If Newt Gingrich was not about to announce his bid today for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, it would not much matter what people thought about his two-faced effort not so many years ago to impeach Bill Clinton for marital infidelity while he himself was cheating on his second wife, just as he had his first. Nor would they care that his private life generally failed throughout his political career to measure up to his falsely pious pitch for family values as the reason for voters to believe in his Republican agenda and his quickly forgotten "Contract with America."
But his personal history matters now because despite his Elmer Gantry-style past, Gingrich will today begin his attempt to reinvent himself as someone who is no longer living a lie like he used to. The first problem with that, of course, is that Gingrich has already proved himself a reprehensible hypocrite. Which leads quickly to the second problem with his GOP revival: why should anyone care about his new ambitions.
Americans are generally familiar with Gingrich's history. It's been widely reported that he first told his first wife that he wanted a divorce while she was lying in a hospital bed in 1981 hoping to recover from an operation for uterine cancer. Gingrich, who had run for Congress in 1978 on the theme, "let our family represent your family," attempted to use the occasion to negotiate terms for the divorce from the woman who had worked to put him through graduate school.
He married his lover six months later, but reportedly engaged in other affairs. He was particularly embarrassed when it was learned in 1998 that he had been having an affair for several years with a congressional aide 23 years younger than he, Callista Bisek, while pursuing the impeachment of Clinton in 1998 for lying about similar conduct with Monica Lewinsky. That scandal forced Gingrich out of office in 1999, ended his second marriage, and led to his third, with Bisek, a platinum blonde who would now accompany him around the country in Gingrich's bid for the presidential nomination.
Gingrich's gall, if not Bisek's, appears up to the chore of challenging the inquisition that is certain to follow if he mounts a serious campaign. Indeed, it hardly seems dented.
Asked recently by David Brody on the Christian Broadcasting Network how he would explain his scandalous past and his phony piety cover for it, he blamed his deeds on the stress and hard work of being in Congress. "There's no question at times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate," he said.
Imagine that. The stress of passionately working as a member of Congress lured him to refocus his passion.
Not to fear. As he recently told a gathering in Columbus, Ohio, his conversion two years ago from the Baptist faith to Catholicism awakened him to the root problem. "In America," he asserted, "religious belief is being challenged by a cultural elite trying to create a secularized America, in which God is driven out of public life."
Who knew the elistists were his old problem? His own history suggests that he hid, well and long, behind his supposed challenge to "the cultural elite" to cover his tattered history of secularizing his own private life. With that history, only the most gullible voters are likely to be swayed by a repeat of his pious rhetoric now.