A recent South Carolina poll has three status-quo candidates — Herman Cain, Mitt Romney, and Newt Gingrich — with a commanding lead. South Carolina Republicans evidently believe the country is basically on the right track if they’re content with candidates who pledge to change things about one to two percent. (Cain supporters will dispute this, but the evidence is right here.)
Regarding Gingrich, I reproduce a passage from Rollback:
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has a reputation for being a right-wing ideologue. But it is surely a strange right-wing ideologue who credits Franklin Roosevelt with lifting the country out of the Great Depression, joins with John Kerry on “climate change,” and supports (among many other things) the Medicare prescription drug benefit, federal programs to pay for more teachers, Internet access for every American, and rewards to students who take challenging math and science courses — not to mention his sympathy for federal energy policy and Hillary Clinton’s proposed national health-care database, among other things….
[In 1994,] the GOP leadership made the [election] into a referendum on [Gingrich’s] “Contract with America,” a series of proposals the party pledged to champion if elected. Democrats and Republicans alike pretended it was a radical assault on government spending and activity — Democrats in order to frighten their base, and Republicans in order to energize theirs. The Contract was, in fact, a hodgepodge of trivial changes that both kept the basic structure of the American Leviathan intact and neutralized the more ambitious plans and proposals of freshman congressmen who may actually have wanted to change something. The center-left Brookings Institution had it right: “Viewed historically, the Contract represents the final consolidation of the bedrock domestic policies and programs of the New Deal, the Great Society, the post-Second World War defense establishment, and, most importantly, the deeply rooted national political culture that has grown up around them.”
And, of course, don’t forget this:
UPDATE: Here’s Gingrich supporting the individual mandate (thanks to Fima Shlimel):
