Today, eBooks are all the rage. My ebook goes wide in 11 days, on December 15th, and will then be available on Amazon, Apple and beyond.
There’s a lot swirling about Mitt Romney, as Newt Gingrich rises. A Parade article pictures him as the family man, but he still comes off as a stiff.
You’ve been attacked by the left and the right. The White House’s David Plouffe said you had no core; George Will called you a “pretzel candidate.” Do these attacks sting?
Well, one, I don’t read them [laughs]. Secondly, I wrote a book, No Apology, in 2010 that laid out my views on the issues. That’s what I believe. I know there will be an effort on the part of some to distract the American public from the significant issues, which are, domestically, the failure of this administration to reboot our economy and, internationally, the growth of entities that wish to reshape the world in their image—namely, the jihadists, an emerging China, a soon-to-be-nuclear Iran unless we take corrective action, and a resurgent Russia. America faces extraordinary challenges, and there are some people who would rather divert attention from those issues to secure their long-term tenure in the White House.
When given an opportunity to open up, instead Mr. Romney offers platitudes.
Say what you will about Newt, and I’ve said it all, he gives the impression that he’s letting you in even if what he’s doing is talking to hear his own voice, to which he is enthralled.
I’ve been reading Mike Allen’s eBook, written with Evan Thomas, edited by Jon Meacham.
This little tidbit about Mitt Romney is a scorcher.
“Everybody knows the book on Romney is that it has to be his way or no way,” said Carney. “he’s very stubborn. He’s very thin-skinned … storms out of meetings when it doesn’t go his way. And people who are involved in debate prep in the last cycle”–here, Carney was apparently alluding to his mole from the 2008 Romney campaign–”basically told us that he would react badly to someone challenging his narrative. He just is incapable of acknowledging that there may be a different interpretation of something.”
Carney warmed to the subject of Romney’s allegedly volatile temper. “Unbelievably temperamental … in that [if] he thinks that it’s three o’clock in the afternoon, it’s three o’clock no matter what time it is… He’s totally easy to get off stride, discombobulated.” At a debate prep in 2008, according to Carney’s source, Romney would turn “beet-red. He’s known to get unbelievably flushed.”
Now that Herman Cain’s star has crashed, though I have no idea why it ever ascended, Mr. Gingrich will try to solidify even more of the wingnut right, because they’re not buying Romney so far.
The problem with Newt is that he just keeps stepping in it, as the White House applauds. No doubt the Republican establishment is relieved as well.
Bad Newt’s coming back.
The all-too-familiar character from the 1990s has only peeked out in public a handful of times so far. But already, Newt Gingrich — flush with pride over new polls showing his left-for-dead candidacy now leading the pack — is letting his healthy ego roam free again, littering the campaign trail with grand pronouncements about his celebrity, his significance in political history and his ability to transform America.
“I helped lead the effort to defeat communism in the Congress,” Gingrich said this week on Sean Hannity’s show.
“I’m going to be the nominee,” he informed ABC News while in Iowa.
“I was charging $60,000 a speech and the number of speeches was going up, not down,” Gingrich said in South Carolina, explaining why he didn’t actually need his consulting fee from Freddie Mac. “Normally, celebrities leave and they gradually sell fewer speeches every year. We were selling more.”
“The degree to which I challenge the establishment and the degree to which I’m willing to follow ideas and solutions to their natural consequence without regard to Republican or Democratic political correctness makes me probably the most experienced outsider in modern times,” he told Radio Iowa.
Even descriptions of his wife Callista fall prey to aggrandizement: “She actually describes herself as being a cross between Nancy Reagan and Laura Bush with just a slight bit of Jackie Kennedy tossed in and I think there is, somewhere swirling in there, the model Callista would like to live up to.”
Is there anything more nauseating to imagine than Newt and Callista in the White House?
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