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Then Newt opens his mouth, and you understand why it’s curtains for Mitt in South Carolina. Here in the Whiteford’s Giant Burger, with a zillion other things on his mind, Gingrich extemporizes a speech about an anniversary promotion offering Giant Burgers at 1957 prices that seems positively Ciceronian compared with Mitt’s fumbling, wet-orange-shirt, trees-are-the-right-height attempts to persuade us that he lives in the same dimension we do.
Now he’s going on about the Port of Charleston, and here is the coup de grâce. A toddler waddles over and, while Newt’s talking, tugs on his pants or something. Newt stops his speech, smirks down at the little guy, and asks, “Hello, do you have a mommy? What? You’re Johnny Cash? Jordan Cash? Thank you, Jordan Cash.”
And he sends the toddler toodling off. When the speech winds down, I talk with a woman named Pam DeLong, who is a Tea Partier here in Laurens. She is for Newt because he’s for real, he’s a smarty, and because of stuff like the Jordan Cash moment. “When that little boy came over, he stopped and talked to him, and he was so natural, and then he just went back into his speech without missing a beat. Romney couldn’t do that. Newt knows what he’s talking about. He doesn’t let things fluster him, which is why I think he’d be the best guy to take on Obama.”
In other words, Newt is an ideal candidate because when an infant pestered him, he hacked it, took it like a man, a pro. If it were Romney? And an infant started fucking with him? You know it would be bad, some pediatric version of the time he sang “Who Let the Dogs Out” to black teens in Florida. “Hello, little organism different from myself. I will now make noises that I believe are comprehensible to your kind.”
"Wells Tower, “Desperately Seeking Mitt”, GQ (the man can write)
