By: E. J. Dionne, Jr, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 18, 2011
Newt Gingrich And The Revenge Of The Base
It is one of the true delights of a bizarrely entertaining Republican presidential contest to watch the apoplectic fear and loathing of so many GOP establishmentarians toward Newt Gingrich. They treat him as an alien body whose approach to politics they have always rejected.
In fact, Gingrich’s rise is the revenge of a Republican base that takes seriously the intense hostility to President Obama, the incendiary accusations against liberals and the Manichaean division of the world between an “us” and a “them” that his party has been peddling in the interest of electoral success.
The right-wing faithful knows Gingrich pioneered this style of politics, and they laugh at efforts to cast the former House speaker as something other than a “true conservative.” They know better.
The establishment was happy to use Gingrich’s tactics to win elections, but it never expected to lose control of the party to the voters it rallied with such grandiose negativity. Now, the joke is on those who manipulated the base. The base is striking back, and Newt is their weapon.
It’s not as if the criticisms being leveled at Gingrich are wrong. On the contrary, there is a flamboyant self-importance and an eerie sense of mission about him. “I am a transformational figure,” he has said. He explains the hatred of his enemies as growing from their realization that “I’m so systematically purposeful about changing our world.” He has also declared: “I have an enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the entire planet. And I’m doing it.”
But wait a minute: Gingrich offered the first set of thoughts in 1994 and spoke of shifting the planet way back in 1985. Newt, in other words, has been Newt for a long time. Yet many of the same conservatives who now find him so distasteful were cheering him on for the very same qualities when he was their vehicle for seizing control of the House of Representatives in 1994. Liberals who criticized these traits in Gingrich back then were tut-tutted for not “getting it,” for failing to understand the man’s genius. It’s only now, when Gingrich threatens the GOP’s chances of defeating Obama, that party elders have decided that what they once saw as visionary self-confidence is, in fact, debilitating hubris.
Gingrich is said to be too tough on his opponents, too quick to issue outlandish charges. He’s actually been quite candid about his take-no-prisoner approach to politics.
“One of the great problems we have had in the Republican Party is that we . . . encourage you to be neat, obedient, and loyal and faithful, and all those Boy Scout words which would be great around the campfire but are lousy in politics. … You’re fighting a war. It is a war for power. … Don’t try to educate. That is not your job. What is the primary purpose of a political leader? To build a majority.”
That would be Gingrich in 1978, reported by John M. Barry in his excellent “The Ambition and the Power,” a book about the fall of former House speaker Jim Wright and Gingrich’s role in bringing him down. Again, Gingrich is a thoroughly consistent figure. The guy you see now is the same guy who always preached a scorched-earth approach to politics.
And in truth, the party took his approach to heart. If discrediting John Kerry’s service in Southeast Asia through false attacks in 2004 was what it took to reelect a president who had avoided going to Vietnam, what the heck. Those who believe in Boy Scout virtues don’t belong in politics, right?
Perhaps the establishment will yet manage to block Gingrich. There are certainly enough contradictions in his record, and he carries more baggage than an overburdened hotel porter. When National Review, that keeper of conservative ideological standards, recently criticized Gingrich for “his impulsiveness, his grandiosity, his weakness for half-baked (and not especially conservative) ideas,” its editors were reciting from a catechism that his critics wrote long ago. Meet the new Newt, same as the old Newt.
This quality endows Gingrich with a peculiar integrity, which I realize is a problematic word to apply to such a problematic figure. I use it in a very specific sense: He is who he is and always has been. The base knows this and loves him for it. But for Republican leaders, Gingrich has become inconvenient. He’s the loudmouthed uninvited guest who is trying to rejoin the country club. The effort to blackball Newt Gingrich will be the next drama in this fascinating train wreck of a campaign.
“A Can Of Worms”: Historian Newt And The Courts
On Fox News this morning, Steve Doocy, reflecting on Newt Gingrich’s remarks in last night’s debate, said the disgraced former House Speaker “was brilliant” when “talking about out-of-control judges and the courts.”
I saw the same comments. “Brilliant” wasn’t the adjective that came to mind.
Megyn Kelly noted in her question to Gingrich that he’s proposed congressional subpoenas for judges who issue rulings that Republicans don’t like, as well as judicial impeachments and the prospect of eliminating courts the right finds offensive. Kelly reminded Gingrich that two conservative former attorneys general have characterized his approach as “dangerous,” “outrageous,” and “totally irresponsible.” He responded:
“[T]he courts have become grotesquely dictatorial, far too powerful, and I think, frankly, arrogant in their misreading of the American people. […]
“I taught a short course in this at the University of Georgia Law School. I testified in front of sitting Supreme Court justices at Georgetown Law School. And I warned them: You keep attacking the core base of American exceptionalism, and you are going to find an uprising against you which will rebalance the judiciary.”
