Unfortunately for Gingrich, that same longevity has also generated plenty of baggage over the decades.
“He is brilliant as a political strategist, impossible as a political candidate,” says Lichtman. “His personality is wrong, abrasive, aggressive. For a party of morality, his personal record on morality is pretty bad.”
Thrice married and twice divorced, Gingrich’s personal baggage and infidelities may be too heavy for Christian conservatives in the party of family values. “Two ex-wives is one ex-wife too many for most evangelicals,” Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist and Religious Liberty Commission, told Newsweek.
As a fiercely partisan, flame-throwing provocateur, Gingrich has also won plenty of enemies. He has called President Obama a “secular socialist” and once said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was acting “in the spirit of Soviet tyranny.”
