A “Historian” By Any Other Name: Freddie Mac Hired Newt Gingrich As It Reshaped Strategy
Within months after taking over as chief lobbyist at mortgage lender Freddie Mac in 1999, Mitchell Delk hired a prominent Washington insider to advise him on how to build support among conservatives on Capitol Hill: Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House of Representatives.
A key part of Delk’s strategy, as outlined in Federal Election Commission records, was to build goodwill in Congress by holding fundraising events for influential members of House and Senate committees that had oversight of Freddie Mac.
Gingrich had experience in such matters as an architect of GOPAC, one of the Republican Party’s most important political action committees.
Gingrich’s activity at Freddie Mac has been under scrutiny during his run for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, as rivals have accused him of lobbying for Freddie Mac.
The former speaker has rejected such allegations, and his first $300,000-a-year contract with Freddie Mac, released this week by his campaign, states that he would not “engage in lobbying services of any kind.”
But the contract, together with the FEC records describing Delk’s revamping of Freddie Mac’s lobbying shop, sheds light on how Gingrich could avoid the lobbyist label and still be valuable to the mortgage lender as a strategist.
Gingrich’s contract says the former House speaker would work with Delk and other Freddie Mac officials on “strategic planning and public policy.”
And, it calls on Gingrich to contribute to the lender’s “corporate planning and business goals.”
“He was a consultant for us, and … not a lobbyist,” Freddie Mac spokesman Doug Duvall said, declining to comment further on the lender’s arrangement with Gingrich.
Gingrich’s campaign has offered few specifics about his work for Freddie Mac, for which he earned as much as $1.8 million during two contract periods. It said late last year that part of his job was to help Freddie Mac build bridges to conservatives.
He has called himself a “historian” who advised the mortgage lender on issues such as its lending policies.
Gingrich joined Delk’s government affairs shop at a time when the former Freddie Mac senior vice president was hiring several former members of Congress and congressional aides for his lobbying team.
At the time, conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill were seeking regulations to rein in the profits of government-sponsored lenders such as Freddie Mac.
Delk, who did not respond to phone calls seeking comment, successfully fought back against such legislation by hiring dozens of outside consultants and spending as much on lobbying as many major corporations.
FEC INVESTIGATION
However, his lobbying team came under investigation by the FEC in 2003.
The FEC probe found that under Delk’s guidance, Freddie Mac improperly used corporate resources to put on 85 fundraising events that raised about $1.7 million for federal candidates.
The majority of the events were for Republicans, the FEC found.
FEC investigators concluded that at least one major contribution to a Republican entity came directly from Freddie Mac funds and that some fundraisers were held in Freddie Mac’s offices – both violations of FEC rules.
In 2006, Freddie Mac agreed to a $3.8 million settlement for violating federal election rules, the largest civil fine the FEC had ever levied.
Delk, who resigned from Freddie Mac in 2004, was not charged in the case. Delk’s lawyer in the case, Ken Gross, said Gingrich’s name “never came up in connection with (the FEC) case.”
Vin Weber, a former Republican representative from Minnesota who also was hired as a Freddie Mac consultant, said he never worked directly with Gingrich on Freddie Mac matters.
He said the mortgage lender did not want congressional arm-twisting but hoped to “create a positive buzz for Freddie Mac.”
Weber said someone like Gingrich could provide an important service without lobbying.
“I wouldn’t ask him to pick up the phone (to call a member of Congress), because that is really not necessary. He is circulating all the time with members of Congress,” said Weber, who is supporting Mitt Romney in this year’s race for the Republican presidential nomination.
Former New York Representative Susan Molinari, another Romney supporter, also was hired by Freddie Mac during Delk’s tenure. She did not return phone calls or emails.
Republican Michael Oxley, who was House Financial Services Committee chairman and attended at least 19 Delk fundraisers, said that at the time he did not know Gingrich worked for Freddie Mac.
Oxley “may have seen him from time to time at a social thing,” said Peggy Peterson, a spokeswoman for Oxley.
Gingrich signed a second contract with Freddie Mac in 2006. The lender ended its relationship with outside consultants in 2008, when the U.S. Treasury placed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in conservatorship.
Republicans have blamed the government-sponsored lenders, which sustained $14.9 billion in losses when the U.S. housing market crashed, for a major role in the subprime lending crisis.
