With all attention focused on Mitt Romney’s income and taxes, Newt Gingrich has gotten a free ride after disclosing his and his wife’s 2010 tax returns. The adjusted gross income of $3.1 million that Mr. and Mrs. Gingrich reported is significantly lower than what the Romneys collected--mostly in capital gains. But making more than $3 million a year is not chopped liver either. The same is true for the total assets of the new Republican frontrunner for the GOP’s presidential nomination. It has been long known that Romney’s wealth amounts to $250 million or so.  But totally lost in the have versus have-not debate is the considerable wealth of Newt and Callista Gingrich—according to Newt Gingrich’s recent disclosure between $7.3 million and $38 million. While $7.3 million is quite a nest egg and might explain Mrs. Gingrich’s preference for Tiffany jewelry, it is utterly amazing to report a more than $30 million gap between the lowest and highest estimate of total assets.  

But whether $7 million or $38 million in his name and regardless of Matt Romney’s greater wealth, Newt Gingrich is a very wealthy man—part of the one-percent financial elite.

And while Gingrich hammers Romney for the ways in which his rival made hundreds of millions of dollars as the head of Bain Capital, he continues to deny that he made his own fortune as political insider, influence peddler, and unregistered lobbyist. To describe his $300,000 a year fee from Freddie Mac, an agency in the midst of the mortgage scandal, first as compensation for his role as historian and then as a strategist comes down to what he easily accuses his political opponents of—not telling the truth. Such phony explanations are insults to everyone else’s common sense.

So, the real Gingrich is a wealthy man who made his fortune as a political influence peddler. Yet, he has succeeded in convincing a growing number of Americans that he is fighting for the common man, for the common interest. That he is the man of the people and for the people. Gingrich speaks the language of and courts members and sympathizers of the populist Tea Party movement. Central to the populist message is faith in the goodness and rightness of ordinary citizens and the idea that the common sense of the common man trumps the views and judgment of elites. Not surprisingly, Tea Partiers have justified their cause by revisiting the grievances and demands expressed by Thomas Paine during the build-up to the American Revolution in his famous pamphlet “Common Sense,” a title that Tea Party patron Glenn Beck borrowed to attack what he alleged to be an out-of-control federal government. Gingrich himself identified early on President Obama and liberals as the greatest threat. Shortly after the birth of the Tea Party, Gingrich said, “People have a growing awareness that the combination of the Obama administration and left-wing Democrats who dominate the Congress means a genuine threat to everything about their life.”

Have you noted that Gingrich does not speak of President Obama, just Obama, thereby signaling the extreme right’s view that the president is illegitimate—not born in the U.S., not a Christian, un-American. Like every populist, Gingrich appeals to the emotions, to the fears, the anger, the frustration of people; he overstates; he disregards the truth—everything to manifest and widen a “fundamental” gap between “we” (the good) and “them” (the bad).

He attacks the power  elite—establishment politicians and the media—and makes believe that he is not profiting from his ties to the former and not playing ball with the latter for the sake of communicating his divisive messages.

Gingrich on stage is very good as populist. He is very good as demagogue. And he is very dangerous.

Michael Gerson, President George W. Bush’s top-speechwriter and senior policy adviser, spelled that danger out in a recent op-ed article in the Washington Post. Discussing Gingrich’s attack on the judiciary, Gerson cites Michael Mukasey, attorney general during the Bush presidency, who commented on Gingrich’s challenge by warning that America would become a “banana republic, in which administrations would become regimes, and each regime would feel it perfectly appropriate to disregard decisions by courts staffed by previous regimes.”

Gerson concludes, “This is a presidential candidate promising a constitutional crisis…” [emphasis added].

I thought I would never agree with Sarah Palin. But today I do. Palin told FOX News last night that she wants the primary competition to continue beyond South Carolina. Her tactic to “keep this thing going” would be a vote for Newt Gingrich in Saturday’s primary. Obviously, she would like to see Mitt Romney’s steamroller slowed down and keep his competitors—especially Gingrich who is most fluent in divisive Tea Party-Speak—viable beyond South Caroline and Florida.  

Although for very different reasons, I agree with Sarah Palin that the primary process should continue. Otherwise, the presidential candidate selection process will be once again a gross violation of the democratic ideal that was the rationale for the post-1968 reforms in both parties: Not party bosses, not the political elite, but rather voters were to determine the nominees of their respective parties.

