Gingrich Warns GOP: Biden Is 'Successful' -- And May Well Win In 2024

@next2godwin
Newt Gingrich

Newt Gingrich

President Joe Biden is winning, and the Republican party must “learn to quit underestimating” him if it’s to have any hope for victory in 2024, warns former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

Gingrich, the brains behind modern-day partisan bouts on the Hill, made the stunning rebuke in a column on his website, blasting his party’s blind aversion to the former president and reluctance to accept its shortcomings.

The Republican — credited for his party’s sweeping 1994 revolution and President Bill Clinton’s impeachment — warned that although he was no Biden supporter, it didn’t take much to “realize how well he is doing by his own definition of success.”

“Like virtually all conservatives and Republicans, I deeply oppose his policies,” Gingrich wrote. “However, conservatives’ hostility to the Biden administration on our terms tends to blind us to just how effective Biden has been on his terms.”

Gingrich’s comments trailed the GOP’s historically underwhelming mid-term performance — winning only a slim 222-seat House majority and losing a Senate spot under ex-president Trump’s leadership, in what the GOP comically named a “red wave” — a defeat he lamented conservatives were unwilling to take notes from.

“Today there is not nearly enough understanding (or acknowledgement) among leading Republicans that our system and approach failed,” he wrote, torching his party, which, even now, is hosting antisemites and conspiracy theorists, planning baseless partisan investigations, and obsessing over snooze fest “bombshell” reveals.

Gingrich said he believed the right’s rabid attacks on Biden were ineffective, proven, he said, by the Democratic party’s shocking defiance of midterm history in last month’s elections.

“The Biden team had one of the best first term off-year elections in history. They were not repudiated. They did not have to pay for their terrible mismanagement of the economy,” he said.

In light of this, MAGA activists, online contrarians, and far-right provocateurs that comprise today’s GOP have insisted on attacking Biden’s age and supposed speech impediments, Gingrich fumed — attacks that didn’t work before the 2020 election and thereafter.

“We dislike Biden so much, we pettily focus on his speaking difficulties, sometimes strange behavior, clear lapses of memory, and other personal flaws. Our aversion to him and his policies makes us underestimate him and the Democrats,” Gingrich lamented in his column.

The Fox News pundit weighed in on his reasoning to Axios: "I was thinking about football and the clarity of winning and losing. It hit me that, measured by his goals, Biden has been much more successful than we have been willing to credit."

Gingrich likened Biden to former presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, both of whom “preferred to be underestimated” and “wanted people to think of them as pleasant — but not dangerous.”

“They found being underestimated was a major asset. While people laughed at them, they were busy achieving their goals and getting their programs implemented, Gingrich said. “Biden has achieved something similar.”

Although Biden recently turned 80, Democrats, bolstered by their strong midterm showing and string of legislative wins, have coalesced around the president, who, the Washington Post reports, remains the top Democratic candidate for 2024.

Gingrich also had high praise for Biden’s Ukraine foreign policy, which House Republicans have assailed and promised to investigate.

“Biden has carefully and cautiously waged war in Ukraine with no American troops. Although poorly timed and slowly delivered, U.S. weapons and financial aid have helped cripple what most thought would be an easy victory for Russian President Vladimir Putin,” he wrote.

President Biden’s effective leadership allowed his “team [to take] an amazingly narrow four-vote majority in the U.S. House and a 50-50 tie in the Senate and turned it into trillions of dollars in spending,” Gingrich opined.

The ex-speaker warned the Republican party to “rethink from the ground up” if it’s to stand a chance against an “almost inevitable second-time Democrat Presidential Nominee Biden.”

“If Republicans are going to successfully work through the next two years in the Congress – and win the presidency in 2024 – we need to look much more deeply at what worked and what did not work in 2020 and 2022,” he wrote. “This is a much bigger challenge than I would have guessed before the election.”

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