Re: Republicans 2012
Gingrich Set to Run, With Wife in Central Role
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/10/us/politics/10gingrich.html
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: May 9, 2011
WASHINGTON — Callista Bisek’s friends from rural Wisconsin were stunned when, well over a decade ago, she confided that she was secretly dating an older, married man: Newt Gingrich.
Still in her 20s when they met, Ms. Bisek had been raised in a town of 1,500, the only child of a meat packer and a secretary. A churchgoing Roman Catholic, she had attended a Lutheran college where she practiced piano five hours a day. “Is this the wisest course for you to be taking?” Karen Olson, her best friend, recalled asking.
Today, Ms. Bisek is Mrs. Gingrich, married for 11 years, but perhaps best remembered for the six-year affair that contributed to her husband’s political downfall. His critics cast Mr. Gingrich, the former House speaker, as a hypocrite who sought to impeach a president over infidelity while engaging in it himself with Ms. Bisek, who was a Congressional aide.
Yet in a curious tale of Washington reinvention, the onetime congressman from Georgia is counting on the third Mrs. Gingrich for his political redemption.
As he prepares for a Republican presidential primary run — he said Monday that he would formally declare his intentions on Wednesday — Mr. Gingrich is presenting himself as a family man who has embraced Catholicism and found God, with his wife as a kind of character witness. Depending on one’s point of view, she is a reminder of his complicated past, or his secret political weapon.
Barely a sentence goes by without Mr. Gingrich uttering the words “Callista and I.” They are constantly together — at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington, at conservative political conferences, at book signings and screenings of their documentary films. She is the voice on his audio books; her face is all over his 2012 Web site, where visitors can read “A Note from Newt & Callista.”
At Villanova University on a recent Thursday night, Mrs. Gingrich warmed up the audience for a showing of the couple’s movie about Pope John Paul II by signing books and DVDs in her left-handed curlicue. But when asked whether she is ready for the scrutiny a campaign would bring, she smiled tightly and grew silent.
Mr. Gingrich answered for her. “Seems to be,” he said, with uncharacteristic tentativeness. “We’ve talked about it for a year. It’s difficult.”
Mr. Gingrich is well aware that social conservatives are skeptical of him because he did not emphasize their issues in Congress, but also because of his two divorces and admission of infidelity. He has been meeting with religious leaders around the country to address their concerns.
Deal Hudson, president of Catholic Advocate, a conservative group, said that if Mrs. Gingrich “wants to be first lady,” she would probably have to discuss their relationship as well.
So far she has not. Both Gingriches declined to be interviewed for this article.
“They would say they wished they had met in a different time in their lives under different circumstances,” said Jackie Cottrell, a friend who worked with Mrs. Gingrich as a staff member on Capitol Hill. “But it’s important to note that they brought their family together in a loving way.”
Mr. Gingrich took up golf because his wife plays; she has adopted his political agenda. In 2009, after years of attending Mass to hear her sing in her church choir, he converted to Catholicism. And when Mrs. Gingrich, who plays French horn with the city band in Fairfax, Va., appears in concerts, her husband totes her black instrument case. “I’m a band groupie and a choir groupie,” Mr. Gingrich likes to say.
How eager she is for him to run after he has been out of office since 1999 is a matter of discussion among their friends. Vin Weber, the former Republican congressman from Minnesota, said he is “quite convinced” Mrs. Gingrich is happily on board. “They’ve been out of public life,” Mr. Weber said, “and I think she misses the excitement of that.”
Others say she wants her husband to run because he wants to. She has hired Ms. Olson as her chief of staff; she is also writing a children’s book, due out in September — just in time for her to go on a book tour and reintroduce herself to the public as the primary race heats up.
“I think she has stepped out of her comfort zone more to promote the movies and the books and has found that she enjoyed that,” said Ms. Cottrell. “That’s been a little bit of a toe in the water.“
At 45, 22 years her husband’s junior, Mrs. Gingrich always looks perfectly composed. She favors an almost retro look — platinum hair teased and sprayed, bold-colored suits accessorized by a triple strand of pearls or eye-popping diamond jewelry. In college, friends say, she once signed up for an 8 a.m. bowling class and rolled a 200 wearing a pencil skirt.
Still, they worry aloud that her “physical presence,” in the words of Matt Gunderson, a childhood friend, makes her seem distant or stuffy. They see a woman who, caricatured as a “blond bombshell” in the press years ago, guards her public image.
“That’s a role she has had to assume,” said Tim Peter, a classmate of Mrs. Gingrich’s at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa, “because that one morning you go out for the paper without your makeup on, that’s the day you wind up on the front page.”
As a young girl in Whitehall, Wis., Ms. Bisek experienced politics through the prism of community ties, not ideology. Mr. Gunderson’s elder brother, Steve, was a congressman; as high school students, Ms. Bisek and her friends knocked on doors and appeared in parades as a singing campaign troupe.
“We were ‘Glee’ before ‘Glee,’ ” the younger Mr. Gunderson said.
If she had a career dream, it was playing for an orchestra, not making headlines in Washington. Yet her high school yearbook suggests a yearning to stand out.
“Some people strive to be one of the many,” she wrote. “I strive to be one of the few.”
She worked for Representative Gunderson, a Republican, in Washington after college, eventually landing a job with the House Agriculture Committee, where she stayed until Democrats took over in 2007. Today, she runs Gingrich Productions, making documentaries in conjunction with Citizens United, the nonprofit group that drew national attention in a Supreme Court case last year. While Citizens United does technical production, Mrs. Gingrich, a former music major, is especially hands-on with the musical scores.
She and her husband work from adjoining offices in a building on K Street, Washington’s lobbying corridor, home to the sprawling enterprise that Gingrich aides call “Newt Inc.,” which produces books and films at a dizzying pace. Their efforts are planned around what Ms. Olson calls their “thematic — the message of what they stand for.”
Their new focus is American exceptionalism, the notion that the United States is unique and stands above other nations. Mrs. Gingrich’s children’s book is devoted to the topic; so is one by Mr. Gingrich, due out next month. It is also the theme of their newest documentary — no surprise given that many Republicans, including Mr. Gingrich, claim that President Obama rejects exceptionalism.
Mr. Gingrich will have to dismantle his busy operation for a presidential run, though aides say Gingrich Productions will survive, with his wife in charge. Looking ahead to the campaign, Gingrich intimates are already envisioning how Mrs. Gingrich, with her college ties to Iowa, might help her husband there.
The same friends who tried to talk her out of out of dating him more than a decade ago have concluded that she knew what she was doing, and are banking that voters will forgive and forget. Ms. Olson summed up their history in what might just become a campaign catchphrase.
“They’re a great couple,” she said, “that had a nontraditional start.”
