Israel Matzav

Can Newt win? (With video from Marianne Gingrich interview)

Rick Perry is planning to drop out of the South Carolina primary on Thursday and endorse Newt Gingrich (Hat Tip: Memeorandum), a move that is likely to make Gingrich the man to beat for the anti-Romney candidacy in the Republican party, notwithstanding Thursday's news that Rick Santorum actually won the Iowa caucuses. Gingrich has been making a lot of very pro-Israel statements lately.

But can Newt win? Over lunch today, Mrs. Carl told me that she thinks Newt is a disaster, and that if he wins the nomination, the Democrats will attack his personal life and Obama will be reelected. Mrs. Carl even told me that Newt divorced his first wife while she was dying from cancer (which of course made me think of John and Elizabeth Edwards). But Newt did not divorce his first wife while she was dying of cancer. She's still alive thirty years later.

Although the thrust of the story about his first divorce is not in dispute — Gingrich’s first wife, Jackie Battley, has said previously that the couple discussed their divorce while she was in the hospital in 1980 — other aspects of it appear to have been distorted through constant retelling.

Most significant, Battley wasn’t dying at the time of the hospital visit; she is alive today. Nor was the divorce discussion in the hospital “a surprise” to Battley, as many accounts have contended. Battley, not Gingrich, had requested a divorce months earlier, according to Jackie Gingrich Cushman, the couple’s second daughter. Further, Gingrich did not serve his wife with divorce papers on the day of his visit (unlike a subpoena, divorce papers aren’t typically “served”).

Gingrich’s marriage to Battley had been troubled for many years before it dissolved 31 years ago, both parties have said. Battley, who is seven years older than Gingrich, had been Gingrich’s high school math teacher in Columbus, Ga. They began dating after he graduated and were married in 1962, when Gingrich was 19 and a freshman at Emory University in Atlanta.

In time, the marriage grew contentious, and the couple spent several years in counseling. In spring 1980, Gingrich left her, Battley told The Washington Post in 1985. Around this time, the couple gathered their children, then ages 16 and 13, around the kitchen table at their home in Fairfax County and told them that they intended to divorce, Cushman wrote in a syndicated column in May (none of the family members nor Gingrich would comment for this article).

Gingrich's second wife has been interviewed by ABC News (Hat Tip: Memeorandum), which is now apparently going to run the interview on Thursday night's Nightline - two days before the South Carolina primary. This is from the first link in this paragraph.

Marianne Gingrich has said she could end her ex-husband's career with a single interview.

Earlier this week, she sat before ABCNEWS cameras, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

She spoke to ABCNEWS reporter Brian Ross for two hours, and her explosive revelations are set to rock the trail.

But now a "civil war" has erupted inside of the network, an insider claims, on exactly when the confession will air!

ABCNEWS suits determined it would be "unethical" to run the Marianne Gingrich interview so close to the South Carolina Primary, a curious decision, one insider argued, since the network has aggressively been reporting on other candidates.

A decision was tentatively made to air the interview next Monday, after all votes have been counted.

Gingrich canceled a press conference on Wednesday to deal with the matter.

"He believes that what he says in public and how he lives don't have to be connected," Marianne Gingrich, Newt's wife of 18 years, explained to ESQUIRE last year.

Developing...

What did Marianne Gingrich tell Brian Ross? Here's some of it.

Let's go to the videotape (Hat Tip: WMAL via Memeorandum).



In Europe, this would be considered a joke or a sign of machismo. But in the US - which still has some moral decency left - one's family life is not a matter to be taken lightly. On the other hand, in the last 20 years Americans have had a President who was provided with oral sex by a woman half his age while attending to the affairs of state in the oval office (and that's just the tip of Bill Clinton's iceberg). Will the American people really vote against Newt Gingrich because his ex-wife tells them to?

I don't know the answer to that last question. But I'm glad it's coming out now and not in the summer after the convention. And yes, I would still vote for Gingrich over Obama, but we'd likely be better off with squeaky clean Rick Santorum (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).

Labels: Newt Gingrich, RIck Santorum

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:33 PM