Newt's South Carolina, Blood for Bloodsport's Sake

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire Magazine

21 January 12

f you want to see how things have swung here - and, if Gallup is to be believed, how they may be swinging elsewhere as well - there's no better place to be than a largely abandoned strip mall tucked into a back-alley off Soper Mountain Road. There's a hardware store gone under, and there's a chop-shop mortgage brokerage that's been dark for a while, probably since the collapse of 2008 - which, as we all know, was brought on by the overregulation of an underregulated industry, and by the loans given out to black people, or something like that. The only sign of life, the only place of business with the lights on that's filling up the spaces in the parking lot, is the storefront on the end with the big NEWT 2012 banner on it. Outside on the small patio, groups of people, staggering under dozens of yard signs, are sent on their way. Inside is a gabbling cacophony of spontaneous conversation, and the recitation of phone-bank scripts from dozens of volunteers, their voices staggered like a group of kids around the campfire, singing a round. The rooms all bear names - The Cold War Room, The Trenches. There's an undeniable sense of something moving here. Another load of pizzas arrive, and everybody cheers.

It was always going to happen this way - Newt was going to go back into his wheelhouse, ripping the media and spouting in the general direction of the White House whatever pile of pejorative adjectives popped into his head at the moment. He tried, lamely, to be a statesman, and the party faithful ignored him. Once he became the vandal he was born to be, the political arsonist among the abandoned tenements of Republican thought, he was bound to take off again. The base doesn't want someone whose ideas on job creation will triumph because they are superior to the president's. They want somebody who can beat him bloody, vicariously, on their behalf, somebody who can "put him in his place." They want someone who will kill the administration just for the sheer fun of watching it die. That's why Newt's fortunes took off after he slapped around Juan Williams on Monday night, and that's why they went into hyper-drive on Thursday when he declared to be "despicable" any public mention of the chronic staff-banging that wrecked his second marriage and that helped wreck his speakership. Sooner or later, he was going to light the whole race on fire just to giggle over the flames, and that meant he had to come do it in South Carolina, and that meant he had to come do it in the upcountry around Greenville, where the base of the base always has been located, where people can be found who will gleefully join him around the bonfire, where is located the ancient home office of American treason.

"Look," says Kellen Giuda, the young National Coalitions Director for the Gingrich campaign, waving his hand over a map of the state that hangs on the wall not far from The Cold War Room, "this area down here in the South, this was always more moderate. This is where McCain won last time. Up here, around Greenville, that's always been the more conservative area. This time, people concentrated their effort down there near Charleston, because they wanted to get that whole military vote down there locked up. But, now, they're starting to see that this is the place where the conservative vote really come from." The endorsements are coming thick and fast now - Rick Perry! Michael Reagan! One-hundred Tea Party leaders from around the country! - and they are settling on Newt, and not on Rick Santorum, because Santorum, while admittedly a dick, is not an angry bully of a dick, and that's what the base is looking for. In fact, the Gingrich campaign tore up its schedule on Friday, and will now have the candidate working the upcountry districts around Greenville hard all primary day.

Sondra Ziegler drove 22 hours from Lubbock to sit back there in The Trenches and phone-bank for the campaign. (This beats her previous record of having driven 16 hours to do the same thing in Des Moines before the Iowa caucuses.) Her mother drove down from Kentucky to join them. She home-schools her three young children - Abigail, Alexandra, and Samuel, 10, nine, and five, respectively - and, if they do campaign work, she says, they don't have to do schoolwork. Apparently, campaign work is like recess. "My oldest is out there now, knocking on doors," Ziegler smiles.

She had not been very politically active before this year. "I did some boots-on-the-ground stuff in the general election, but never anything for the primary." She and her children even have become temporarily famous; NPR did a piece on them earlier this week.

Ziegeler's argument for Gingrich is based on electability, but it's not the kind of electability argument put forth by the Romney people, which is dead-assed and based on money and visibility and ads and sterile salesmanship. Ziegeler believes that Newt is the most electable Republican because he can "stand up to Barack Obama in a debate." She was moved to hit the road by watching Gingrich in the earlier debates, and his recent performances have strengthened her resolve. "I believe this is a critical time for our country," she says. "We need someone who can take the fight to Barack Obama."

Sondra Ziegler is not an angry person. She is not a nasty person. But she is also making an argument for electability based on blood and sinew and the raw bloodsport that's been on display since Newt disposed of his statesman's kid gloves and shined up the brass knuckles again. This is where Newt Gingrich's politics were born, places like this, deep in the unreconstructed Id of the unreconstructed South. He was always going to come home.