By Peter WallstenFormer House Speaker Newt Gingrich has launched a national tour to rally conservative voters in advance of the Nov. 2 elections. The tour, through states such as Iowa, Nevada and Ohio, could also be a testing ground for Mr. Gingrich to mount a campaign for the presidency in 2012. Newt Gingrich speaks during his ‘Jobs Here, Jobs Now’ tour at the JW Marriott Las Vegas Oct. 21, 2010 in Las Vegas, Nev. T (Photo by Ethan Miller/Getty Images) His political committee, American Solutions, is being refashioned to capture the energy of the tea party movement – building a network of activists and first-time candidates that could become a standing army should the former speaker decide to run. Even if he does not run, Mr. Gingrich views American Solutions, a so-called 527 committee eligible for unlimited donations, as a nerve center for the newly energized conservative movement. (Check out this story in today’s WSJ and this video.)In a recent chat with Washington Wire, Mr. Gingrich offered his views on the tea party movement and the Obama grassroots machine – and had sharp words for a vocal critic, MSNBC host and former Rep. Joe Scarborough.Here are some highlights from the conversation:Q: How do you unify the tea party?A: You don’t organize by hierarchy and structure and long meetings,puma maratonki, because then it becomes endless. There’s not a true tea party structure. These are individual citizens who get aroused and are totally independent and are working together in ways that’s very exciting. … Virtually everywhere we go we have a tea party meeting, we have a small business owners meeting. We’re trying to both combine the entrepreneurial spirit, how do you get back to job creation, and we’re trying to combine the citizen spirit, what are ways we reduce government – in some ways what (Prime Minister David) Cameron is doing in England with his concept of big people and small government rather than big government and small people. And we’re trying to work with the tea partiers to understand that.Q: Could this be a network for you if you run for president?A: Ideally, American Solutions becomes bigger than any single candidacy at any level. Think of this as being much more like past movements, the Jeffersonians or Jacksonians or the rise of the Republicans in the 1850s. This is an effort to create a wave of change of which I am clearly a part, but I’m a long way from being the central or the deciding figure.Q: Some thought President Obama’s campaign heralded a new movement.A: I think that it went form a ‘We’re all in this together’ to ‘This is what the president wants.’ Well, people didn’t sign up to be told what the president wants. … There’s an inherent flaw in his coalition because the most energized, aggressive parts of his system are very hard left. And so if he listens to them he get signals that aren’t compatible with the vast majority of Americans. But they are his base.Q: Aren’t these challenges natural for anyone who goes from movement leader to elected leader? A: No. … Obama, I think, is a sincere Alinsky fairly left ideologue. And I don’t mean that in a negative way. I think that’s who he honestly is. He became by accident the president of this extraordinarily center right country, which is unlike any European country and unlike any American academic campus. So if he listens to the country he won’t do the stuff he’s doing. Btu he really wants to do the stuff he’s doing and he doesn’t listen to the country. Well, guess what that does to your grassroots organization?Q: How do you respond to the recent Politico column by Joe Scarborough calling you out for bombastic comments?A: He’s been at MSNBC too long. Why would I take seriously any commentator at MSNBC? Scarborough used to be a friend. I’m going to go back and find what Scarborough said about welfare reform when he was passionately for it because he was a real conservative, and then I’ll be glad to let you go take it to Joe…. Reagan used to be attacked all the time because he was very clear. Clarity confuses the establishment.By Mary Lu CarnevaleIn just over a week, Republicans are widely expected to win control of the House, taking the 39 seats they need – and then some. The Election Day outcome for the Senate isn’t so clear since several races are too close to call. The results will kick off a round of changes in Washington that go well beyond moving offices or measuring drapes.At the Washington Post, Karen Tumulty notes that would be a historic outcome. “Not since the election of 1930 has the House changed hands without the Senate following suit,” she writes.Democrats are struggling to survive in a toxic political environment for a party in power: a weak economy; a president whose approval rate is sagging; an anti-Washington, anti-incumbent political mood; tens of millions of dollars in spending by outside interest groups; an opposition that appears more energized than their own base. In addition to their anticipated congressional gains, Republicans also expect pickups in the 37 states that are electing governors,nike shox sko, and in legislative races down the ballot. Those elections could have repercussions for congressional redistricting next year and for the presidential contest in 2012. Politico’s Jim VandeHei and John Bresnahan preview the expected leadership upheaval.Voters will do much more than decide control of Congress next week: They will determine whether the most powerful political figures in Washington are up, out or ousted from their leadership jobs. Nancy Pelosi, the most powerful House speaker in decades, is in serious danger of losing her job, either by Democrats’ surrendering the majority or by emerging with a margin too thin to protect her. John Boehner is a cinch to replace her if Republicans win back power — but expectations are running so high, his job could be on the line if they fall short. Harry Reid, a less formidable and less polished leader than