When a sitting president is not challenged, as is the case with Barack Obama this year, the sole focus is on the competition within the “out” party—this time around on the GOP.  But regardless of party, the selection process has proved to be as undemocratic as the pre-1968 situation, when primaries were merely beauty contests and subject to be embraced or disregarded by party leaders.

While the parties themselves contributed to this state of affairs, media reporting and punditry as well as pollsters are first in line in the list of villains.

A look at the caucus/primary calendar of the GOP reveals that relatively small, unrepresentative states with tiny numbers of delegates dominate among the early election sites. In Iowa 28 delegates were at stake, in New Hampshire 12. Far larger, demographically representative states, were weeks or month later than the earliest caucus and primary states. For example, California with a total of 172 delegates at stake is set for a primary on June 5^th, New York with 95 and Pennsylvania with 72 for April 3^rd.

The news media, pundits, and pollsters, all interested in hyping the news, have good reasons to rarely or never reveal the total number of delegates needed to win a major party’s nomination. In this year’s Republican competition, the winner needs 1,144 delegates—one half of the 2,287 total plus one!

Only if you are informed about the high number of delegates at stake here, can you know what a tiny number are spoken for after Iowa and New Hampshire: a total of 40 delegates—yes, forty delegates of a 2,287 grand total!

And, yet, news reporting, news analysis, and punditry have all declared winners and losers following the decisions in the first two states. Since financial donations dry up for the declared losers in Iowa and New Hampshire, it was inevitable for Michelle Bachmann and Jon Huntsman to throw the towel. Perry is likely to be next as soon as his money cushion is exhausted. By the time, the largest states hold their primaries, voters do not have the same choice as those in the small early bird states. And chances are that they have no chance at all—that one candidate has long been the declared winner without coming close to the required number of delegates.

Think a moment of today’s situation: After Iowa and New Hampshire and only 40 delegates out of a total 2,287 dished out, Mitt Romney, a clear winner in New Hampshire (12 delegates) and but for eight votes sharing the victory with Rick Santorum in Iowa (28 delegates) is widely perceived as the GOP’s sure  presidential nominee. That Romney is unstoppable will be trumpeted even louder, if he wins South Caroline—even though that state’s 25 delegates lifts to only 65 the total of those spoken for, again, out of 2,287.

After listening to more than a dozen debates in this far too long primary season, after listening to the remaining five candidates in the GOP line-up the other night, and after reviewing the paradox of early caucus/primary states with small numbers of delegates compared to the high total, I came to conclude this: First, the selection process (not only that of the GOP but of the Democratic Party as well) is far removed from the participatory ideal; second, this process does not necessary attract the best and the brightest,

Contrary to the GOP’s presidential hopefuls this season who love to put down America’s allies in Europe, the candidate selection process conducted within those countries’ parties and their membership may not always produce the best candidates—but never those presenting a clear minority within a given party or---the clueless     

In 1964, historian Richard Hofstadter wrote an interesting essay about the rise of Goldwater Republicans that is as relevant today as it was in the 1960s. “American politics has often been an arena for angry minds,” Hofstadter began his article in Harper’s magazine. “In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.”

    Behind the Goldwater movement Hofstadter recognized the deeply seated “paranoid style” in American politics characterized by “heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy.” He noted furthermore that the right-wingers of the mid-1960s felt that “America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion.”

    Were Hofstadter alive today, he would surely recognize the same “paranoid style” in the rise of the Tea Party and its power that has moved the Republican Party and its candidates to the extreme right. Today’s right-wingers are driven by the imagined threat that the Democratic Party is conspiring to enact a socialist/communist agenda, that the “illegitimate” President Obama in particular is “un-American” and acting against the national interest, and that Obama is a Muslim or a Muslim sympathizer who conspires to bring Islamic sharia law to America.

    Not just right-wingers and their elite guardians with deep pockets but literally all Republican candidates for the presidential nomination are either part of the movement or see themselves forced to join the battle against the evil, conspiratorial forces that undermine America.

    Mitt Romney, the allegedly moderate among the GOP’s presidential hopefuls, said the other day, “The president said he wants to fundamentally transform America, I kind of like America. I’m not looking for it to be fundamentally transformed into something else. I don’t want it to become like Europe.” I guess he meant the allegedly socialist systems of our European allies.