By: Marilyn Thompson and Samuel Jacobs, Reuters, January 28, 2012
The Current Crop Of GOP Liars
The wackiest candidates have dropped out but Newt, Mitt and Ron have made some outrageous claims of their own.
Americans are still struggling to come to terms with the loss they felt as the wackier GOP candidates fell by the wayside. For pure entertainment value, the mendacity they offered on the campaign trail couldn’t be beat.
Who can forget Herman Cain worrying about how China, a member of the club for almost a half-century, is now “trying to develop nuclear capability”? How can one top the convincing specificity of Michele Bachmann’s claim that on “page 92” of the healthcare reform bill, it says “people can’t purchase private health insurance after a date certain, which means people will ultimately go into a single-payer plan”? We have to admit that we’ll miss Rick Perry telling us wild tales of Obama’s totalitarianism extending to “telling us what kind of light bulb we can use.”
Those kind of bizarre untruths were like a series of small gifts for political watchers and late-night comedy writers alike. But just because some of its more colorful wheels have come flying off, that doesn’t mean the GOP clown car isn’t still moving down the road toward the November elections.
We thought we’d take a look at some of the brazen falsehoods offered up by the candidates who remain standing today.
1. Mitt Romney: No Apologies
Mitt Romney wrote a book called “No Apology,” and has repeatedly said on the campaign trail that Obama took a world tour at the beginning of his presidency to issue mea culpas to dastardly foreigners everywhere. This lie is so brazen not only because it never happened, but also because Romney uses the talking-point in speech after speech.
Ironically, as James Taub noted in the New York Times, “In a major speech in Cairo in 2005, Condoleezza Rice, then Mr. Bush’s secretary of state, said that ‘for 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East — and we achieved neither.’ What was she doing if not apologizing on behalf of the United States — and vowing to put an end to a pattern of misguided policy?”
2. Newt Gingrich: Christmas Warrior
Why should the nutjobs at Fox News have all the fun? In Davenport, Iowa, on December 19, Gingrich revealed the results of something he said he’d “been investigating … for the last three days.” What was it?
Apparently if the president sends out Christmas cards, they are paid for the Democratic or Republican National Committees because no federal official at any level is currently allowed to say ‘Merry Christmas.’ And the idea, I think, is that the government should be neutral. … I’m going to go back and find out how was this law written, when was it passed. We’ve had this whole — in my mind — very destructive attitude in the last 50 years that we have to drive religion out of public life.
Guess what? Yup – he just pulled that one out of… perhaps one of those mass emails your crazy right-wing uncle keeps forwarding you.
3. Ron Paul: New Poll Shows That Everyone Agrees With Me!
We’d guess that most Americans haven’t given much thought to Ron Paul’s quixotic quest to return the United States to the gold standard and the regular cycle of booms and crushing busts that long accompanied it.
But on January 3, Paul told his supporters, “today there was a national poll that came out and they were talking about how many people supported the gold standard. How long has it been since they’ve taken a national poll on the gold standard? And guess what? The majority of the American people believe we should have a gold standard and not a paper standard!”
Politifact asked Paul’s campaign to provide some documentation, and they were pointed to a column that referenced three polls showing slim majorities of respondents holding a favorable view of the idea, but they were polls of only Republicans and Republican leaners, and they were conducted in just three states. A real national poll, meanwhile, found that the gold standard is on the wish-list of a minority of Americans.
4. Santorum: A Dingo Is Eating Your Baby! (Or Something)
Rick Santorum is obviously a man who is fascinated with dead babies and inflammatory rhetoric.
Last March, he married the two in an attack on Obama at the Iowa Faith and Freedom conference. Speaking of a wingnutty bill that would require doctors to treat fetuses after “botched abortions,” Santorum said that Obama had opposed the measure when he was in the Illinois state senate, which was true, but then went on to claim that Obama had “said in fact that any child, prior to nine months of gestation would be able to be killed.” He added: “Think about that: any child born prematurely, according to the president, in his own words, can be killed. Now, who’s the extremist in this abortion debate?”
There are some things that shouldn’t even need to be debunked. Obviously, no politician would ever go on record saying something so crazy – that’s just common sense.
But if you really need to verify that Obama never suggested anything of the sort, here’s the fact check.
