Newt Gingrich’s Ideas Aren’t As Creative Or Effective As He Thinks
Years ago, I remember an interview in which former Speaker Newt Gingrich said he read at least one book a week. The trick to doing so for such a busy man?
Always carry what you’re reading, he recommended, even when you’re not traveling; read in doctors’ waiting rooms, in checkout lines—any place where you’d otherwise just be wasting time.
Some time after that—he was out of office by this point—I saw Gingrich in the Tysons Corner (Virginia) mall. He was in the corridor, slowly pacing in a circle … his nose buried in a book.
Impressive, I thought; he reads even while (presumably) his wife shops.
The downside to this kind of bibliophilia, for certain personalities, is that it can lead to faddishness. I’m sure you have a friend who fits the bill: Whatever he’s reading at a given moment is all he can talk about. And then he moves on.
I’ve always had the impression that Newt is a lot like that—and this Washington Post report on Gingrich the “ideas factory” gives me no reason to doubt it.
Brimming with ideas is perhaps a superior condition when compared to, say, the calcified simplicity of George F. Will (“Romney’s economic platform has 59 planks—56 more than necessary if you have low taxes, free trade and fewer regulatory burdens.”) The latter is a time-honored trope for too many conservative pundits: Get government out of the way of the market, ponder no further, and then pat yourself on the back for appreciating “society’s complexities.”
But an overheated motor of idea generation in high office is a recipe for disaster, or at least folly. As Charles Krauthammer observes, Gingrich as president would be “in constant search of the out-of-box experience.”
Then again, Gingrich seems to me to be full of lots of ideas that are not as imaginative as he thinks or, alternatively, just plain dumb. Gingrich wants to be able to fire federal judges, partially privatize Social Security and Medicare, and create a flat-tax alternative to the current code. This is comfortably in line with the positions of his GOP rivals.
Then there’s Gingrich’s now-infamous “child janitor” idea. Kids in the inner-city lack productive role-models, he says; they don’t see what it’s like for an adult to get up in the morning and go to work. This is itself a debatable proposition, but what bothers me most about it is that it’s a solution in search of the wrong problem.
When I think of Gingrich’s hypothetical poor inner-city kid, I see a bunch of problems, short- and long-term. He’s going to a lousy school—and even if he does well there, he faces long odds of a) finishing college and b) doing better than nonpoor kids who didn’t finish college. Set aside the schooling question, there’s the fact of stratospherically high unemployment rates in the inner city, and the broader, abysmal lack of opportunity for low-skilled men.
All of this is to say that cleaning bathrooms as a teenager is probably not going to change outcomes for this kid.
“Paycheck President” Gingrich really has nothing interesting to say about declining social mobility in America, about how to mitigate the ways in which the global economy and low-skilled immigrants are squeezing working- and middle-class Americans from the top and bottom.
All that time reading in malls and doctors’ offices, and he’s still well inside-the-box on the most important questions.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, December 5, 2011
A GOP Reality-Show Race, Thanks To The Tea Party
The contest for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination has been described as a reality show and a circus. But what’s happening inside the GOP is quite rational and easily explained.
The obvious Republican nominee was Texas Gov. Rick Perry — obvious because his government-bashing, ideology-mongering, secessionist-flirting persona was a perfect fit for a Republican primary electorate that has shifted far to the right of Ronald Reagan.
The yearning for someone like Perry was inevitable. He combined the right views — actually, very right views — with experience as a chief executive that made him seem like somebody who was ready to be president.
Consider that even before he had gotten into the race, mere word that he might run sent Republican voters scrambling his way. He already had 18 percent to Romney’s 23 percent in a late July Gallup poll. Michele Bachmann was next at 13 percent. At that point, Newt Gingrich was at 6 percent and Herman Cain was at 4 percent.
After Perry announced his candidacy, he soared. The
Aug. 17-21 Gallup survey had him at 29 percent, Romney at 17 percent, Bachmann down to 10 percent and Gingrich and Cain both at 4 percent. (Ron Paul, holding aloft the libertarian banner, holds his core voters no matter what’s happening around him. Paul was at 10 percent in July, 13 percent in August.) Another survey at the time by Public Policy Polling put Perry at 33 percent to 20 percent for Romney.
This nomination was Perry’s to lose, and lose it he appears to have done. This opened the way for the relatively short-lived, if entertaining, Herman Cain show, which finally closed on Saturday.