    Newt Gingrich presents himself as the defender of the true America and President Obama as a threat to America’s creed. "I am an American exceptionalist,” he said during the campaign. “He [President Obama] believes in fundamentally undermining the America we inherited. I believe in fundamentally rebuilding the America we inherited." 

    And former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum chastised President Obama the other day for “absolutely un-American activities” and explained that he, Santorum, was a candidate for the presidency in order to leave the country in better shape for his children.

    In their book Mad As Hell: How the Tea Party Movement is fundamentally Remaking Our Two-Party System , Scott Rasmussen and Douglas Schoen wrote,  “The right-wing populism we are experiencing today is significant because it represents the conjoining of three separate, distinct, and not easily reconcilable strands of conservatism, economic conservatism, small-government libertarians, and social conservatism.” I think that the two pollsters are right. Looking at the GOP’s presidential candidates, they have signed on to the objectives of all three strands, just as most Republican members of Congress signed Grover Norquist’s no-tax pledge.

    As The Economist editorialized recently,

    “Nowadays, a [Republican] candidate must believe not just some but all of the following things: that abortion should be illegal in all cases; that gay marriage must be banned even in states that want it; that the 12m illegal immigrants, even those who have lived in America for decades, must all be sent home; that the 46m people who lack health insurance have only themselves to blame; that global warming is a conspiracy; that any form of gun control is unconstitutional; that any form of tax increase must be vetoed, even if the increase is only the cancelling of an expensive and market-distorting perk; that Israel can do no wrong and the “so-called Palestinians”, to use Mr Gingrich’s term, can do no right; that the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and others whose names you do not have to remember should be abolished.”

            It might well be that the American populace and electorate moved markedly to the right. But whether the victor in the GOP’s nominating process will produce a Republican victory in November and the party’s complete control in Washington is far from clear.       

            Because any Republican nominee will be burdened by supporting the complete right-wing package, there will be an opportunity for progressives, the Democratic Party, and President Obama.   

“No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other,” Hannah Arendt wrote in an 1967 essay (“Between Past and Future”) published first in The New Yorker,  “and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues.” At the time, she lamented about “organized lying, as we know it today….”

But even Arendt, a political theorist with particular interest and expertise in the nature of political power and the human condition, could not have imagined this year’s unreal political reality show, staged by a line-up of unlikely presidential hopefuls, in what seems a parody of a competition for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.

Even after the wacko Herman Cain’s departure from the campaign trail, the remaining six men and one woman continue to be an embarrassment for the Republican Party and for the whole nation. In spite of America’s long tradition of a stable and well-functioning democracy, the country’s current political soap opera is not only the laughing stock of late night comedians at home but of observers abroad as well.

The leading German news magazine DER SPIEGEL called the Republican candidates in a recent Spiegel Online commentary “a club of liars, demagogues and ignoramuses” and suggested that they “even cause their fellow Republicans to cringe.”

Many, perhaps the majority of Republicans do not like what they see and hear. But the power of the most extreme fringe of the Republican Party, mobilized by the Tea Party movement, has gained enormous influence since Barack Obama moved into the White House. Without the blessing of the Tea Party, without the nod of the most conservative faction in the Republican Party, no candidate can hope to win the coming contests or even place near the top of the field.

That is the widely-held perception and that explains why all candidates massage the truth about their records to fit the contemporary sentiments of constituents that dominate the primary contests. “Lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politician’s or the demagogue’s but also of the statesman’s trade,” Arendt wrote. But today’s Republican candidates’ tool boxes seem filled with lies and half-truths.

That is certainly true for the current front-runner Newt Gingrich who during this campaign asked for the punishment of politicians that supported the controversial, government-sponsored Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae enterprises—although he himself collected at least $1.6 million for giving them “strategic advice” after he was hired “as historian.”

Or take Mitt Romney who claims that as businessman he has a proven record of creating jobs, whereas in the real world his take-over adventures were driven by profit imperatives at the expense of jobs. He also sticks to his denials that he did not change his positions on health insurance, legalized abortion, and other issues. Just as Gingrich erases his support for what now would qualify as liberal policies from his memory.  

