Comeback Kid?

THE November 16th Time magazine cover photo of Newt Gingrich— clearly produced in the first moments after he announced his resignation—is a portrait of someone both very somber and very sad. Now, Newt is by nature and habit neither of those things, neither sad nor somber, and looking at that picture I thought, “So, after all that pummeling, four years of it, night and day without letup and from all sides—from your so- called friends as well as your enemies—you have finally been brought to your knees. Welcome to the human race.”

I have known other people who have taken a lot of punishment for the innocent brashness of their ambitions, but I have never seen anyone take what had been so relentlessly dished out to Newt not long before I first made his acquaintance: an enormously expensive campaign of nasty TV commercials, unprecedented in an off-election year, accompanied by the only too predictable game of Gotcha from the press; a series of Mickey Mouse ethics charges intended by the Democrats in the House to bedevil and distract him, and finally levying from him the sum of $300,000 as a repayment for the expense incurred by Congress in pursuing him. Nor had he through all this been lacking in Job’s comforters in the conservative community to instruct him in the many different ways he had brought it all upon himself, forgetting that it was his strength for which he was being punished and not his weakness (weakness being something that members of Congress were by tradition only too willing to forgive in one another).

MD

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Midge Decter

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House of Representatives

THE November 16th Time magazine cover photo of Newt Gingrich— clearly produced in the first moments after he announced his resignation—is a portrait of someone both very somber and very sad. Now, Newt is by nature and habit neither of those things, neither sad nor somber, and looking at that picture I thought, “So, after all that pummeling, four years of it, night and day without letup and from all sides—from your so- called friends as well as your enemies—you have finally been brought to your knees. Welcome to the human race.”

I have known other people who have taken a lot of punishment for the innocent brashness of their ambitions, but I have never seen anyone take what had been so relentlessly dished out to Newt not long before I first made his acquaintance: an enormously expensive campaign of nasty TV commercials, unprecedented in an off-election year, accompanied by the only too predictable game of Gotcha from the press; a series of Mickey Mouse ethics charges intended by the Democrats in the House to bedevil and distract him, and finally levying from him the sum of $300,000 as a repayment for the expense incurred by Congress in pursuing him. Nor had he through all this been lacking in Job’s comforters in the conservative community to instruct him in the many different ways he had brought it all upon himself, forgetting that it was his strength for which he was being punished and not his weakness (weakness being something that members of Congress were by tradition only too willing to forgive in one another).