ShareThisNewt Gingrich the history professor could teach a semester-long course on the improbable fall and rise of Newt Gingrich the presidential candidate, who leads the polls in Iowa and key early primary states of South Carolina and Florida.
The midterm exam assignment would focus on the weeks before the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses -- to see if the former House speaker survives the barrage of attacks by everyone from Democrat Nancy Pelosi to conservative John Sununu, former chief of staff for President George H.W. Bush and a supporter of rival Mitt Romney.
If Gingrich survives the attacks -- and his own propensity for self-immolation -- analysts say he could have more staying power than the past few Republican flavors-of-the-month who have melted under the front-runner's spotlight.
Though Gingrich raised less money than all but one of his GOP rivals through September, analysts say if he performs well in the early states he could get enough of a fundraising bump to compete in the Jan. 31 Florida primary.
But first he must survive December.
In the past few days, Gingrich, 68, has been called "self-aggrandizing," "unstable," "a big government liberal" and "the Kim Kardashian of the GOP." He's been accused of "serial hypocrisy" and of being a participant in the "excesses of our broken and polarized political system."
And that's just what his fellow Republicans have said. No wonder that of the 50 House Republicans who served with Gingrich in Congress until his 1999 resignation, only two have endorsed him.
Yet six months after his campaign staff quit en masse and he was politically left for dead at the Tiffany's checkout counter, as President Barack Obama adviser David Axelrod described it, Gingrich enjoys a double-digit lead in Iowa over Romney.
The source of his rise, analysts say, is both clear and baffling.
Republicans love his full-throated defense of conservative principles. They forget -- or are ignorant of -- why conservatives fell out of love with him not long after he helped lead the 1994 Republican revolution that put the House in GOP hands for the first time in 40 years.
Gingrich is attractive to Republican primary voters "because he says things with such apocalyptic certainty," said Dennis Goldford, co-author of "The Iowa Precinct Caucuses: The Making of a Media Event."
They've forgotten how the Republican-led House hit him with the largest fine in House Ethics Committee history; his tumultuous private life; his volatile leadership skills; and how fellow top House Republicans tried to overthrow him four years after he led their comeback. When the federal government shut down in the mid-1990s, more poll respondents blamed Republicans than President Bill Clinton.
Yet Republican primary voters seem unfazed by his more recent flip-flops on climate change -- including the 2008 commercial he appeared in with Pelosi saying that they agree that "our country must take action to address climate change."
He supported individual mandates for health care in 2005; he now opposes them and wants to repeal the new federal health care law. He supported the federal government's bank bailout, which many Republicans opposed. He rails on Washington insiders, but earned at least $1.5 million consulting for Freddie Mac.
"Yes, he has baggage," said Tod Lindberg, a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution think tank who has studied Gingrich for decades. "But it kind of helps him in a way that this is a guy whose dirty laundry has been aired in many ways for many years."
If you apply the one-sentence historical test to Gingrich, Lindberg said, "you come up with 'Newt Gingrich was a Republican leader that led his party to its first majority in the House of Representatives in 40 years.' It's not ... 'and he screwed it up.' That's the second line.
"That's what Republicans are responding to," Lindberg said. "He did take a party out of the wilderness."
Gingrich has built his campaign lead through a series of strong debate appearances, where his professorial knowledge of the issues has outshone the competition, analysts said.
But trouble potentially lies ahead.
Getting voters to one of Iowa's 1,700 caucus locations requires a statewide operation of volunteers and staffers that insiders say Gingrich is unlikely to assemble in the coming weeks.
While Gingrich enjoys a healthy lead in Iowa, two-thirds of the likely GOP caucus voters in a recent CBS News/New York Times poll said they hadn't made up their minds yet.
Then there's perhaps Gingrich's biggest enemy, analysts said: Gingrich.
On Dec. 9, he told a Jewish cable channel that Palestinians are an "invented" people and that "they are really Arabs who chose not to live elsewhere."
While that may not hurt him with Republican primary voters, it would if he were to get the nomination. Gingrich still does not poll well with independent voters, who will decide the general election, Lindberg said.
(Email Joe Garofoli at jgarofoli(at)sfchronicle.com.)
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