Jacob Heilbrunn: Is Newt Gingrich Following In Nixon's Footsteps?

Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest.

Can a new "Newt" emerge to win the Republican nomination? In an ingenious  columnin the Los Angeles Times, Doyle McManus speculates that Gingrich may be following in Richard M. Nixon's path. Just as Nixon transformed himself into a moderate candidate in 1968, so Gingrich is now refraining from partisanship. He's being nice to his fellow candidates in the debates. He shakes his head over the bad feelings in Congress.

Garry Wills diagnosed this phenomenon in his book Nixon Agonistes. He called it "compensatory counterstress." What he meant by that is that the temptation for rival politicians is to say almost the same thing towards the end of a race for the presidency. Wills was referring to the general election, not the primary. But Gingrich seems to be accelerating the model as he tries to tamp down his more ebullient pronouncements. In Confessions of a Conservative, Wills concluded that "the candidates middle in toward each other so energetically that they tend to pass each other and fall, rhetorically, into the opposite camp." They want to capture the "indeterminate middle"—what we could today call "independent voters."

Whether that will occur in the current partisan atmosphere is questionable. But Gingrich clearly is trying to sand off his rough edges as quickly as he can. There are many reasons to think that Gingrich could pull it off and an obvious one why he might not...