President Barack Obama's handling of everything from America's response to the Islamic State (ISIS) to the economy and the border crisis have laid the groundwork for "a remarkable Republican sweep" in the midterm elections, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich told
Newsmax TV's "America's Forum" on Wednesday.
"The president is decaying," he said. "People don't believe him. Even if he says what they want him to say, they don't believe he'll do it.
"He's angering his own left both on the border and with the war against ISIS. At the same time, the economy's still not good and people are worried about the deficit, they're worried about big spending. It doesn't feel right to them.
"So what you're likely to see is a very significant Republican turnout and a substantial decline of Democrats turning out," Gingrich added. "You're likely to see independents pretty consistently voting with Republicans and we see this in poll after poll around the country."
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Even the most reputable pollsters expect a bad year for Democrats.
"You can never say it's over until it's over, but my sense is — and you see this with Stu Rothenberg, for example, and Charlie Cook, who are probably the most two respected analysts in the country in elections, both of whom have now said they think the final result will be bigger than the polls," Gingrich said. "They think there's this underlying tide building, and it's very anti-Democrat and very pro-Republican."
A former representative from Georgia, Gingrich was the architect of the "Contract with America" during the 1994 congressional campaign which resulted in a Republican victory.
He resigned his House seat in 1999, after 20 years, and became a political consultant and ran for president in 2012. Now a member of CNN's "Crossfire" panel, he has been a vocal critic of Obama.
He penned a piece the night before the president's Sept. 11 speech on the United States' plan to combat the Islamic State (ISIS), in which
Gingrich laid out 10 objectives Obama needed to impart to the American people. They included Obama stating what would be considered a victory, Obama's strategy for defeating terrorists and recruiters coming from the United States, and whether Obama plans to ask for more resources for the military while continuing to cut the budget.
While it's impossible to predict the future, Gingrich told host J.D. Hayworth that the midterm results could be even worse than Democrats expect.
"We don't know yet how much more Obama will decay in the next seven weeks," he said. "You watch
performances like John Kerry the other morning. He just couldn't be honest and he couldn't say is this a war or is it not a war, is it this, is it that. I mean people are frightened of things like ISIS. They are worried about the economy. They're worried about a border that's so porous that 60,000 or 80,000 children come across it.
"They look at all this stuff and they feel like from Washington, from the Obama administration, they're getting gobbledygook. All of that just lowers their morale. Young people for the first time have turned against Obama. So whatever that magic coalition was going to be that they thought he was going to build, it's in the process of disintegrating."
It is possible, but not likely, for Obama to rebuild credibility with the American people, Gingrich said. Perhaps if there is a Republican rout in November he will change his tack.
"Presidents have enormous advantages if they want to use them," Gingrich said. "They have the bully pulpit of the White House. They have the prestige of Air Force One. They have a capacity to do many things.
"It will be interesting to see — and I don't want to prejudge — we have no reason to believe today that Obama will learn anything or that Obama will change at all.
"But on the other hand," he added, "if there's really a wreckage on election night and he's now faced with Mitch McConnell as Senate leader and John Boehner as House leader and he sees at the state legislature and at the governorship similar wreckage, I don't know how he'll react.
"I mean, is that suddenly the moment when he looks up and says, boy, I've really got to change? Does he start having breakfast every Tuesday with McConnell and Boehner? I don't know."
Gingrich identified "three huge challenges" Obama is facing: He is not very competent at the job of being president; his radical ideology "filters the world through a set of values and patterns that don't work very well because they're not accurate"; and he's ferociously arrogant.
"Someone was pointing out that a lot of the Democrats are mad at him over the decision to take on ISIS and the part of it's just that he doesn't call anybody. He doesn't say, hey, I'm thinking of doing this, what do you think?
"And my reaction was, well, when you're up on Mount Olympus, it's so painful to deal with mere mortals and there's a lot of that in Obama. The arrogance of the way he golfs. The arrogance of his total lack of sensitivity to anybody else's opinion, anybody else's view, anybody else's values. Those are not very good signs for him learning."
Conservative commentator and psychiatrist Charles Krauthammer recently characterized Obama as "a "self-involved narcissist" who "lives in a cocoon surrounded by sycophants."
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Obama's feeble performance as commander in chief, and the likelihood that he will "stumble through the last two years" will make former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's job more difficult should she run, as anticipated, for president in 2016, according to Gingrich.
"I remind people, as bad as we think it is right now, in France, 13 percent approve of socialist President Hollande and 62 percent want him to resign," he noted. "Now who knows where we'll be by next summer if Obama can't learn anything out of this experience."
Gingrich said he doubts he would run for president again, saying there are a "great set of candidates" waiting in the wings.
"We're going to have a lot of governors running," he predicted. "I look at, potentially, Jeb Bush, Rick Perry from Texas, John Kasich is going to win a massive majority in Ohio and then Kasich was the budget chairman who balanced the budget for four straight years, so he has a pretty good story to tell.
"Scott Walker has a huge fan base now. Chris Christie is clearly going to try to run, put something together.
"In the Senate you've got Marco Rubio and you've got Rand Paul and you've got Ted Cruz. You might have Mike Pence from Indiana, you might have Gov. [Mike] Huckabee, who right now leads the poll in Iowa.
"So we're going to have a pretty big field and we're going to have some people we can be very proud of."
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