From 1999 through last March, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich had a regular presence on Fox News as a contributor with a reported salary of “nearly $1 million a year,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
On this weekend’s episode of “The Chris Matthews Show,” NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent Kelly O’Donnell said that Gingrich’s longtime presence has created a “comfortability” with voters.
“He’s had this great forum for a long time where he can work out some of these ideas,” O’Donnell said. “There’s a comfortability with those voters who are not necessarily thinking of all of those data points in his career that didn’t go so well. They’ve had a chance to — in a much more intimate way — spend time with him. … Romney has not been in that same forum: Just recently the other day he said you’ll see me more on Fox News because it’s important to Republican primary voters.”
Host Chris Matthews theorized that Republican voters in Iowa watched Fox News instead of entertainment programming, which helped Gingrich’s cause.
“Hard-working conservative guys and women come home in Iowa and places like that,” Matthews proclaimed. “After they go to work, they don’t watch entertainment shows, ‘American Idol.’ They watch the hard-nosed, right-wing stuff. Newt’s on as one of their advisers. That’s pretty intimate.”
Watch:
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CNN chief political analyst Gloria Borger added there was a TV presence for Newt Gingrich that was a lot like Ronald Reagan’s presence while he took a hiatus from politics.
“Right, and Newt didn’t disappear,” Borger said. “And let me recall one other person from history that was sort of interesting in his relationship with television, and that’s Ronald Reagan — Ronald Reagan, a salesman for General Electric who then took his story on the road politically. They already knew him from television. They liked him. He had been in their living room. Forget the movie stuff. He had been in their living room and then can take his politics on the road.”