Quote of the Day (Andrew Ferguson on Newt Gingrich, “Panicky Before Panicky Was Cool”)

“Reading the [Newt] Gingrich catalog, you get used to intimations — or are they threats? — of Armageddon. Windows are slamming shut, or are just about to, all over the place, all the time. ‘Time is running out,’ he wrote toward the end of ‘Window of Opportunity,’ 27 years ago. It’s no wonder that Washington thinks he’s so smart: Gingrich was panicky before panicky was cool. The political class runs on his kind of excitement, as one crisis of the century succeeds another, week by week. Politics on its own terms is so boring — decades of the same issues, the same interests, the same charges of heartlessness against Republicans and of profligacy against Democrats — that attention has to be stoked by artificial means.”--Andrew Ferguson, “What Does Newt Gingrich Know?”, The New York Times Magazine, July 3, 2011