5. Romney’s Tax Fairytales
Mitt Romney said he wouldn’t release his returns, then he said he’d release them in April and then Newt Gingrich gave him a hard time and he folded. It’s courage like that which makes one wonder how he’d deal with North Korea.
Anyway, the returns show that the “unemployed” candidate made over $40 million in 2010 and 2011, and paid 13.9 percent in taxes on those sums. A paltry figure, and Romney is responding to the criticism he’s received on the topic with two age-old and wholly dishonest conservative talking-points, and an additional sleight-of-hand, all rolled into one juicy bundle of mendacity.
Via Think Progress, this is what he told Univision’s Jorge Ramos in an interview this week:
ROMNEY: One of the reasons why we have a lower tax rate on capital gains is because capital gains are also being taxed at the corporate level. So as businesses earn profits, that’s taxed at 35 percent, then as they distribute those profits as dividends, that’s taxed at 15 percent more. So, all total, the tax rate is really closer to 45 or 50 percent.
RAMOS: But is it fair what you pay, 13 percent, while most pay much more than that?
ROMNEY: Well, again, I go back to the point that the, that the funds are being taxed twice at two different levels.
Mendacious talking point, the first: “double-taxation.” We don’t tax “funds” in this country, we tax transactions. If a company turns a profit on its transactions, it pays taxes on that profit. When it pays money out to investors as dividends, or when investors sell stock at a profit, those transactions are also taxed. No transaction is taxed twice.
Mendacious talking point, the second: that 35 percent tax rate. That’s the top corporate tax rate on the books, but because businesses take advantage of all manner of loopholes, the effective rate – what they actually pay — is actually far lower. It’s a classic conservative talking-point that we have the highest corporate tax rate in the world, but the reality is that we collect less in corporate taxes than most developed countries. Studies of some of the biggest companies have shown their effective tax rates to be, on average, less than half of what’s on the books.
And the sleight-of-hand: Bain Capital is a Limited Liability Company. This is what’s known as a “pass-through” structure, meaning that the company pays zero in corporate income taxes – the partners’ shares are taxed as income or losses on their personal returns, and in this case, most of the gains are investment income taxed at 15 percent.
In other words, even if we bought the “double-taxation” nonsense and the 35 percent rate, his talking-point still wouldn’t be true.
6. “Nancy Pelosi May Destroy the Entire Gop With a Single Wave of Her Wand”
That headline is borrowed from Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent, who reports on a dark conspiracy theory Mitt Romney has embraced to argue that Newt Gingrich is unelectable.
Sargent explains:
There seems to be a very persistent belief in some Republican and conservative circles that Nancy Pelosi is in possession of secret and damning information about Newt Gingrich that would immediately cause his presidential campaign to implode if she leaked it.
A little while ago, Pelosi said in an interview that she was familiar with “a thousand pages” of documents related to the ethics probe of Gingrich that got him bounced from Congress. That triggered the first round of right-wing conspiracy-mongering….
But, alas, she was just talking about the House Ethics Committee’s report on Gingrich’s corruption, which is already widely available. In fact, if you want to read Pelosi’s “secret” treasure-trove of damning info, it’s available online right here!
7: Gingrich: Conservative Republicans Are Secret Liberals
Speaking of which, Newt himself is offering a big lie about his ethics troubles. He said this week that he’d been wholly exonerated in the investigation – an odd claim given that he was sanctioned by the House and it fined him $300,000 to cover the costs of the investigation.
Perhaps that’s not as bad as the fib he offered gullible Fox News viewers in December. Gingrich told Greta Van Susteren that the House Ethics Committee (then called the Standards of Official Conduct Committee), “was a very partisan political committee and that the way I was dealt with related more to the politics of the Democratic Party than to ethics. And I think in that sense, [the campaign issue] actually helps me in getting people to understand, this was a Nancy Pelosi-driven effort.”
But, as Politifact noted in awarding Gingrich a “pants on fire” for the claim, three of the four Republicans on the committee voted to recommend that Gingrich be sanctioned, and then the “full House went on to pass the ethics report 395 to 28, with 196 Republicans voting for it and just 26 voting against it.”
