Gingrich 'doesn't speak in sound bites,' a spokesman said. Newt reins himself in for final push

ATLANTIC, Iowa — After months of bringing his legendary rhetorical meanderings to the presidential campaign trail, Newt Gingrich has suddenly discovered message control.

With just three days to go to the Iowa caucuses, gone are the references to railroads, space exploration, heavy policy positions or the nitty-gritty of running for office that he’d kept to even as he rose and fell in the polls. Thursday night, he didn’t get to talking about his jobs plan until finishing an extended impromptu history lesson about Abraham Lincoln’s decision to build the transcontinental railroad after a visit to Council Bluffs. But in Council Bluffs on Saturday morning, 50 yards from the tracks and in earshot of a train noisily rumbling by, he didn’t even mention it.


Instead, Gingrich stayed mostly on message, delivering a nearly identical speech for the fourth time in a row — a sudden show of consistency.

Of course, he’s not a completely changed man. At a town hall meeting here Saturday afternoon, Gingrich delivered his neatly segmented remarks on taxes, regulations and an overarching economy, but when asked to explain his position on global warming, he delivered a new line.

“I’m an amateur paleontologist,” Gingrich said. “I spend a lot of time looking at the Earth’s temperature for a very long time. I’m a lot harder to convince than just looking at a computer model.”

Gingrich appears to get bored giving the same speech over and over again, instead straying off message and relishing in fielding questions from the audience, which he spends most of his events doing.

That’s led him down unexpected paths — but ones he’s almost always been willing to engage.

Take the last stop on Tuesday at Mabe’s Pizza in Decorah, where a woman asked if America is prepared for a pandemic.

“I honestly don’t know, and it would depend on what kind of pandemic it was,” Gingrich said.

He wasn’t done. For several minutes, he went on about the quality of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — based in Georgia, the state he represented in the House, he noted. Then he told the woman that what he’s really concerned about is the threat of an electromagnetic pulse, a frequent subject of Gingrich diversions that he even brought up on stage at the CNN debate in Washington, D.C., last month.

Gingrich acknowledges his tendency to stray.

At a campaign stop in Sioux City on Thursday morning, as he was starting to wander into an unprompted discussion on Freddie Mac, “What does your jobs plan mean for Iowa?” was shouted from the back.

The question didn’t come from a local reporter trying to write an impact story but from Gingrich press secretary R.C. Hammond, who was trying to get the candidate back in his lane.

“Oh, he wants me to get back on message,” Gingrich responded. “R.C. does his best to corral me and keep me from wandering like that.”

But even then, Gingrich said he isn’t concerned about getting off message.

“I don’t worry about it much,” he said. “I find that you guys cover enough material every day that we get the message through endlessly, and we just keep repeating it.”

Despite his own efforts to stop them, Hammond dismissed the notion that Gingrich’s ramblings can be an issue.

“You’re trying to force him into a mold,” Hammond said. “He doesn’t speak in sound bites.”

Hammond added that storytelling is a large part of Gingrich’s appeal.

“It’s appealing to voters that he can have a thought that lasts longer than a minute,” he said.

In fact, sometimes Gingrich has thoughts that last several minutes.

Instead of talking in overarching themes about creating jobs or changing the economy, he frequently talks about how he is talking about the economy. He goes on long tangents about economic theory.

At an event in Storm Lake on Friday, where he was endorsed by Art Laffer, an economist who advised Ronald Reagan, both spoke at length about the intricacies of supply-side economics.

While trying to evoke the goodwill that comes with being tied to Reagan, even Laffer acknowledged that the discussion of the college-level economic theory could be lost on some.

“I hope I’m not going way over your heads in talking about this today,” Laffer told the crowd before launching into an explanation of a competition-based tax policy.

Talking about economics didn’t prompt the type of cheering and emotional response other candidates get when tossing out buzz words and repeating well-crafted lines.

But Gingrich said he wasn’t concerned about risking glazed-over eyes in the audience.

“I campaigned in 1978 on cutting taxes to create jobs and won,” Gingrich said when asked if talking about policy will lose people. “I worked with Reagan’s camp in ’79 and ’80, and he campaigned on the three-year tax cut to create jobs. In 1994, we campaigned on trying to have the economy grow again.”