The more outrageous the positions, the greater the support from the Far Right and Tea Party crowd. In a speech at Harvard University, Gingrich called child labor laws „truly stupid“ and suggested that schools in the poorest neighborhoods “ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school.” Since he took on unionized labor and poor children in one sentence, his support among Republicans has grown. No wonder that he defended his rejection of child labor laws during this week’s appearance with the oddest of presidential king-makers, Donald Trump, who promised to select ten apprentices (in an effort to sound sophisticated, Trump called them “apprenti”) from New York City schools to work for him.

There are millions of poor children in schools in poor neighborhoods in New York and elsewhere but the current frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination exploits his meeting with the most relentless publicity seeker of all times to masquerade as a benevolent public servant before cameras and microphones.

Gingrich describes the 2012 presidential race as “the most important election since 1860.” Obviously, he compares himself to Abraham Lincoln and casts himself as the savior of America as we know it just as he claims a major role in the defeat of communism with the fall of the Soviet Union.

Rarely was the conflict between truth and politics more pronounced and more troublesome than in today’s field of Republican contenders for the presidential nomination.  

Yesterday, as I walked towards the Metropolitan Museum of Arts and encountered the Occupy Wall Street protest directed against Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the recent eviction of OWS protesters from Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, I wondered whether I witnessed the beginning of the end of the two-month old initiative. The number of protesters was quite small. Their mood seemed more festive than combative. They actually seemed to blend naturally into the beautiful fall day in always action-laden Central Park. From news reports we know that the mood of far larger groups of demonstrators was very different in other parts of the country, most of all at the University of California, Davis, following the pepper spraying of peaceful protesters. But this may change as well.

The Occupiers themselves and reporters characterize OWS commonly as a “movement.” But unless the burst of contentious political actions grows into a persistent social movement, “99 percent” will be remembered more as a catchy slogan than a dramatic turning point in favor of a much needed public debate about social justice and sustained political action for closing the 1-99 percent gap.

In the newest edition of his book Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, Sidney G. Tarnow defines the characteristics of both contentious politics and social movements. According to him, “Contentious politics occurs when ordinary people—often in alliance with more influential citizens and with changed in public mood—join forces in confrontation with elites, authorities, and opponents.” As for social movements, he notes, “When backed by well-structured social networks and galvanized by culturally resonant, action-oriented symbols, contentious politics leads to sustained interaction with opponents—to social movements.”

We also know that major social movements in America’s history coincided with the emergence of new media—pamphlets during the revolutionary era; the penny press during the Jacksonian period in the 1830s; the yellow press and muckraking magazines in the Progressive era, and TV-networks at the time of the Civil Rights movement.

Now, social media allow social networking like never before. Charles Tilly and Lesley Wood caution, however, to “avoid technological determinism” since “the mere invention of new communications media did not single-handedly change the character of social movements.” Of course, they are right. People determine whether, how, and for what to use new media forms. As the Arab uprising cases demonstrated, transnational TV-reporting was equally or more important in engaging people than social networking.

New media offer new opportunities to those involved in contentious politics and social movements. Thus, social media was a major, if not the major reason for the rapid growth and persistence of the Tea Party movement that distributed propaganda material, recruited supporters, raised funds, organized collective actions, facilitated local person-to-person meetings via the Internet--and still does all of the above.

The American political process comes down to competition between various interests. Therefore, in order to push for meaningful policy changes, contentious political initiatives cannot rely solely on the public performance stage but must become organized for and involved in electoral politics and pressure on decision-makers in Washington and elsewhere.

That’s precisely what the Tea Party’s contentious politics was/is about: Frequent actions in public spaces and sustained pressure within the political process—the sources for its continuous influence on members of congress. 

Now more than two months old, the Occupy Wall Street initiatives remain at the performance stage. The occupation of public spaces and targeted demonstrations are basically the means to attract the traditional news media, receive coverage and thereby the attention of the general public instead of singing to the choir in the social media. Although not happy about the news coverage in the traditional media, the  OWS initiative achieved its important attention-getting objective.

Yet, the singular focus on performance in public places continues. There is actually a risk here: When these sorts of contentious actions interfere with ordinary citizens’ daily life, as they did last Thursday in New York, sympathizers of the articulated grievances can and do turn into critics and even opponents.

It seems that Occupy Wall Street is near or has reached a crossroads with one way leading to activism in the political process to influence the outcome of elections and actual policy output--and the other into memory lane.