Newt and the Christians

MANIFESTO

Quick: Who won the 2008 Republican Iowa caucuses? If you didn't guess Mike Huckabee, you'd be wrong.

And why, pray tell, did Huckabee prevail? It had everything to do with Christianity:

The Republican contest was essentially about one thing: religion. Evangelical Christians accounted for a remarkable six in 10 GOP caucus-goers, and they favored Huckabee, a Baptist minister, over Mitt Romney, who's Mormon, by a broad 46-19 percent.

Fast forward to 2012 where we find that

Newt Gingrich has stepped into the breach and now stands alone as the most popular GOP presidential candidate in The Des Moines Register’s new Iowa Poll.

So if we can assume—and there's no reason not to—that 60% of Iowa Republican voters are evangelical, it should be remarkable that the former Speaker of the House is so popular there.

This is a man who, after all, has been married three times and has had untold extramarital affairs. It should stand to reason that the nominally pious should derogate such behavior.

But the truth of the matter is that the evangelicals don't care about matters like these. In Gingrich they see a candidate who rails against "those people" who need food stamps to survive.

Like the Tea Partiers, evangelicals continue to demonstrate that they are simply a bunch of greedy and racist homophobes who care only about their own precious souls and couldn't care less about Jesus's teachings regarding the poor and oppressed.

Theirs is a selfishly vile way to go through life, but one can certainly see why the perfidious Gingrich would be so appealing to them.