Gingrich eats his words so he can spit them out with a new preposition this fall.

I’ve always felt that politicians embody the most vile manifestation of celebrity, with newscasters hot on their tails. We like “real” celebrities – movie stars and music artists – because they’re pretty, or funny, or put a song in our heart. Newscasting has always seemed to draw people who want to be admired in this way, but fall a little short of silver screen level “star quality” or “It Factor”. But politicians? Dear God. They’re often not very attractive, they talk about things you don’t understand, care about, and exactly 50% of the time don’t agree with, and then they want you to LIKE them so much you actually have to trudge out and SAY SO in a voting booth. Since they’re generally so unattractive and disagreeable, that means that in order to secure this love and admiration they so desperately need, they have to lie and cheat almost constantly. Which is why I was so excited about the idea of the Newt Swingrich 2012 campaign. As such a despicable spouse cheat and hypocrite, he’s well on the way to winning our 2011 Best Politician award. Let’s not forget that Newt was not only cheating on his wife while engineering the Clinton/Lewisnky impeachment circus, he also was one of the key architects of the Contract with America. An interestingly titled document, since the only Americans that actually signed it were all GOP politicians. A document that was also interesting in that it is often credited with giving the GOP a congressional majority for the first time in decades, when this was in fact already well on the way to happening. It was sort of like Reagan shouting “tear down that wall” at a time when this was almost certain to happen anyway. Good timing and good politics, but not really “good leadership” in the conventional sense. In any case, I have much more to be excited about this week than last week regarding the 2012 presidential race. If historians record this era in America with any accuracy, it will be remembered as the era that turned politics into the DC version of “American Idol”, and Frank Luntz – GOP pollster, strategist, and author of the brilliant Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear – will be remembered as its kingmaker. And he’s at it again. You may have read or heard about his  survey work with 26 Iowa Republicans last month. The results were interesting, and could easily be spun in two distinctly different ways. While on the surface, Gingrich seemed to be the surprise winner, the inclusion of undeclared candidates like Michele Bachmann shifted the feel of things quite a bit. Suggesting that Bachmann may in fact be capable of more than just the Tancredo Effect. Just the other day CNN reported that she’ll be forming an exploratory committee by June. This would create a pretty volatile field, with the strongest contenders so far being Huckabee, Gingrich, Palin, and Bachmann. But can a teabagger candidate like Palin or Bachmann do anything but divide the party? Especially if there are two of them? And if they get enough media spin (as Andrew Breitbart says, Sarah’s really too good for the White House and should take her throne as the next Oprah) can the old-school white guys learn to work with them? Because they’d probably have to sign on to the teabagger remix of the Contract with America called the Contract FROM America . And then we have Trump to consider, and hell who knows, maybe even Hillary. As outlandish as THAT sounds, it was James Carville himself who not too long ago said “If Hillary gave [Obama] one of her balls, they’d both have two”. He also hilariously called Romney the “Designated White Guy”. Wherever this heads, you can trust we’ll have more fun than a tornado in a trailer park with the 2012 campaign trail. The Swingrich campaign is just the beginning. We’ll probably have to fine-tune our Donner Party platform, and give the Palyn/Quail ticket a re-think.