“Since we don’t know how he got here, I don’t know how he can be stopped,” said Ed Rogers, a longtime Washington lobbyist and party strategist who worked for the first President George Bush.
Mr. Rogers, who has not endorsed anyone, is like many in the party who esteem Mr. Gingrich for his achievement in leading Republicans to the control of Congress in 1994, after 40 years in the House minority, but who recoil from the prospect of him at the top of the ticket given the controversy, scandal and electoral defeats that defined his four years as speaker.
Late Saturday, former Senator Bob Dole, the 1996 Republican nominee, endorsed Mitt Romney, whose campaign is now anticipating a long and hard-fought nominating battle against Mr. Gingrich. Last week, Mr. Romney won the endorsement of Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolinawhich holds the first Southern primary, on Jan. 21.
Mr. Gingrich’s team has dismissed the criticism as coming from Romney supporters, and has pointed to grass-roots support for his candidacy. For all the anxiety about him, from establishment Republicans to Tea Party conservatives, he has surged in polls nationwide and in the early voting states. Many voters say they have been persuaded by his combative, confident and learned performances in 13 Republican debates that Mr. Gingrich could best take on President Obama.
Yet some Republicans on Capitol Hill say that Mr. Gingrich would not only lose to Mr. Obama, but that he could take other Republican candidates down, too, in a year when high unemployment has driven hopes within the party of capturing the White House and the Senate while holding control of the House.
One of the great problems we have had in the Republican Party is that we . . . encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics. ... You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power. ... Don’t try to educate. That is not your job. What is the primary purpose of a political leader? To build a majority.”
That would be Gingrich in 1978, reported by John M. Barry in his excellent “The Ambition and the Power,” a book about the fall of former House speaker Jim Wright and Gingrich’s role in bringing him down. Again, Gingrich is a thoroughly consistent figure. The guy you see now is the same guy who always preached a scorched-earth approach to politics.
And in truth, the party took his approach to heart. If discrediting John Kerry’s service in Southeast Asia through false attacks in 2004 was what it took to reelect a president who had avoided going to Vietnam, what the heck. Those who believe in Boy Scout virtues don’t belong in politics, right?
Perhaps the establishment will yet manage to block Gingrich. There are certainly enough contradictions in his record, and he carries more baggage than an overburdened hotel porter. When National Review, that keeper of conservative ideological standards, recently criticized Gingrich for “his impulsiveness, his grandiosity, his weakness for half-baked (and not especially conservative) ideas,” its editors were reciting from a catechism that his critics wrote long ago. Meet the new Newt, same as the old Newt.
This quality endows Gingrich with a peculiar integrity, which I realize is a problematic word to apply to such a problematic figure. I use it in a very specific sense: He is who he is and always has been. The base knows this and loves him for it. But for Republican leaders, Gingrich has become inconvenient. He’s the loudmouthed uninvited guest who is trying to rejoin the country club. The effort to blackball Newt Gingrich will be the next drama in this fascinating train wreck of a campaign.
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