Gingrich added he’s “prepared to take on the judiciary” unless federal courts started issuing rulings that he agreed with. He went on to say he understands these issues “better than lawyers,” because he’s “a historian.”
Let’s note a few relevant angles here. First, it’s time to stop characterizing positions such as these as “conservative.” Gingrich doesn’t want to conserve anything; he’s eyeing a radical revolution of the separation of powers and the American branches of government, stripping the judiciary of its power as an independent branch.
Second, Gingrich is a lousy historian. Real scholars tend to consider Gingrich’s crusade against the courts as a crackpot agenda.
And third, it was odd to see Ron Paul, of all people stand up last night as a voice of reason.
“Well, the Congress can get rid of these courts. If a judge misbehaves and is unethical and gets into trouble, the proper procedure is impeachment. But to subpoena judges before the Congress, I’d really question that. And if you get too careless about abolishing courts, that could open up a can of worms. Because there could be retaliation. So it should be a more serious — yes we get very frustrated with this, but the whole thing is, if you just say, ‘Well we’re going to — OK there are 10 courts, let’s get rid of three this year because they ruled a way we didn’t like.’
“That to me is, I think opening up a can of worms for us and it would lead to trouble. But I really, really question this idea that the Congress could subpoena judges and bring them before us. That’s a real affront to the separation of the powers.”
Yes, Ron Paul was the sensible one on the stage last night when it comes the courts.
Great.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, December 16, 2011
Mitt Romney Can’t Catch A Break–Christine O’Donnell Endorses Him
Former Gov. Mitt Romney just can’t seem to get a break. And most recently, it’s not because of an endorsement he failed to get. It’s because of one he just received, from failed Delaware Senate candidate Christine O’Donnell, best known for her creepy TV ad reassuring voters that she is not a witch.
At a time when the GOP field is seeking to kick it up a scholarly notch, O’Donnell’s endorsement reminds voters of the intellectual lightweights in the party. Remarkably, O’Donnell—much like professional egotist Donald Trump—seems to think her blessing is desired.
“I’ve been warned by many not to endorse because no matter who I choose, no doubt some will be upset,” O’Donnell said in a statement. Really? Was the field of contenders trying to win her endorsement? Or is it only the campaign strategists of the endorsee who she believes will be upset?
More wisdom from the unsuccessful candidate:
“It is a difficult decision choosing between such great candidates, truly difficult. Yet, this race is too important to sit out.” It’s the presidential race, for heaven’s sake, and we’re struggling out of a stubbornly lingering recession and extricating ourselves from two costly wars. Of course it’s an important race.
Then there’s this political insight:
Additionally, we simply can’t afford to have the primary contest drag out the way it did in 2008. Unlike 2008 when the incumbent president was not a candidate, the longer the 2012 GOP Primary contest drags out, Pres. Obama continues to have a free pass and get away with campaigning from the Oval Office. The sooner we have a nominee, the sooner we as a movement can unite and get to the real task at hand; making sure Pres. Obama is a one-term president.
Baaaaammmmmp! Not really. The 2008 GOP primary didn’t really “drag on;” former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee stayed in the race for awhile, but he stayed in longer than he genuinely was in the race. It was the Democratic primary that dragged on until June, and their guy won the election. That primary served to make President Obama a stronger candidate, and had Hillary Clinton won the nomination, she would have been a stronger candidate as well. The difference between the Democrats in 2008 and the GOP in the current cycle is that the Democrats’ last primary dragged on because they had two very strong candidates with very different appeals to voters. The Republicans, at the moment at least, are facing an extended selection process because segments of the party are unhappy with the offerings.
O’Donnell is right, then, in suggesting that a protracted civil war within the GOP could weaken the eventual nominee. But if her endorsement would make the difference, the party has much bigger problems.
By: Susan Milligan, U. S. News and World Report, December 14, 2011
Beach Volleyball, Child Labor, and Other Crazy Newt Gingrich Comments
Gingrich’s surge has pretty much made him the GOP frontrunner. But will his past comments come back to haunt him? The Daily Beast rounds up some of the most out-there things the ex-speaker has said.
“When Secretary Sebelius said the other day she would punish insurance companies that told the truth about the cost of Obamacare, she was behaving exactly in the spirit of the Soviet tyranny.”
—Values Voter Summit, 9/17/11
“And if you want to put people in jail—I want to second what Michele said—you ought to start with Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and let’s look at the politicians who created the environment, the politicians who profited from the environment, and the politicians who put this country in trouble.”
—Republican debate, October 2011
“The poorest children in the poorest neighborhoods should have jobs in the schools that they go to…The kids could mop the floor and clean up the bathroom and get paid for it and it would be OK.”
—Fundraiser dinner in Iowa, 12/1/11
“I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular, atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”
—Address to Cornerstone Church in Texas, March 2011
“The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.”
—Interview with Mother Jones magazine, October 1989
“The secular socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”
—In his book, To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine, May 2010
“A mere 40 years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that’s what freedom is all about.”
