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Said a whopping 9% of americans wanted him to be president. 9%. the time at which he was most known by the american people was not only a time at which he was greatly disliked. he was also the stuff of nightmares, almost literally. in the same time magazine poll which i said was 1996, it was actually 1995, sorry. the same time magazine poll, 1995, 49% of americans chose the adjective scary to describe their feelings about newt gingrich. that actual word, scary. but now he s back. tomorrow night there is a $1,000 a head fund-raiser for gingrich in washington hosted by k. street lobbyists, one lobbyist, robert livingston who succeeded gingrich as speaker-elect and was forced to resign from a sex scandal a few weeks later. he s a successful lobbyist. his house seat went on to david vitter, the hooker guy, got bob livingston s seat after his sex scandal who got newt gingrich s speakership after his scandal. hooker scandal guy is a senator ....
So, therefore, you get to know him in another context and say, that was so long ago. and, but, you know, i think what s really interesting about newt is i got to know newt back in 1986. and newt when he s not in power, when he doesn t have a lot of power, is a really interesting guy. you d love to talk to him. i talked to somebody who was quite close to him once. he said when newt gets power, somebody gives his head a helium injection and he starts attacking people. another republican i talked to said, you know, he had a file cabinet in his office. four files were newt s ideas. one file was newt s good ideas. this is from republicans who actually kind of like newt, say about him. the problem he has, there are people who like to sit down with him and chat to him about stuff, argue with him about stuff. they worry, does he have a presidential temperament? they worry his tendency to attack other people the tendency to attack i think is hurting him in these scandals because when you use ....
People in washington is to say, this guy just is not someone you want to be president. is romney campaigning better because of gingrich s surge in the polls? i m not sure he s campaigning better, but he s campaigning more intensely. harder. he is finally going on meet the press. my reading of the romney side, they never expected it to be them and newt. i think some of them, the smart ones i know are concerned because it is getting very, very close. romney seems very reluctant to go after gingrich. but that s why i think you re going to see a lot more talk about the ethics stuff, a lot more talk about his temperament and going to see a lot of his former colleagues who are actually worried about him as a nominee start speaking out. queue the newsreel footage of ....
And the other sex scandal guy is raising money for the ethics scandal guy who is running for president. who says you can t survive scandal in this town? and do rather well with it. joining us now is washington post columnist e.j. dionne, also a senior fellow at the brookings institution and msnbc contributor. e.j., good to see you. thank you for being here. good to see you. i m still drawing the lines among all the people. livingston, like gingrich goes. livingston steps in. livingston has to step down. livingston s seat goes to david vitter. look at where all the guys are now. i think, why do i bother talking about scandals? this stuff rolls off these guys. they just get reincarnated. it s true. there s a lot of forgiveness ....
Attack words against other people and then get involved in stuff where you are under the microscope, people are less forgiving toward you than if you d been a little more restrained in those other attacks. i think those attacks still live with a lot of people in this town. there is this sense that his that he operates with a lot of centripetal force. that can make him an exciting person to watch. an interesting person out of power. i wonder what you think about the sort of emerging evidence on the left that the left, both democrats and people who are just progressives, are really psyched by the prospect of a newt gingrich candidacy. that a guy who left office as probably the best known politician in the country who wasn t the president, himself, 9% of the country wanted him to be president, 49% of the country thought he was scary. i think the left thinks that he would be an imminently beatable candidate. what s your assessment of that? i must say, whenever the left, whenever prog ....