8. Newt Lies About Food Stamps
Gingrich lies shamelessly about food stamps – it makes him look hip with the Ayn Rand crowd. He has said, repeatedly, that “more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history.” And while it’s true that the overall number of folks receiving nutritional assistance is at an all-time high, thanks to a crushing recession, Gingrich’s claim is simply false: 444,574 more people were added to the program under Bush than during Obama’s term.
But that one may not be as brazen as a claim he made in November in Council Bluffs, Iowa. “We now give [benefits] away as cash,” he said. “You don’t get food stamps. You get a credit card, and the credit card can be used for anything. We have people who take their food stamp money and use it to go to Hawaii. They give food stamps now to millionaires because, after all, don’t you want to be compassionate?”
This is just silly. According to the USDA’s rules, “households can use benefits to buy groceries or to buy seeds and plants which produce food. (In some places where subsistence fishing is the norm, such as remote areas of Alaska, recipients can also pay for nets, hooks, fishing line, rods, harpoons and knives.) And in some areas, restaurants can be authorized to accept SNAP benefits from qualified homeless, elderly, or disabled people in exchange for low-cost meals.”
As for the millionaires, no again. To be eligible for benefits a family can’t be earning more than 30 percent over the poverty line.
9. How Many Jobs Plans Have the GOP Blocked?
During a January 16 debate, Mitt Romney said of Obama, “Three years into office, he doesn’t have a jobs plan.”
We’re guessing this will be an oft-repeated talking point as the campaign progresses. It’s also a brazen bit of historical revisionism. As the AP notes, “Like them or not, Obama has proposed several plans intended to spur the economy and create jobs.”
From the stimulus to the payroll tax deal, Obama’s offered all sorts of plans that the GOP, eager to go into the election with a sluggish economy, has blocked. The most recent of these, as the AP notes, was offered just a few months ago:
In September, Obama introduced his most recent jobs plan, rolling it out in a speech to the full Congress in which he urged Congress to “pass it right away.” It included $450 billion in tax cuts and new spending, including greater cuts to payroll taxes and tax breaks for companies that hire those who’ve been out of work for six months or more. Almost none of it has been passed into law.
10. Romney’s Mythical War on Religion
Romney’s got a little problem: many of the evangelicals who have long served as the foot-soldiers in GOP campaigns really, really hate Mormons. So, Mitt’s trying desperately to shore up support by showing that he’s as dedicated to the culture wars as any good American right-winger.
Here’s what he said on a conference call with Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition on Wednesday:
Then of course there’s the assault on religion….now he’s gone forward and said that religious institutions, universities, hospitals and so forth, religious institutions have to provide free contraceptives to all their employees, even if that religious institution is opposed to the use of contraception, as in the case of the Catholic Church. Even in that regard, fighting to eliminate the conscience clause for healthcare workers who wish not to provide abortion services or contraceptives in their workplace, in their hospital for instance. It’s an assault on religion unlike anything we have seen.
There’s been an assault on marriage. I think he is very aggressively trying to pave the path to same-sex marriage.
Two problems here. First, much to the frustration of his LGBT supporters, Obama doesn’t favor gay marriage. Second, as Igor Volsky (who reported Romney’s comments for Think Progress) notes, “Federal regulations contain clear provisions in three separate laws shielding federally funded healthcare providers’ right of conscience.”
For instance, the1976 Church Amendment “prevents the government (as a condition of a federal grant) from requiring healthcare providers or institutions to perform or assist in abortion or sterilization procedures against their moral or religious convictions,” the Coats Amendment of 1996 prohibits the government from “discriminating” against medical residency programs or other entities that lose accreditation because they fail to provide or require training in abortion services” and the Hyde/Weldon Conscience Protection Amendment of 2004 “forbids federal, state and local governments from requiring any individual or institutional provider or payer to perform, provide, refer for, or pay for an abortion.”
These “conscience clauses” are also enshrined in Obama’s signature legislation, the Affordable Care Act. So, thankfully, the Christian majority remains just as un-oppressed today as it has been in the past.
