I talked to one of them on my way out, after Newt and Callista had made their way through the cologne-and-cocktails scrum and out the door. His name is Randy. He lives in Dawsonville, Georgia. He was standing with his 13-year-old son in front of one of the televisions that had been set up in the ballroom, watching the news that Rick Santorum was leading Ohio. "What do you make of this?" he asked me. I told him that if Santorum won in Ohio, it would change the party as well as the race, and make Newt completely irrelevant if he wasn't already. He thought about that for a bit; then he said, "People like Santorum because he's a conservative. Newt's not a conservative. He just gives lip service to being a conservative because he has to. He's a radical. If he gets to Washington, he'll be just as radical as Barack Obama, just on the right side and with more respect for the Constitution. I like him not just because he thinks like me but because he has fallen down like me. I'll tell you what I know about him — he's a dirty dog. He's still a dirty dog. He's a reptile. He doesn't have the same blood running in his veins that we do. I'll get out there and get in people's faces, but when they get in mine my feelings get hurt. That just shows I'm human. But Newt's not human. He doesn't have feelings. And you know what? That's why we need him. Isn't that wild?"

 

It was the best one-paragraph profile of Newt Gingrich I'd ever heard, and so I asked him what he thought of Santorum. "He's the Republican Party's Jimmy Carter," he answered. "You know, when Nixon got in trouble, he got in trouble because all the bad feelings of that time — Vietnam, riots, crime, the whole thing — needed a place to go. It all got dumped on Nixon. But the other feelings needed a place to go, too, and they all went to Carter. People voted for him because they thought he was pure, and they thought they could trust him. Well, maybe he was too pure. It's the same way with Santorum. People usually don't vote for purity in politics — but they see Santorum and think he might be as pure as he looks. They think he might be more pure than they are themselves. So they vote for him. I worry that he doesn't like freedom as much as I do. But we've had freedom for a long time. You know, I want to see speed limits enforced again. I like driving 60 in a 55-mile-per-hour zone, but I don't like driving 75 and watching cops pass me by. I have a 16-year-old daughter, and it worries me that we live in a time when you can get away with anything. So maybe it's Santorum's time."

 

 

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