Newt's divorces are a hot topic as we head into the primary season, much more so than John McCain's divorce was this time four years ago. McCain's marriage to Cindy could roughly parallel's Newt's to Calista.
Twenty years before running for president the first time in 2000, McCain's first marriage was estranged and he started seeing Cindy; he got a divorce from his first wife and married Cindy.
About fifteen years before running for president, Newt was having an affair with Calista. Eleven years before the run, he divorced wife #2 Marianne and married Calista.
Three differences stand out. The first is that the McCain marriage was on the rocks pre-Cindy, The second is that it was two decades removed from his presidential run rather than one.
The third one was key; McCain was a fairly obscure congressional aide when he got remarried in 1980; Newt was Speaker of the House during his affair, presiding over Bill Clinton's impeachment over lying about an affair when he was likely lying about his own. When the news of his affair with Calista came out, he was a very public figure.
We've seen divorced politicians do well on the national stage; Ronald Reagan and John Kerry come to mind. However, both had their divorces well back of their presidential runs.
Going through a messy divorce while a major national figure hasn't been conducive to running for President. Nelson Rockefeller and Rudy Giuliani both had very messy divorces while governor and mayor of New York respectively, being "an item" with a future wife while being married to a previous one. Both ran for the GOP nomination, but as the representative of the leftmost side of the party.
Neither were running as moral conservatives; "social issues" weren't much at play in the 1960s when Rocky was running, and Rudy ran on national-security issues to make him viable among the more conservative elements of the party.
Newt, on the other hand, is running as a moral conservative; it's near impossible to run as a social moderate in the modern GOP, as Jon Huntsmann is finding out the hard way and Rudy found out last go-round. Unlike Rocky and Rudy, Newt has a decade behind his moral failings as opposed to five years for Rudy; Rocky's remarriage happened in 1963, right in the middle of three runs in '60, '64 and '68.
Ross Perot had the line "If your wife can't trust you, why should I?" Would having that high infidelity a decade in the rearview mirror be enough to trust Newt with the ship of state? Yes, if you're a doctrinaire conservative, Newt's intellectual affairs with various pro-government ideas over the years don't thrill you, either.
A seemingly heart-felt Catholic faith would point towards granting some grace on the first front along with supporting conservative stances on social issues all along; a hypocrite in the past, to be sure, but better doing the right thing some of the time than not at all. The old saw is that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue; it's a step ahead of amorality, at least as far as Congressional votes goes.
The intellectual affairs are 'nother matter; your mileage may vary, but I'm not a huge minarchist, so I'm more open to grace there as well.
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