Callista Gingrich – mistress, wife and First Lady in waiting?

CALLISTA GINGRICH, permed to a terrifying precision from blonde-rinsed head to polished toe, may be about to emerge as the trump card in the Republican party primaries for next year’s presidential election.

She is the third wife of Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House who blew it in the 1990s when he persecuted President Bill Clinton for being an adulterous sleazebag while he himself was bedding a young mistress – Callista - as his then-wife died of cancer.

Even American conservatives got that one, and threw Newt out.

Now, at 68, he is back as the latest frontrunner in the stumbling race to challenge President Obama. Polls show that Gingrich, white-haired, slimmed down a belt-notch or two and shamelessly admitting to holding credit accounts worth $500,000 at Tiffany’s in order to shower Wife #3 with diamonds, is ahead in the critical states of South Carolina (God and racism) and Florida (Cuban commie-haters and rich retired New York Jews).

Mormon Mitt Romney, ever the “presumed front runner” but stuck at 25 per cent of the Republican vote, yesterday paid Newt the compliment of denouncing him on Fox News for “erratic outspokenness” for calling Palestinians an “invented people”, and as an “unreliable leader”.

Callista, a generation junior to her husband at 45, is in the spotlight after Newt told Newsweek how he had been ready to quit the race until she told him, Dick Whittington-style, to “turn again”.

If the Republicans cannot find a bottom worthy of putting on the Oval Office throne, it looks like they may have found in Callista a Power Behind the Throne they can believe in.

Callista Gingrich, nee Bisek, born to a meat packer and a secretary in a town of 1,500 in Wisconsin, is looking like the new Nancy Reagan. She is as ambitious as Nancy. A practising Catholic, she studied for a music degree at a Lutheran college in Iowa before scoring an internship on Capitol Hill in Washington. She was in Newt’s bed in her 20s.
 
Her Facebook page lists her employers as Gingrich Productions, where Newt peddles his old power as a lobbyist, and The Basilica of the Red Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, where she sings in the choir with such enchantment that Newt himself has converted to Rome.

No candidate gets close to the Republican nomination without claiming the mantle of Ronald Reagan. Why else would Gingrich Productions publish a book called Ronald Reagan, Rendezvous with Destiny, with both Gingriches listed as authors?

Ron and Nancy’s private life – ambition, divorce, children abandoned to the ministrations of shrinks – had no more in common with the professed “family values” of the Religious Right than Newt and Callista’s.

It should take only a little spin to persuade the pious Republican base of Newt’s moral soundness. Karen Olson, Callista’s “best friend” from childhood who is now her personal chief-of-staff, tried this one on the New York Times: “They are a great couple who had a non-traditional start.” Not bad. ·