And don’t forget, his audience sees themselves as victimized and abused, disrespected by those they feel are intrinsically inferior to them. They don’t want to merely discredit and defeat liberals or even prove them mistaken, they want to humiliate them, demolish them, make them whimper and cry and beg for mercy. These guys don’t just want victory in battle, they want to torture the prisoners.

Gingrich promises them that, he’s tough, “he don’t take no shit from anybody”, he’ll “mop the floor with them”, he “ain’t looking for trouble but he won’t back down from it”. You’ve heard the rap before. It’s every schoolyard cliche in the book.

The Gingrich audience knows things are going bad for them, that the world is changing into a state which is not very sympathetic to them. To put it bluntly, things aren’t working out the way they’d planned, the way they were counting on. They are scared, not so much by the fact that things may go wrong, (everyone recognizes that as a possibility), but that perhaps they are partially responsible for what is happening to them, either by omission or commission. They need someone they can blame for their problems because it will then justify their own actions up to now. Whatever is going wrong can be blamed on someone else, someone different, someone who can be crushed. They need an Other, an alien, a foreigner.

Carter was a businessman, military man, farmer, born-again Christian southerner. He wasn’t cut out to be their scapegoat. Clinton didn’t fit the bill either, too much of the good ole boy Bubba ’bout him. Good lookin’, sweet talkin’ ladies’ man, too. Obama’s just right: foreign, exotic, funny name, uppity, smarty-pants, an anti-colonialist Kenyan Makaka with a fake birth certificate and forged college grades. Can you imagine going after someone for nonsense like that when what you really fear is his politics and economics? That makes no sense unless its viewed as a psychosocial artifact.

Gingrich is a very intelligent man, perhaps the most intelligent Conservative politician around (there are lots of intelligent Conservatives, but they rarely go into politics). But he is also cynical and ruthless, unprincipled and ambitious. His own colleagues and congressional allies realize that about him. If Gingrich actually believes the tough-guy entrepreneurial scholar-patriot myth he’s created about himself, he’s merely laughable. But if he is aware of what he is doing and doing it deliberately, he is really dangerous. In fact, he’s lethal.

without the crowd, he can’t rise to the occasion. and without the applause and ovations he sounds like an angry, bitter, little man.