—Speaking at the Republican National Convention, August 1996
“I want to say to the elite of this country—the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite: I accuse you in Littleton… of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid to take responsibility for things you have done, and instead foisting upon the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don’t have the courage to look at the world you have created.”
—Speaking about the Columbine shootings, May 1999
“This is, by the way, one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration. The more successful they’ve been at intercepting and stopping bad guys, the less proof there is that we’re in danger. And therefore, the better they’ve done at making sure there wasn’t an attack, the easier it is to say, ‘Well, there was never going to be an attack anyway.’ It’s almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us.”
—Speaking in Huntington, N.Y., April 2008
“I did no lobbying of any kind, period. For a practical reason, I’m gonna be really direct, okay. I was charging $60,000 a speech and the number of speeches was going up, not down. Normally, celebrities leave and they gradually sell fewer speeches every year. We were selling more.”
—Campaign stop in Bluffton, S.C., 11/30/11
“It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid. Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”
—Speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, 11/21/11
“All the Occupy movement start with the premise that we owe them everything,” Gingrich said. “They take over a public park they didn’t pay for, to go nearby to use bathrooms they didn’t pay for, to beg for food from places they don’t want to pay for, to obstruct those who are going to work to pay the taxes to sustain the bathrooms and to sustain the park, so they can self-righteously explain they are the paragons of virtue to which we owe everything. That is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country, and why you need to reassert something by saying to them, ‘Go get a job right after you take a bath.’”
—Speaking at Iowa family values forum, 11/19/11
“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”
—Interview with the National Review, 9/11/10
“How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn’t get out of the way of a hurricane.”
—Speaking at CPAC, 5/3/07
“There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate. What I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn’t trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing them.”
By: The Daily Beast, December 12, 2011
Newt Gingrich: Hospital Divorce Story Is A Lie, Except That It Isn’t
GOP presidential frontrunner Newt Gingrich (oh how I love typing that!) is fighting hard to negate much of the baggage that will bedevil him over the coming year. Like the story of how he accosted his first wife with divorce matters while she was recovering from surgery at a hospital.
To try and rewrite that bit of his sordid history, Newt enlisted his daughter Jackie, who was 13 at the time of the incident, and apparently claims no talk of divorce occurred at that hospital visit.
For years, I have thought about trying to correct the untrue accounts of this hospital visit. After all, I was at the hospital with them, and saw and heard what happened. But I have always hesitated, as it was a private family matter and my mother is a very private person.
So what did she see and hear at that hospital visit?
[H]ere’s what happened:My mother and father were already in the process of getting a divorce, which she requested.
Dad took my sister and me to the hospital to see our mother.
She had undergone surgery the day before to remove a tumor.
The tumor was benign.
As with many divorces, it was hard and painful for all involved, but life continued.
Notice anything missing? Yeah, pretty much everything that happened at that visit. And there’s a reason she might want to skip any details. They were as nasty as advertised. Here’s her mother recounting the (then-unchallenged) event to a reporter for the Washington Post, Jan. 3, 1985 (ellipses are in the original article):
“He can say that we had been talking about [divorce] for 10 years, but the truth is that it came as a complete surprise,” says Jackie Gingrich, in a telephone interview from Carrollton. “He’s a great wordsmith . . . He walked out in the spring of 1980 and I returned to Georgia. By September, I went into the hospital for my third surgery. The two girls came to see me, and said Daddy is downstairs and could he come up? When he got there, he wanted to discuss the terms of the divorce while I was recovering from the surgery . . . To say I gave up a lot for the marriage is the understatement of the year.”
Yup. The reality is a lot harsher than the new sanitized version Newt and his daughter are peddling. A Newsweek reporter actually challenged Gingrich on this:
When the subject came up in my conversation with Gingrich, he urged me to read Jackie’s column. I told him that I had, and suggested that the actual story of that day, as recalled in contemporaneous accounts, was more complicated. Jackie, a cancer survivor, was in the hospital for the removal of a tumor, which proved benign. According to the Gingriches’ pastor at the time, the Rev. Brantley Harwell, Gingrich brought his daughters to visit their mother, and while he was there, he began discussing particulars of the proposed divorce settlement—“division of property, alimony, that kind of thing,” Harwell would recall. (Harwell, who recounted his version of events in 1995, died this summer.) A bitter argument ensued, which Jackie later discussed with her pastor and others.
So how does Newt square away his new claim that the hospital story is a big lie, with the fact that it wasn’t?
“I haven’t disputed that there was an angry discussion,” Gingrich says now. “We got into an argument. Now, how many people do you know going through a divorce end up occasionally getting into arguments? That then got spun into its worst possible interpretation.”
Well, so much for claiming that story was a lie.
By: Markos “Kos” Moulitsas, Daily Kos, December 12,2011
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