He’s Baaack

by digby

Bill Sher reports on Newtie’s little speech at CPAC which included this little gem:

There’s more to say about Newt Gingrich (who looks more like a presidential candidate after today) but let me call attention to this from his grand finale address to CPAC:

He blamed the residents of New Orleans’ 9th Ward for a “failure of citizenship,” by being “so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn’t get out of the way of a hurricane.”

And he called for a “deep investigation” into this “failure of citizenship.”

Here’s the full quote:

How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn’t get out of the way of a hurricane.

It pays to remember that the reason George W. Bush ran as a “compassionate conservative” was to try to distance himself from the discredited image of Newtie’s Republican revolution. That comment pretty much nails the problem in a nutshell. Newt is a jackass and the country as a whole has always pretty much hated him.

He’s extremely popular among the hardcore conservatives, however, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he becomes their standard bearer. They have always erroneously assumed that the rest of the nation loves his arrogant psuedo-intellectual meanness the way they do.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continues to maintain solid job approval ratings throughout the nation, with 50 percent of adults approving of her performance in her first weeks of wielding the gavel.

According to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, Pelosi’s disapproval rating for her job performance is 31 percent, suggesting that Republican efforts at muddying the San Francisco Democrat’s image have not been successful.

The rating places Pelosi in a much stronger political position than the last time the House flipped control. Twelve years ago, Republican Newt Gingrich of Georgia became speaker and instantly became a public lightning rod.

According to a Jan. 29, 1995 Post-ABC poll, Gingrich’s approval rating was 40 percent while 48 percent of adults disapproved of his job performance four weeks into his tenure as speaker.

It only got worse. The more people saw him the less they liked him:

Gingrich proved more popular as a revolutionary than as a leader. Like Wright, he became entangled in an ethics imbroglio that eventually led to his reprimand by the House in 1997 and a $300,000 penalty.

After the Republicans in Congress shut down the government in 1995 in a showdown with President Bill Clinton, Gingrich’s popularity plunged, never to return to the heights of 1994. By 1996, nearly six in 10 voters had an unfavorable opinion of him. Some of his top lieutenants even plotted a coup against him, but Gingrich, ever the survivor, managed to keep his job.

On Tuesday, election night, Gingrich pointed to the fact that Republicans had won House majorities in three successive elections for the first time in 70 years. But each majority was smaller than the last, and his troops became restless. Exit polls showed that 58 percent of the voters had an unfavorable view of him, while just 36 percent viewed him favorably.

I’m quite enthusiastic at the prospect. He is a perfect representative of the toxic creepiness of modern conservatism. Run Newt, Run.

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