Gingrich

SUMMARY

President Gingrich? How exactly would that work? Newt is vision-free: he is laughably devoid of any new policy ideas of his own. His tenure as Speaker was dangerously irresponsible, unethical, and erratic, which bodes ill for any executive position he might hold. His entire career, in and out of office, centers on vicious, bitter attacks against Democrats, but when the guns are trained on him, he flipflops, and then changes his story, and then attacks the media, and then runs away: he can’t take the heat.

DETAILS

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich knows his reputation is disastrous, and some in both parties question whether he has the self-control to be president. He has tried a number of times to claim that his bomb-throwing days are behind him. He said it took until 1996 to learn to tone down his style, but that he’s all better now, much as Norman Bates said in Psycho II. But the facts prove otherwise: right up into this year, Gingrich has proved himself to be so filled with hate, and so devoid of self-discipline, that he can’t help launching the most blistering attacks he can.

Gingrich attacks Obama for not bombing Libya.

Gingrich attacks Obama for bombing Libya.

Gingrich attacks Obama for shaking hands with Chavez, whereupon the media point out that Nixon did the same thing.

Gingrich attacks Obama for for smiling while he shakes hands with Chavez, whereupon the media point out that Nixon did the same thing.

Gingrich attacks Obama for coddling terrorists and launches quite a pile of McCarthyite charges, and then in the same breath…

Gingrich attacks Obama for using McCarthyism, with no evidence.

Gingrich attacks Obama for his “Kenyan anti-colonial behavior” (i.e. Obama’s black!).

Gingrich attacks Obama for building an America like communist Poland where the government tears down crosses and “a small secular political elite [is] imposing its radical values on a massive majority of worshippers."

Gingrich attacks Obama for his proposal to change the rules on charitable deductions, calling it a “war against churches” and claims Obama wants to “replace the church with a bureaucracy, and to replace people's right to worship together with a government-dominated system."

Gingrich attacks Obama for nominating Sotomayor the Latina woman racist.

Gingrich attacks Obama for running a White House that is “weird”, “nuts”, “crazy”.

Gingrich attacks Obama with this: “You want to be a country that creates food stamps, in which case frankly Obama’s is an enormous success. The most successful food stamp president in American history. Or do you want to be a country that creates paychecks?” All while hinting that he’d like to revive poll tests. Poor, black, poor, black, food stamps….

Gingrich attacks Obama for driving the nation to ruin with “radical left-wing values”.

Gingrich attacks Obama for being “very dishonest” on immigration.

Gingrich attacks Obama and his party for “behaving exactly in the spirit of the Soviet tyranny”.

Gingrich attacks Obama for “the greatest political corruption ever seen in modern America.”

Gingrich attacks Obama for advocating euthanasia.

Gingrich attacks Obama for being “the most radical president in American history.”

And these two quotes speak for themselves.

“Look, I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion….You have to confront the reality that these secular extremists are determined to impose on you acceptance of a series of values that are antithetical, they're the opposite, of what you're taught in Sunday school.” The gay-atheist hordes are coming to beat you without mercy! I hate when that happens. We all know it’s the gays and the atheists who are the real bullies, not the homophobes and evangelicals, right?

Newt published a book “To Save America: Abolishing Obama's Socialist State and Restoring Our Unique American Way” arguing that Obama is one step away from Hitler. He argues that the evil Obama regime threatens America as much as Nazi Germany or the Russians. “The degree to which the secular-socialist left represents a fundamental replacement of America, a very different world view, a very different outcome, I think is a very serious threat to our way of life.”

Of course his uncontrolled hate extends to any Democrat in power. He fought a scorched-earth war against Clinton, to include an impeachment and shutting down the federal government which occurred, he implied, because the Clinton staff snubbed him on Air Force One.

