EVERETT, Wash. – Newt Gingrich was barreling toward the end of his stump speech Friday night when Occupy protesters started a ruckus in the theater balcony.
His supporters drowned them out with “Newt” chants and one offered the Republican presidential hopeful a piece of advice: “Stay cheerful.”
He did, but he couldn’t resist a jab.
“It’s all right,” Gingrich said. “It’s nice to be in a free country. … There’s no necessary parallel between noise and intelligence.”
Asked to describe himself in one word at Wednesday’s Republican debate, Gingrich used “cheerful,” but a week-ending campaign swing through Washington state, Idaho and California, showed the uneasy coexistence of Gingrich’s cheer and pugilism.
The idea is to project the image of a happy warrior in the model of President Ronald Reagan. The result is a critique of President Barack Obama that is part comedy routine, part frightening description of a diminished nation and dangerous world in a second Obama term. And though primary GOP rival Mitt Romney no longer has a starring role in the Gingrich’s speeches, he draws the occasional barb, too.
Gingrich conducts much of his derision of Obama in a mocking tone, giving the message a lighter feel. He kept his rally crowds laughing as he referenced Obama’s energy speech in which he talked about algae as a promising alternative fuel.
“We should get a bottle of algae and we can go around and we can have the Obama solution,” Gingrich said Thursday in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. “And maybe what we ought to do at newt.org is we ought to get T-shirts that say, ‘You choose. Newt: Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less. Barack Obama: Have Algae, Pay More, Be Weird.’”
The smiles disappear when Gingrich begins to talk about national security, in which his anti-Obama rhetoric became more strident this week.
“I think this president has gone so far towards appeasing radical Islamists that he is failing in his duty in commander in chief,” he said in Coeur d’Alene.
Gingrich attacked Obama for apologizing to the Afghan people for an incident in which Muslim holy texts were burned in a U.S. military garbage pit. Outrage roiled the nation this week and two American servicemen were killed during riots.
Gingrich said Obama is not working hard enough to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program – which Gingrich said he would do with more covert action – and warned of “300,000 dead, a half million wounded” in a “second Holocaust” nuclear attack on Israel by Iran.
He delivered a grim account of international affairs and a president ill-equipped to handle them.
“In many ways the world right now is spinning out of control more than any time since the end of World War Two,” Gingrich said in Spokane, Wash., Thursday. “We don’t have a model for defeating radical Islam. We don’t have a model for containing China. We are floundering. And we are floundering with a president who doesn’t even know it’s a problem. This is very serious.”
After a Friday event in Federal Way, Wash., three Gingrich supporters said they found his message hopeful and positive, despite such rhetoric.
“He has self confidence that he’s going to turn the country around, that’s the cheerful part that shines through,” said Jo Holing, of Puyallup, Wash.
While the Obama attacks have been consistent, if escalating, Gingrich vacillated this week – as he has throughout the campaign – on how much he criticized his Republican rivals.
In Spokane he did not target Romney; hours later in Coeur d’Alene he went on an extended attack on Romney’s positions on abortion and gun control not heard for weeks.
“Gov. Romney at times is severely distanced from the facts, to use his phrase,” Gingrich said, referencing a speech Romney gave recently in which he described himself as a “severely conservative” governor. “He is not a severe conservative. He is at times severely distanced.”
The next day, an audience member in Everett made a similar point, calling out: “Mitt Romney’s a liar.”
Cheerful Newt chuckled. “I’m not going to disagree," he said. "But I’m not going to get into all that.”
About the Author
