others identified as Muslim Brotherhood front groups in the 2004 Holy Land Foundation terror fundraising trial.

In a Wednesday Los Angeles Times op-ed, Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) president Salam al-Marayati threatened the FBI with a total cutoff of cooperation between American Muslims and law enforcement if the agency failed to revise its law enforcement training materials.

Maintaining the training materials in their current state “will undermine the relationship between law enforcement and the Muslim American community,” al-Marayati wrote.

Multiple online sources detail MPAC’s close alignment with CAIR.

In his op-ed, Al-Marayati demanded that the Justice Department and the FBI “issue a clear and unequivocal apology to the Muslim American community” and “establish a thorough and transparent vetting process in selecting its trainers and materials.”

Specifically, al-Marayati called for a new “interagency task force” to review the training materials — a task force including representatives of the Islamist organizations the FBI is tasked with monitoring.

Some believe the Obama administration’s Justice Department will go even further.

“The Attorney General has announced what sounds like reprogramming if they find people who have actually received training” that Islamist groups find objectionable, Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney told The Daily Caller. Gaffney is co-author of a report, published by the Center, titled “Sharia: The Threat to America.

   Daily Caller

Rick Perry goes on the attack, refers to Mitt Romney as ‘Obama-lite’

The competition between Republican presidential frontrunners Rick Perry and Mitt Romney has been heating up over the past few days. And on Perry’s first big splash on national TV, the Texas governor took it to another level.

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   Daily Caller

Time To Try A Free-Market Energy Policy

Time after time, politicians believe they know best. Taxpayer-funded investments in “green jobs” have been repeatedly exposed as failures, but what F.A. Hayek called “the fatal conceit” — the idea that central economic planners have the knowledge and wisdom to make decisions for us — keeps a firm grip on Washington. Politicians seem intent on picking winners and losers, substituting their own political whim for legitimate consumer preferences, but fail to recognize the disastrous consequences.

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The Daily Caller

FreedomWorks is adding 500 to 2,000 members a day to its network of like-minded Tea Party activists. Those activists will provide an army of volunteers for a presidential candidate who supports their small-government goals, say FreedomWorks’ staffers.

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The Daily Caller

If Mitt Romney wins the Republican nomination for president, Tea Party activists may not show up at all to vote in the general election, one leading group associated with the Tea Party movement is warning.

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