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Marianne bombshell? Not so much

Well, that wasn’t much — the Marianne Gingrich interview on Nightline, I mean. The open marriage thing is shocking, but I thought there would be more. She came off as flaky when Brian Ross brought up the FBI ethics investigation she underwent on suspicion of bribery, back when she was married to the Speaker of […]

Well, that wasn’t much — the Marianne Gingrich interview on Nightline, I mean. The open marriage thing is shocking, but I thought there would be more. She came off as flaky when Brian Ross brought up the FBI ethics investigation she underwent on suspicion of bribery, back when she was married to the Speaker of the House. Her nervous laugh about it was unsettling, and might have undermined her credibility with some viewers.

This Newt-is-a-sleaze anecdote is news, but it’s not new news — and that, plus her own squirreliness, makes me conclude that this thing won’t have legs. Especially after Newt’s I-am-outraged attack on the news media tonight. Demagoguery? Sure. But effective at stopping any potential fallout from the Marianne interview, which turned out to be pretty weak tea.

You want more on Newt’s dismal character? Read Esquire’s 2010 interview with Marianne. Much more revealing. Excerpt:

“Newt always wanted to be somebody,” she says. “That was his vulnerability, do you understand? Being treated important. Which means he was gonna associate with people who would stroke him, and were important themselves. And in that vulnerability, once you go down that path and it goes unchecked, you add to it. Like, ‘Oh, I’m drinking, who cares?’ Then you start being a little whore, ’cause that comes with drinking. That’s what corruption is — when you’re too exhausted, you’re gonna go with your weakness. So when we see corruption, we shouldn’t say, ‘They’re all corrupt.’ Rather, we should say, ‘At what point did you decide that? And why? Why were you vulnerable?’ “

In an updated (January 19) reflection on that interview, writer John Richardson says:

The real problem is that the marriage dispute is actually the most forgivable part of Gingrich’s behavior. Love makes fools of us all, etc., and liberals who believe in parole and rehabilitation really should think at least once before they snicker at the religious folks who have decided to believe in Newt’s remorse for his past behavior. But the story Marianne told in Esquire went much, much deeper — a story of wildly erratic behavior that went back to the very first night they met, full of manic ups and downs, secrets and betrayals and passionate reconciliations. More important was his behavior in Congress, the ferocious and manic drive that accomplished much (for better or for worse, depending on your point of view) but collapsed in a breakdown so severe his own Republican peers had to force him out of power. Or the story about his midnight visit to Bill Clinton, immediately followed by Gingrich backpedaling on the Clinton impeachment. Or her ultimate conclusion about his financial ethics and the truly grotesque amount of lobbying he has done since he left Congress — that he chose corruption.

But focusing on the divorce makes it easy to dismiss Marianne as just a bitter ex-wife — the marital version of “disgruntled employee.” This would be really unfortunate. … The real story is that Newt Gingrich is so deeply conflicted and strange, so erratic and unreliable, so scheming and secretive, that he’s way too much like a character out of Dostoevsky than a politician should ever be.

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