2008: Newt's a beaut

Since we can expect the Republican Party will find it expedient to look for its nominee outside the current covey of self-declared bush league White House wannabes, we should consider keeping track of Newt Gingrich and Fred Thompson. Here, to get us started, is a tasty bit of racism from this year's gathering of the Conservative Political Action Committee:

"How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn't get out of the way of a hurricane."

Aside from what it suggests about how "uneducated" Newt is -- the people of the Ninth were not done in by wind and rain but by the failure of inadequately funded levees, the ex-speaker's remark is a classic example of the American ruling class' familiar stratagem of misdirecting attention from its own misdeeds by blaming the victims of its policies.

Because Gingrich appears loathsome to most progressives, they underestimate his chances. In polling at CPAC 2007, for example, even though Gingrich is undeclared, he came in a strong fourth, narrowly trailing Romney, Giuliani and Brownback. More interestingly, Gingrich tied Giuliani as the attendees' second choice. If the Democrats don't choose their candidate wisely, in 2008 he could be the nation's first choice.