[Peace-discuss] Anti-war presidential candidates

[C. G. Estabrook]

The anti-war movement should support Ron Paul for his consistent opposition to 
the Obama administration's wars - or perhaps even former New Mexico governor 
Gary Johnson, if he turns out in fact to be anti-war. We've been fooled on that 
point recently.

Although it's hard to believe that the Long War will be brought to an end by 
electoral action - Vietnam wasn't - the antiwar movement should be putting what 
pressure it can on other potentially anti-war candidates - including Newt 
Gingrich - and John Huntsman. Remember that Richard Nixon was (consciously and 
purposefully) the anti-war candidate in 1968: the anti-war movement, properly, 
did not vote for the Democrat - and of course it shouldn't in 2012.

Unless perhaps Obama is driven out as Johnson was in 1968 and/or an anti-war 
primary challenger emerges. As in 1968, two-thirds of the populace today is 
opposed to the war (although two-thirds of our unrepresentative Congress 
supports it) - and the Democrats are aware of the parallel.

The New Republic
Why Newt could win.
Walter Shapiro
May 10, 2011

The Republican presidential race is fast resembling World War II baseball, when 
4-Fs roamed the outfield, the ball lost its bounce because of the rubber 
shortage, and sportswriters found it hard to imagine that any team could win the 
World Series. But as heretical as it seems today, someone is going to be bathed 
in lights and drenched in confetti as the victorious GOP nominee at the Tampa 
convention.

All this brings us to Newt Gingrich, who is going to declare his candidacy 
Wednesday in clichéd 21st century disembodied fashion—with announcements on 
Twitter and Facebook and a follow-up interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News. 
Yet, for all of the missteps leading up to this moment—including a mangled 
rollout of his exploratory campaign in March—Gingrich remains a curiously 
undervalued stock in the Republican presidential portfolio.

Newt undervalued? I can hear the snickers and the stunned gasps. Yes, Gingrich 
has more defects than a 1971 Chevy Vega and his liabilities may seem more 
daunting than the final Lehman Brothers balance sheet. The affairs, the three 
marriages, and the ethics charges that helped end his congressional career after 
the 1998 elections are not the sort of things a candidate boasts about on his 
Facebook page. Moreover, the 67-year-old former House speaker will be a senior 
citizen among the GOP contenders (granted, Ron Paul is 75) and Jimmy Carter was 
president when Gingrich was first elected to Congress in 1978.

All this helps explain why Gingrich—despite sometimes polling in double digits 
during trial heats among GOP contenders—has become a plaything of the 
conventional wisdom. Intrade, an online stock market for political predictions 
that is a good gauge of elite opinion, gives Gingrich a paltry 3.6 percent 
chance of winning the Republican nomination. That puts Newt behind Donald Trump 
(4.8 percent) and Michele Bachmann (4.2 percent) and (yikes!) just ahead of Ron 
Paul (2.8 percent).

In politics, new and shiny objects have the same allure that they do in nursery 
school. This week, Jon Huntsman (running at 11.1 percent on Intrade) is being 
portrayed as the most dynamic returnee from China since Marco Polo. Even though 
Huntsman, a former Utah governor, probably has better name recognition in 
Beijing than in Bettendorf, Iowa, he is lionized as a top-tier presidential 
possibility. Somehow it does not matter that in a national CNN/Opinion Research 
Corporation Poll released last week, 64 percent of Republicans had never heard 
of Huntsman.

What Gingrich has going for him is that presidential elections are about 
something beyond gauzy biographical ads and rehearsed debate one-liners. “We’re 
in the personality phase of the campaign,” says Republican pollster David 
Winston, who worked for Gingrich when he was House speaker. “But eventually it’s 
going to move from personality to policy. GOP voters are going to ask, ‘What are 
your solutions to fix the nation’s problems?’ And that is the moment that plays 
to Newt’s greatest strength”...

Running for president involves more than running your resume up a flagpole and 
seeing who salutes. That future-oriented part of the conversation is what 
baffled candidates like Rudy Giuliani and Wesley Clark in 2004 for the 
Democrats. But from the days that he was over-enthusiastically touting 
what-comes-next thinkers like Alvin Toffler, Newt Gingrich has always been about 
the future. The former House speaker’s ideas may not always parse and sometimes 
have an amnesiac’s lack of consistency, but more than any Republican running 
(especially cautious candidates like Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty) Gingrich is 
likely to ride the intellectual wave of the primaries...