By: Joshua Holland, Alternet, Published in Salon, January 27, 2012
The Conservative Backlash Against Newt Gingrich
In a political season known for its twists and turns, this week’s twist was pretty amazing to watch: the conservative take-down of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich. In the wake of his big win in South Carolina, the backlash began this week. There are some who believe all of this was orchestrated by the Romney campaign, but I’m not so sure. It’s not clear to me that the conservative movement likes former Gov. Mitt Romney, either. I don’t buy into the conspiracy—former Gov. Sarah Palin says the “establishment” is trying to “crucify” Gingrich, as she defended the First Dude’s endorsement of Newt—I just think that conservatives who have never liked Speaker Gingrich but have been holding their tongues suddenly realized that he might actually have a shot at the nomination. This week, there was a Speak-Now-or-Forever-Hold-Your-Peace moment. Forever holding one’s peace didn’t look like a good idea anymore.
The anti-Newt arguments aimed at grassroots conservative voters came in rapid fire. Three were particularly persuasive, and the first of those was from George Will. If you believe that we need Gingrich because he’ll beat President Obama in the fall debates, you need to read this:
Just 11 days after finishing fourth in New Hampshire, Gingrich’s pugnacity in two debates enraptured South Carolinians, especially when he waxed indignant about the supposition that the risk-taking in his personal life–e.g., having an affair during an indignation festival against Bill Clinton–is pertinent to his fitness for the presidency. Gingrich encourages Republican voters to believe he should be nominated because he would do best in the (at most) three debates with Barack Obama. So, because Gingrich might sparkle during four and a half hours of debates, he should be given four years of control of nuclear weapons? Odd.
The second came from former Assistant Secretary of State Eliott Abrams, who was President Reagan’s point man on fighting the Sandinistas in the 1980s. In the National Review this week, Abrams recounted his personal experience with Gingrich, who opposed Abrams and the Reagan administration on fighting the Soviets; he then names other members of Congress who were far more supportive of Reagan, namely Reps. Henry Hyde, Dick Cheney, Dan Burton, Connie Mack, and Tom Delay; and then ends by quoting Gingrich insulting Reagan in a 1980s-era floor statement, all to devastating effect.
As a new member of Congress in the Reagan years — and I was an assistant secretary of state — Mr. Gingrich voted with the president regularly, but equally often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides, and his policies to defeat Communism. Gingrich was voluble and certain in predicting that Reagan’s policies would fail, and in all of this he was dead wrong.
The third hit came from R. Emmet Tyrrell, the former publisher of the conservative American Spectator magazine. If you believe that we need Newt Gingrich as our nominee because of his big ideas and above-average intelligence, you need to read “William Jefferson Gingrich” by Tyrrell. He compares the former president and the former speaker, after admitting that he first noticed nearly two decades ago that “Newt Gingrich is conservatism’s Bill Clinton, but without the charm”:
Newt and Bill, as 1960s generation self-promoters, share the same duplicity, ostentatious braininess, a propensity for endless scrapes with propriety and the law. They are tireless hustlers. Now Newt is hustling my fellow conservatives in this election. The last time around he successfully hustled conservatives in the House of Representatives and then the conservatives on the House impeachment committee.
So the three biggest attributes that Gingrich supporters point to as evidence of his electability—his skill in debates, his support of Reaganism, and his intellectual prowess—were eviscerated not by moderates aligned with Romney but by the most widely-read conservative columnist, a former high-level Reagan official, and one of the most popular conservative publishers of the last two decades. These weren’t the only ones to come forward this week; there were others as well. The tide is turning against Newt Gingrich, and in any other election year, I’d say if he loses Florida, Gingrich is probably finished. He’s taken a big hit from conservatives on the right. But this isn’t any normal election year, and who knows where we’ll be even a week from now. Stay tuned.
By: Mary Kate Cary, U. S. News and World Report, January 27, 2012
Newt Gingrich: “Deconstructing A Demagogue”
When not holding forth from his favorite table at L’Auberge Chez François, nestled among the manor houses of lobbyist-thick Great Falls, Va., Dr. Newton L. Gingrich likes to lecture people about food stamps and how out-of-touch the elites are with real America.
Gingrich, as he showed in a gasping effort in Thursday night’s debate in Florida, is a demagogue distilled, like a French sauce, to the purest essence of the word’s meaning. He has no shame. He thinks the rules do not apply to him. And he turns questions about his odious personal behavior into mock outrage over the audacity of the questioner.
After inventing, and then perfecting, the modern politics of personal destruction, Gingrich has decided now to bank on the dark fears of the worst element of the Republican base to seize the nomination — using skills refined over four decades.
Monica Almeida/The New York TimesNewt Gingrich spoke at the 1998 Republican National Convention winter meeting in Indian Well, Calif.
Deconstructed, Gingrich is a thing to behold. Let’s go have a look, as my friend the travel guide Rick Steves likes to say:
The Blueprint. Back in 1994, while plotting his takeover of the House, Gingrich circulated a memo on how to use words as a weapon. It was called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Republicans were advised to use certain words in describing opponents — sick, pathetic, lie, decay, failure, destroy. That was the year, of course, when Gingrich showed there was no floor to his descent into a dignity-free zone, equating Democratic Party values with the drowning of two young children by their mother, Susan Smith, in South Carolina.
Today, if you listen carefully to any Gingrich takedown, you’ll usually hear words from the control memo.
He even used them, as former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams wrote in National Review Online this week, in going after President Reagan, calling him “pathetically incompetent,” as Abrams reported. And he compared Reagan’s meeting with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with Neville Chamberlain in 1938 in Munich.”
The Method. Even a third-grader arguing with another kid over the merits of Mike and Ikes versus Skittles knows better than to play the Hitler card. But Gingrich, the historian who never learns, does it time and again. Thus Democrats, he said last year, are trying to impose “a secular, socialist machine as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany.”
He has compared the moderate Muslims trying to erect a mosque and social center near Manhattan’s ground zero to Nazis, and made the same swipe at gays. People who love members of the same sex, he said, were trying to force “a gay and secular fascism” on everyone else.
Deny the Obvious. Gingrich is the rare politician who can dissemble without a hint of physical change, defying Mark Twain’s maxim that man is the only animal that blushes — or needs to. He’s also skilled at attacking the very things he practices. In the South Carolina debate last week, when Gingrich went ballistic over a question on an ex-wife’s claim that he wanted an open marriage, he said he had offered ABC numerous witnesses to rebut the charge. In fact, his campaign admitted this week, there were no such witnesses — only character rebuttals by children from a previous message.
His claim that he was paid at least $1.6 million by the mortgage backer Freddie Mac for work as a “historian” was a laughable fiction. This week, those contracts were released, and show no mention of historian duties; it was old-fashioned influence peddling.
He got caught by Mitt Romney Thursday in a classic political move. After Gingrich blasted Romney for investments that contributed to the housing crisis, Romney turned around and asked him if he had some of those same kinds of investments. Um, yes, Gingrich admitted, he did.
Go for the Hatred. It was Gingrich, even before Donald Trump, who tried to define the president as someone who is not American — “Kenyan, anti-colonial.” And there he was earlier this week, pumped by a big audience in Sarasota, Fla., reflecting back at him these projected fears. When he said he wanted to send President Obama back to Chicago, the crowd took up a chant of “Kenya! Kenya!”
Calling Obama “the best food stamp president ever” is a clear play on racial fears. In the crash of the last year of George W. Bush’s administration, food stamp use surged, but Gingrich would never associate a white Texan president with dependency.
A favorite target is the press. He’s snapped at debate moderators from Maria Bartiromo of CNBC, Chris Wallace of Fox and the preternaturally fair John King of CNN for asking relevant questions. It was a tired and predictable ploy when he tried it on Wolf Blitzer Thursday — he tried to deflect a question on his attacks by calling it a “nonsense question” — and Blitzer didn’t back down. But the outrage is selective and always calculated.
So, Gingrich was the picture of passive redemption when the Christian Broadcasting Network asked him, twice over the last year, about his many wives. In one case, Gingrich said he cheated because he loved his country so much. This week, he said his infidelities made him “more normal than somebody who walks around seeming perfect.” But he never flipped out at the Christian questioner, as he did at King, calling the CNN reporter’s query “close to despicable.” (Another favorite word.)
The general public can read this particular character X-ray, given that Gingrich’s unfavorable rating is off the charts, higher than any other major politician’s. And so could his former Republican colleagues in the House; witness the paucity of endorsements from those who served with him.
But he has a vocal constituency, weaned on the half-truths of conservative media. It makes perfect sense, then, that Gingrich this week demanded that crowds at future debates be allowed to cackle, whoop and whistle at his talk-radio-tested punch lines.
