N ewt Gingrich reluctantly leaves some of the slower-thinking states now to come to New York, starting with a Tea Party-sponsored event Saturday night at Staten Island’s Hilton Garden Inn.  Gingrich will be in the Trevi Garden room of the Hilton, part of Nicotra’s Ballroom there, and that will be a pretty good place for him to feel at home, considering his colorful — and extremely busy — romantic past.  Three years ago, December 2008, there was another famous event at the Hilton, a luncheon for Rep. Vito Fossella, on his way out of office at that point, facing a five-day jail sentence because of a drunken-driving bust.  You may remember that because of that drunken-driving arrest, it came out that the married Fossella had not just been having an affair, but had fathered a child with his girl on the side. That would eventually cost him his job in Congress, but clearly this was thinking out of the past in the Republican Party, where no one cares about your private life anymore.  “Oh, we have political events for all kinds here,” somebody from the Hilton Garden told me yesterday.  At that farewell luncheon three years ago, Rep. Pete King said he couldn’t wait for Fossella, a well-liked guy from the time he served in the City Council, to return to public service.  If he could have seen a few years into the future, Fossella not only would have tried to hold on to his job at the time, he might have started to see himself as future presidential material.  One girlfriend doesn’t even get you a seat at the table with the big boys these days.  You know who is probably thinking about a political comeback? Anthony Weiner. Just not wielding his cell phone next time like he’s Annie Leibovitz. And maybe as a good God-fearing Republican.  Three years ago Fossella said, “Whatever the future holds is in God’s hands,” and that’s Gingrich’s story now that he and God are finally on fairly decent terms, after an adult life where his idea of family values was having a lot of them. Families, not necessarily values.
Newt Gingrich is the new Republican front-runner now that poor old Herman Cain is finally moving toward the door, having become this year’s increasingly weird Ross Perot the way you knew he would, still trying to convince the long-suffering Mrs. Cain the way he is trying to convince everybody else that all these women are lying about him.