Pelosi, could easily lose either his race — a 50-50 proposition at this point — or, less likely,Louis vuitton tenisky, his 10-seat majority. If the Senate falls, Mitch McConnell would become majority leader and inherit arguably the worst leadership job in Washington: running the Senate with a meaningless margin and squeezed by a bunch of tea party senators hellbent on stiffing the establishment. All of these dramas will play out in the hours and days after the results roll in. Publicly, all of the leaders — as well other lawmakers watching their backs or contemplating a power grab — insist they spend little time gaming out the post-election scramble. Privately, everyone in leadership is, well, gaming out the post-election scramble.Melinda Henneberger of Politics Daily interviews House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and writes that while “politicians are a pretty thin-skinned bunch, Pelosi has a reputation among her peers as someone who is not so much impervious to attacks as downright invigorated by them. Which sounded like hooey, I must say, until I asked her how that could be.”“You have to know what you’ve come here to do,” she says in an interview in her office. “You didn’t come here to be in a popularity contest, you came here to get a job done. And if you’re going to do that, you’re going to be throwing some punches and you’d better be ready to take some. You’re in the arena, so they have to discredit you. If I were not effective they wouldn’t care about me.” Wait, so she takes the rough treatment as a compliment? Not exactly: “I take it as a sign of our effectiveness, A. And B, it helps me raise money … OK?”It’s that slightly bloodless quality – oh, and in politics that is a compliment – that has given her the flexibility to compromise with the same Blue Dog Democrats who are running against her now. It’s also what made Pelosi, who doesn’t curse or raise her voice, and is one of the best-loved bosses on the Hill, the most powerful woman in American politics. As practical behind closed doors as she is partisan in public, she’ll be mentioned in the same breath as Sam Rayburn and “Uncle Joe” Cannon, who was as eager to block reform as she is to ram it through.A canny strategist and prolific fundraiser, she helped build her own House majority, recruiting and financing the moderate candidates who have complicated her job as Speaker. Yet the boys in town underestimated her right up to the moment she pushed through the most sweeping legislative agenda since the Civil Rights era, in a horrible economy and while we were fighting two wars: She “is no Newt Gingrich; she really isn’t intellectually interesting,” tsked the Brookings Institution’s Stephen Hess when Pelosi became Speaker. “We have to see if she is really ready for prime time.” Republican critiques frequently referenced her smooth forehead, Armani suits and sexuality, as when Stephen Moore told his fellow fiscal conservatives at an Austin convention of “Americans for Prosperity” that if they were ever feeling depressed, “just remember you’re not Mr. Pelosi.” Or when Mike Huckabee joked that “the only thing worse than a torrid affair with sweet, sweet Nancy would be a torrid affair with Helen Thomas. If those were my only options, I’d probably be for same-sex marriage!”And at Time, Mark Halperin writes that President Barack Obama must come up with a new, post-midterm plan – and suggests recycling elements of President Bill Clinton’s playbook. If he wants to continue to achieve his campaign promises, the President is going to have to make some profound changes, something Obama’s stay-the-course history suggests does not come naturally to him. By luck or design, however, the newly installed interim chief of staff, Pete Rouse, is one of Washington’s great long-range planners. And Obama and Rouse have at least one comeback model. The Clinton game plan circa 1994 shows how a young Democratic President, seen as overreaching and lurching leftward two years into his term, can move back to the political center, reconnect with the opposition, reclaim his momentum and successfully maintain his agenda…By EditorJohn McCary reports on a protest at the World Bank.About 20 people, some clad in pink and others carrying luggage, protested outside the World Bank at noon today, shouting, Pack your bags, Mr. Wolfowitz, it’s time to go home! The protest is the latest in a series calling for the resignation of World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz after disclosures of a pay-and-promotion package he helped work out for his girlfriend, a World Bank employee now detailed to the State Department. John McCaryCode Pink peace advocates, in mock police uniforms, cordoned off the front of the World Bank building at lunchtime today.“Nepotism is not the most serious of Paul Wolfowitz’s crimes,” said Medea Benjamin, one of the founders of Code Pink, a pro-peace organization whose members showed up in mock pink police uniforms, blowing whistles and cordoning off the front of the World Bank with crime-scene tape, while World Bank staffers came and went on their lunch hour. But didn’t they get Al Capone on taxes? Benjamin added. We want him out.Our objective is to link the scandal to other larger issuesthe lies that were told in the run up to the Iraq war and haven’t had any consequences, said organizer Sameer Dossani, director of the 50 Years is Enough Network, a nonprofit group that monitors the World Bank’s activities. Before coming to the World Bank, Wolfowitz had been deputy Defense secretary.Many bank staff members smiled awkwardly at the protesters and hurried away. A few stopped to take pictures or talk to the protesters. Two visitors, who didn’t give their names but said they were from Mexico and Brazil, walked in the middle of the protesters to take pictures. The Wolfowitz saga is big news in their countries, they said.

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