Former speaker of the house Newt Gingrich feeds a panda.John Gastaldo/The San Diego Union-Tribune/ZumaPress.com
As a service to our readers, every day we are delivering a classic moment from the political life of Newt Gingrich—until he either clinches the nomination or bows out.
Newt Gingrich once told an interviewer that he’s been fighting to save Western Civilization since 1958, so it shouldn’t come as a total surprise that he spends most of his waking moments attempting to extrapolate grand, sweeping meanings from incredibly mundane items (Popsicles, for instance). As he told Atlanta magazine, his plans to save America often left little time for anything else:
“If you said to me, ‘What are your hobbies?’ they would be reading, going to the movies, going for long walks, animals and the outdoors. But the truth is when I read, I am reading about something that relates. When I go to the movies—I saw Parenthood the other day—I think, ‘What does that tell me about America?’ In a sense, I am almost always engaged. And that has a disadvantage to really break out of that and stop to think, All right, how do you have a private life?”
All of which gives some much needed context to Gingrich’s confession, to CBN’s David Brody last spring, that his extramarital affaiirs were “driven by how passionately I felt about this country.”
