Gingrich wants to be an annihilationist

By A. Peter Bailey
TriceEdneyWire.com Columnist

The emergence of Newt Gingrich — one of, if not the most egotistical politicians in the country as the leading contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination — is a clear, unambiguous sign that most of the white voting public won’t be satisfied with just defeating President Obama. They want to annihilate him in order to show him and the rest of us who’s still in charge.

If white voters simply wanted to beat the president, they could support Romney. But he’s not enough of a pit bull for what they want to accomplish. Newt Gingrich is which is why white voters, many of whom consistently and loudly proclaim their eternal devotion to family values and political morality, are backing a man who has had three marriages, a couple of messy divorces and admitted ethics violations when he was Speaker of the House of Representatives.

The only people who are surprised by this turn of events are those who swallowed whole the notion that the United States is now a post-racial society. Those of us who refuse to accept this Pollyanna concept are scornfully dismissed as being stuck in the 1960s or players of the race card or practitioners of political correctness who can’t acknowledge a new racial reality. What we do know is that 58 percent of white voters in the 2008 presidential election voted for Senator John McCain which means that only 42 percent voted for then Senator Obama. We also know that that 58 percent will hold firm in 2012 and that at least half of that 42 percent will most likely move away from President Obama in 2012.

It has become more and more obvious that many white voters are extremely agitated at seeing the Obamas in the White House. Some have become almost unhinged. The latter includes Gingrich who seemingly finds an African American in the position that he wants more than any other in the world to be unbearable. For the past three years the former House Speaker has made that clear. His recent description of President Obama as “the food stamp president” is just one of a long list of derogatory names he has called him.

Gingrich’s insistence that President Obama is basically an interloper is shared by a whole lot of white voters. That’s why he has soared in the polls and why a recent one showed that he could not only defeat the president in states such as South Carolina and Florida but also in Ohio. Romney has attempted to counter the Gingrich surge by calling President Obama “an appeaser” when, it comes to international affairs especially those involving Israel but that doesn’t have the annihilating effect of Gingrich’s “food stamp president.”

This article was originally published in the December 19, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper