Nuking Newt.

At a recent gathering of my peers, no small achievement, one observer volunteered that he had never, "including Nixon," seen so concentrated a battery of derogation as has been fired in the past three weeks on Newt Gingrich. The operative scare-word, he pointed out, is "scary." And indeed Mr. Gingrich is, in the eyes of his chattering critics, scary. But he is also a great deal else.

In search of the definitive demotion one turns to The New Yorker, wherein the talented David Remnick (he wrote Lenin's Tomb) presides over Beltway opinion. After reading his profile of Mr. Gingrich you might go away thinking him not scary in the sense that Dr. Strangelove was scary--Mr. Remnick doesn't discover a nuclear missile under Newt's bed--but scary in the sense that he has blindsided America into giving him a post of critical responsibility without the public's having weighed his extraordinary personal disqualifications.

Like what? Well, although he is for family values, Newt has been divorced. Well, divorces are very sad events, but they do happen widely, as for instance, in our time, to Adlai Stevenson and Ronald Reagan. But his critics mix much melodrama into the story of the divorce, the punchline of which is that Mr. Gingrich brought in to his wife "during her recovery" a pad of paper on which he had written out the suggested arrangements for the divorce. It is made to sound very much like the landlord visiting the dying widow moments before the end demanding extra money to pay for the leaky roof. It isn't until some time later that one learns the former Mrs. Gingrich is very much alive, 16 years after the hospital transaction.

Mr. Remnick reminds us (most people knew it) that Gingrich did not serve in the war, though Remnick smiles bravely while acknowledging that Gingrich's explanation for not going to Vietnam (he pleaded parenthood, which was a deferrable event) has never been shielded by such "nervous indirection" as characterized Clinton. But this does not prevent him from observing that notwithstanding Vietnam, Gingrich "has posed as a hawk in Congress." What is the difference between posing as a hawk and being a hawk, one wonders. Abe Lincoln was one hell of a hawk back then, though he never himself saw action.

In assessing Gingrich the goal is totalist--no concessions are made. Well yes, he got a PhD and taught history--but he never got tenure. On the other hand, that is not so unusual, at age 28. In any case, Gingrich is "no great scholar." That's right, nor has he ever said that scholarship was his primary interest. (At the time Adlai Stevenson, the intellectuals' dreamboy, was nominated for President, not one listing under his name appeared in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature, where minimal journalistic and scholarly events are recorded.) "He is also reminiscent of the middle-brow thinkers of the nineteenth century who won their fame explaining all in a single volume: Henry George, whose Progress and Poverty led to the single-tax movement. . ."

Henry George a middlebrow thinker! What would that make of such as Albert Jay Nock, one of George's biographers, who deemed George among the seminal minds of the economic renaissance?

But you can't win. Gingrich is a hypocrite, an eccentric, a woozy futurist; he is lacking in wit, given to schematic political constellations. Why, he even makes you-know-who look good! Newt cannot wear the white hat of Ronald Reagan. "He wears his black hat proudly and squints, looking back to the future."

Now that kind of rhetoric betrays true fear, and one wonders what are the grounds for this fear. That under Newt, Americans will be permitted to starve? That isn't, really, very likely, but under pre-Newt, Americans are very widely permitted to be killed, mugged, raped, casually impregnated, exposed day and night to the sepsis of modern culture, rendered illiterate by indulgent inattention . . . Dear Newt is not going to change all of that; the prophet Jonah would not succeed against Nineveh. But what we are learning is that those nice people at the opinion stands of American liberalism just don't like Old Testament sounds. Scary.