Let’s grant him his wish, and allow audiences to vent at will, as they did Thursday night in Florida. This kind of noise — from Republican debate crowds who have booed an American soldier serving overseas, cheered for the death of the uninsured and hissed at the Golden Rule — are a demagogue’s soundtrack.
By: Timothy Egan, The New York Times Opinionator, January 26, 2012
How Newt Gingrich Gets Away With “Class Warfare” and “Race Baiting”
When Rick Perry was still in the presidential race, he angered some conservatives by asserting that if you oppose in-state tuition for illegal immigrants brought here as kids then “you don’t have a heart.” For normal politicians, it is folly to tell the base a position they hold is heartless.
But Newt Gingrich isn’t a normal politician. He is so expert at signaling tribal identification with conservatives that he can seemingly say or do anything without losing the ability to be competitive. In a past entry, I explained how the conservative movement made such a rise possible. Here I want to cite just one example of the ruinous (for them) dynamic that is beginning to result.
[Here] is a clip from Newt Gingrich’s appearance on Univision on Wednesday. Here’s the transcript:
INTERVIEWER: What do you think of Romney’s idea of self-deportation?
NEWT GINGRICH: I think you have to live in a world of Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts — and automatic, you know, $20 million per year income with no work — to have some fantasy this far from reality.
Remember that I talk, very specifically, about people who have been here for a long time. Who are grandmothers and grandfathers who have been paying their bills, they’ve been working, they’re part of the community. Now for Romney to believe that somebody’s grandmother is going to be so cut off that she’s going to self-deport? This is an Obama-level fantasy.
INTERVIEWER: You call him anti-immigrant.
NEWT GINGRICH: Well he certainly shows no concern for the humanity of people who are already here. I mean, I just think the idea that we’re going to deport grandmothers and grandfathers is a sufficient level of inhumanity — first of all it’s never going to happen.
Observations:
1. Isn’t it amazing to see Newt Gingrich soar in a Republican primary even as he asserts that (a) rich guys are so clueless it’s like they live in a fantasy world and (b) investing money and earning a return on it is tantamount to “no work”? Isn’t it stranger still that while saying all this he accuses President Obama of class warfare?
2. Isn’t it amazing that Gingrich can surge in a GOP primary even as he suggests that wanting to deport illegal immigrants is inhumane, even anti-immigrant? His base has a hair-trigger sensitivity to being accused of xenophobia, and supports deporting all illegal immigrants; yet somehow Gingrich gets away with saying this on Univision. Had Jon Huntsman done the same he’d have been excoriated.
3. The idea of self-deportation spurred by better workplace enforcement — the Mitt Romney position — is in fact the mainstream position of illegal-immigration restrictionists, who mostly insist that the specter of mass deportations are a straw man conjured up by the left to scare people. And it is in fact the case that if you make it more difficult for folks without documents to get jobs, many of them will leave, having come here with the express hope of earning American wages.
4. Under Romney’s plan, which is clearly targeted at working-age adults, illegal immigrant grandparents who’ve been here for many years are in fact the least likely people to be bothered, yet Gingrich talks as if they’re the focus of Romney’s plan.
5. Even Gingrich’s demagoguery is inconsistent, for he isn’t willing to affirm that illegal-immigrant grandparents who’ve been here for some time should be given amnesty. He’d instead create a series of citizen panels modeled after the draft boards of the World War II era that would sit in judgment of whether these longtime residents got to stay or go, presumably sending some of them home. I wonder how Gingrich would respond if a debate moderator pointed out that his plan would deport some longtime residents and called him anti-immigrant and inhumane?
This is but one example of what the right can expect so long as Newt Gingrich is around. Because his appeal is grounded in tribal solidarity — because what people like about him is his ability to lash out at the mainstream media, the cultural elite, and President Obama — he can stray from conservative orthodoxy and policy far more than any other candidate and still retain his support. It’s a more extreme version of what happened during the Bush era. Republicans elected the guy with whom they wanted to have a beer, and since they felt in their gut he was one of them, he spent years advancing an agenda that would’ve drawn cries of tyranny had a Democrat tried it.
Gingrich backed that Bush-era agenda. And if he’s elected president expect him to do all sorts of things that conservatives complain about after the fact, when they realize that they’ve been had again.
By: Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, January 25, 2012
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