Live-Slogging the Newt Gingrich Victory Autofellatio

“Pump Up the Jam” just concluded at the Gingrich rally, and now Gingrich is getting introduced by a man who says Republicans want a candidate with a “backbone,” and that they don’t want a “timid” candidate. Somewhere, Romney is weeping hot tears on his plaid little boy shorts. Now it’s just introducers introducing introducers, along with a Foghorn Leghorn guy who says “Make no mistake about it. This was a land. Slide. Victory. This was the political version of a tsunami.” (If you want to watch this along with me, by the way, you should follow this link.) The next introducer, whose name I didn’t catch, is also pushing the strong-and-not-timid line. He says Gingrich will cut taxes, “Ronald Reagan-style.” Um, ha?

Now, to Toby Keith’s “American Ride,” Newt and Callista are coming out. Or they’re supposed to be coming out. All the phones and cameras in the house are turned to one door, but there’s no sign of Newt…

This is some real delayed gratification in action. They just switched away from “American Ride” in the middle of the kinda inappropriate “Momma gets her rocks off/Watchin’ Desperate Housewives” verse to something more appropriate for a Republican rally—”Only in America,” Brooks & Dunn. Still no Newt! That’s some bad mismanagement of an important moment. Politico has switched away from the rally. Now it’s “Don’t Stop Believing.” The Journey version, not the Glee version—what do you think this is, a Santorum rally? Oh, my God. Where the fuck is Newt Gingrich? Nowhere. Newt is nowhere. Now it’s time for “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.” Literally. The title of that song should be taken literally. We have seen nothing. Back to “American Ride.” Bad music goes to political rallies to die, my friends. Except, “Song 2” by Blur just came on. Um? If Newt comes out to this song shirtless, headbanging, and covered in sweat, my day will be made. Oh my God. Back to “American Ride.” Just the chorus. FINALLY Newt comes out, looking as smug and self-satisfied as I’d hoped.

“Newt! Can! Win!” the crowd chants. “A whole Newt world!” someone shouts. “Tsunami!” Gingrich thanks the members of his family and South Carolina team. Wow. This is not the tear-out-the-gate rant I was hoping for. Gingrich says everyone, even people who “by accident or misinformation” were for other candidates, were very nice to him in South Carolina. A baby girl in the crowd is flipping out and having a tantrum, and you can just tell Newt wants to tell her to shut the fuck up and stop spoiling his moment. Newt calls South Carolina “very humbling and very sobering,” thanks to all the people who want to help the country “get back on the right track….the elites in Washington and New York…do not represent [South Carolinians] at all.”

“It’s not that I’m a good debater. It’s that I articulate the deepest felt” values of the American people, Newt says. Shoutout to Reagan, putdown of Jimmy Carter. “The genius of America is you can come from any background.” Gingrich says when he watched the other speeches tonight he was “struck” by the variety of the Republican candidates available. He sends a whopping love-letter to Santorum for being right on Iran. Then he praises Ron Paul for being “right on the Federal Reserve.” “While I disagree with him on many cases,” Gingrich says, he agrees with Paul on “fiat money and the Federal Reserve.’ He calls Romney “hard working” and says he did a “terrific job with the Winter Olympics.” “In America, you can make your case, no matter what the elites think in New York and Washington.” “The fact is we want to run not a Republican campaign. We want to run an American campaign because we are optimists about the future because America has always been optimistic about the future.”

“Callista and I decided to run because we decided,” he begins, bringing up the idea of a frightening co-presidency, explaining that Obama would be too radical in his second term. He says he’s going to “Florida and beyond.” “I will challenge President Obama to seven three-hour debates,” and the crowd goes nuts. “I already have conceded that he can use a teleprompter if he wants to. If you had to defend Obamacare, wouldn’t you want to use a teleprompter?” Newt says “the centerpiece of this campaign is American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky.” U!S!A! the crowd chants. He says Obama draws his inspiration from Saul Alinsky and radicals who don’t like “the classic America.” He says he hates “the growing anti-religious” bigotry “of the elites.” He says he wants to “eliminate anti-religious bigots.” He says his campaign is built on jobs, growth, and money. He mentions the “media elites” again and cites Obama as the biggest food stamp president in American history again, calling himself “the best paycheck American president.” This is a standard line for Newt, but it plays really, really well in South Carolina.

Gingrich says he’s going to work with Rick Perry to “return power to the states” and calls for the people to “be with me and not just for me.” He says that since he is “the only Speaker of the House in your lifetimes to balance the budget” four times, he will surely do that as president, too. He says he wants to ensure that “no American president ever again bows to a Saudi King,” saying he wants to build an American energy plan. He says engineering bureaucracy goes too far these days, and says that construction projects shouldn’t take longer than World War II to organize. He also accuses the Obama White House of not just being incapable of playing chess or checkers, but being “incapable of playing tic-tac-toe” on the Keystone Pipeline.

This crowd is loud, angry, and dumb. Gingrich is tossing them all kinds of bones. He says he wants to help America “remain the historic America,” or whether we’d like to become “a brand-new European socialist-style” radical state. The crowd bellows “NO!” and Newt responds, “I agree with you.” Gingrich says he’ll “abolish all the White House Czars” on day one. (Not very Reaganesque of him.) Then he says with the people’s help, they can beat “big money,” which is a pretty harsh slap on Romney. And that’s it.

Wow. From a Republican standpoint, Newt was pretty awesome. He took his case right to Obama and he had all the fire, “facts,” and dog whistles that Mitt never brings to his speeches. If you were to look at both of these speeches without much prior knowledge, you’d say the only candidate who could tackle Barack Obama on his own level would be Newt Gingrich. It was a pretty phenomenal speech for the Fox News crowd.