Staff Report
The Republican re-embrace of former Speaker Newt Gingrich says a lot about whom he sees as his opponent — and it isn’t just President Barack Obama. It’s the media.
If not for major media’s embrace, Obama would still be sitting in the Senate, perhaps mulling another run for the presidency. A UCLA economist-political scientist recently tried to measure how the liberal media bias influences the way people vote. He concluded that this bias gives the Democrat candidate 8 to 10 percentage points.
Republicans understand this. So does Gingrich — on a very deep level. He knows the media dislike him above and beyond their anti-conservative Republican disdain. That he is testy, no-nonsense, whip smart and knowledgeable makes him formidable. That he engineered the 1994 GOP takeover of the House and pushed former President Bill Clinton into governing in the center makes him effective.
The good news for the media is that Gingrich is a Southern white male Christian Republican. He belongs to a group for which no advocacy organization exists to play the race/sex/religion card when Gingrich gets called — on-air by cable hosts and pundits — “racist,” “disgusting” and a “pig.”
