Last Call

MoDo The Red may actually have found somebody she despises more than Michelle Obama: Callista Gingrich.

IF you want to figure out why Newt Gingrich is still out there grasping for lost power, howling at the moon like King Lear, look to Callista. 

You can find her anytime standing statue-still on stage next to Newt as he speaks, gazing at him with such frozen attentiveness that she could give a master class to Nancy Reagan. 

Yeah, at this point she's blaming Callista for Newt still being in the race.  She hates Michelle Obama, but man if she were in an elevator with Callista, MoDo would stab her.  Like, 27 times.

In business, the Transformational Wife is less complicated. In politics, she’s a double-edged spouse. She feeds his ego like a goose destined for pâté, but drains support among some women and some evangelicals who disapprove of a man who keeps trading in wives, even sick ones. 

At the Texas meeting of evangelicals last month, one of the leaders, James Dobson, questioned whether Callista, “a mistress for eight years,” as he put it, would make a good first lady. 

Ouch.

Gingrich’s communications director, Joe DeSantis, has airbrushed Callista’s Wikipedia page 23 times since 2008, often to banish unflattering details from the site, according to BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski. 

DeSantis edited the introduction, taking out the fact that she is “the third wife of,” and excising the sentence, “She met her husband while he was in the House, and had an affair while he was conducting the impeachment investigation for President Bill Clinton.” 

As The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza reported, the top Google search for Gingrich in Florida during the primary there was “Callista,” right up there with “Newt wives” and “Newt scandals.” 

That may be why she has a largely nonspeaking role in the campaign, as silent as the slender heroine of “The Artist,” even though Newt relays that she has described herself as a hybrid of Nancy Reagan, Laura Bush and Jackie Kennedy. The campaign does not want to remind voters that the relationship, portrayed as so redemptive, was born in sin and hypocrisy.

 

Damn.  I mean I know it's petty, catty malarkey and all (MoDo's specialty) but it's just as awful when directed at Republicans as it is when it's directed at the First Lady.  The difference is that she's right about Newt's hypocrisy, but directing that anger at Callista isn't healthy.  Pin it on Newt, where it belongs.

And stop penning columns while drunk.