He also firehosed one of his own successors, Nancy Pelosi, falsely claiming she lied about the torture issue. As he saw it, Pelosi was engaging in a "despicable, dishonest and vicious political effort" to hide what she knew. She "lied to the House....I think that the House has an absolute obligation to open an inquiry, and I hope there will be a resolution to investigate her. And I think this is a big deal. I don't think the Speaker of the House can lie to the country on national security matters....She is a trivial politician, viciously using partisanship for the narrowest of purposes, and she dishonors the Congress by her behavior....Pelosi's the big loser, because she either comes across as incompetent, or dishonest. Those are the only two defenses....The fact is, she either didn't do her job, or she did do her job and she's now afraid to tell the truth." Wow, Newt Gingrich proclaiming moral standards for Speaker of the House. Even though he’s dead wrong again.

His endless stream of inflammatory statements may be due to some sort of political Tourette’s syndrome. But it could also be that he is driven by a need to out-crazy the other Republicans, because the extremists who control the GOP are suspicious of him. For starters, he is a serial philanderer, now on his third wife. He went to the hospital to argue with his wife about their divorce papers while she was being treated for cancer, and then lied about it, and then blamed his infidelity on his love of country, and then pleaded with voters to judge him on his potential for the future rather than his past, and then said he was asking God for forgiveness.

As health care became a major issue, Gingrich flopped all over the place. He endorsed and then condemned individual mandates, then endorsed a congressional mandate for schoolchildren to take physical education five days a week, then endorsed and then condemned the Ryan plan to rip apart Medicare, then insisted that his views were evolving, then claimed he supported a modified version of Ryan’s plan after all, then said he would have voted for the Ryan budget, then said he liked the Ryan plan only as a starting point, then said his original statement didn’t even have anything to do with Ryan or his budget, changing his story again and again depending on the audience. And then he blamed the whole thing on the media, claiming the reporters who quoted him were cowards. And then he declared that, although everything is allegedly on the table, “gotcha” questions about his past are off-limits. And then ran away from the media entirely.

Finally he claimed the media coverage of his health-care statements was so electric because his campaign was historic. "It's going to take a while for the news media to realize that you're covering something that happens once or twice in a century.” He has this idea in his head that his candidacy is so loaded with awe-inspiring ideas and epochal change the media are still absorbing the wonderfulness of it. In his own mind he turned a series of gaffes and reversals into an orgy of ego-massaging.

All that, and his conversion to Catholicism, his violations of tax laws, his lies to investigators, his censure as Speaker, his preference of the moderate over the tea party candidate in the special election in New York, his effort to bring moderates into the GOP, all are causing him trouble with social conservatives. George Will has already written him off: ”this is just not a serious candidate.” The Wall Street Journal rejected him, saying he has too much baggage. The Club For Growth, which targets Republicans who stray too far from the rightwing extreme, has expressed doubts about his views on economics and health care and his outreach to less conservative Republicans. They will inevitably figure out that Gingrich shot an ad with Pelosi calling for a federal solution to global warming, an ad backed by Al Gore, although he is already backtracking on this issue. Gingrich currently has 38 percent favorables among Republicans.

Even after getting pounded on the Medicare issue at the beginning of his campaign, he proved unable or unwilling to be careful, watching where he put his feet. He told his team he wanted to focus on the Chinese community in Iowa, and focus on issues such as shutting down the EPA. He essentially refused to woo donors. He earned so little and spent so much that he didn’t even have the registration fee to enter the Ames straw poll.Finally much of his top staff quit en masse and his national campaign co-chair, Sonny Perdue, switched to Pawlenty.

We need to remember that the presidency is a leadership job, an executive position, and his short tenure as Speaker makes one wonder how effective he could be. In four short years, he lost control of the House to GOP hardliners, made the GOP look extreme with a history-making government shutdown, acquired a reputation for wildly changing strategies on the fly, launched a historic impeachment which damaged the GOP brand, was slapped with a historic reprimand for ethics violations, suffered historic midterm losses in 1998, suffered a highly unusual effort to throw him out of the Speaker’s chair, and made history yet again with his resignation.

The man is desperate. Currently he’s running behind Obama even in Georgia, his home state. He will be 69 next year and 73 in 2016, so time is running out. The movement of Republican extremism, which he helped to found years ago, has abandoned him, and so have the party donors.