Yet Romney still can’t take off, and a lot of ink and online pixels have been spent trying to explain why. I see four factors holding Romney back. That he is a flip-flopper is no longer a charge by his opponents; it is taken as a given. His refusal to repudiate his Massachusetts health-care plan goes down badly with conservatives. His public personality is, well, stiff and patrician enough that the Internet is now full of videos of Romney’s awkwardness. And he is a Mormon, a problem for some conservative evangelicals.
It’s outrageous that Romney’s religion is an issue, and anyone analyzing its impact has a moral obligation to say so. Alas, that does not mean it has no effect. And Romney ought to be proud of his health initiative — although it’s disingenuous of him to deny the strong links between what he did and what President Obama fought to get enacted.
But what’s going on is not just a Romney problem. The Republican Party’s core electorate has changed radically since 2008 — and even then John McCain won the nomination against the wishes of many on the Republican right because the opposition to him was splintered.
A party that lived by the tea crowd in 2010 is being severely hobbled by it now. The Republican right wants the kind of purity that led it to take candidates such as Cain and Bachmann with great seriousness for a while. The same folks took Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell and Joe Miller seriously in the 2010 Senate primaries, too. None of them got elected.
Perry once seemed the answer to this problem. Now that he, Cain and Bachmann have faltered, lonely conservative hearts have turned to Gingrich. This is odd, since Gingrich can give Romney an excellent run in any flip-flopping contest.
But Gingrich has always kept at least one foot in the camp of movement conservatism, and he talks like a movement guy. This could be enough. The question is whether he has the discipline not to say something really foolish between now and Jan. 3, the date of the Iowa caucuses. (Free advice to Newt: Stop talking about yourself in the third person as a world historical figure.)
There is talk of the “Republican establishment” swooping in to save matters, and things certainly seem ripe for a draft write-in campaign for some new candidate. But the Republican establishment, such as it is, is essentially powerless. It sold its soul to the Tea Party, sat by silently as extremist rhetoric engulfed the GOP and figured that swing voters would eventually overlook all this to cast votes against a bad economy.
That’s still Romney’s bet; yet his failure to break through suggests the right wing will not be trifled with. Republican leaders unleashed forces that may eat their party alive. And the only Republican really enjoying what’s happening is Newt Gingrich.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, December 4, 2011
Gingrich Presidential Run Inspires Fear And Loathing In Top GOP Circles
Sure, Newt Gingrich is surging in the polls. But the blunt truth about Newt is that the people who know him best and have worked with him in Washington want him nowhere near the White House or the top of the GOP ticket — and in the end, that’s likely to doom his chances.
Check out the new National Journal “Insiders” survey out this morning, whichi s particularly devastating to the disgraced former Speaker. This is from a regular panel of well-connected Republican operatives. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything so savage by these folks against a same-party politician:
“Winning the presidency is all about discipline, focus, and organization,” said one Republican Insider, “none of which are strong suits for Gingrich.”
“With Newt, we go to bed every night thinking that tomorrow might be the day he implodes,” said another Republican. “Not good for our confidence – or fundraising.” A third Republican stated plainly, “Gingrich is not stable enough emotionally to be the nominee — let alone, the president.”
“Bigfoot dressed as a circus clown would have a better chance of beating President Obama than Newt Gingrich, a similarly farcical character,” quipped a Republican.
“Come on,” sighed another GOP Insider, “the White House is probably giving money to Gingrich as we speak.”
What’s a bit unusual about Gingrich is that there probably is a sharp split between how Washington-connected party actors and those farther outside of Washington or with weaker connections to the national party network feel about him. That’s because he’s been out of office for over a decade, and has been treated as a campaign curiosity until very recently. So there’s been no reason for vetting information to spread from those who worked with him while he was in office to local activists, operatives, and politicians, many of whom weren’t even around when Newt resigned in 1998.
For them, the natural inclination is to assume the best about big-name Republicans, and to treat any negative stories about them as the usual garbage from the liberal media. That will change once they start hearing national conservative leaders calling Newt a “farcical character” and questioning his conservative bone fides, as Club For Growth’s Chris Chocola and others did in the Washington Post article on Newt’s policy positions this morning.
As more party actors hear negative things about Gingrich from sources they trust, they’ll quickly lose what little enthusiasm they currently have for him. After that, it will almost certainly filter down to rank-and-file voters. The Newt moment just is not likely to last very long. Too many top conservatives just want nothing to do with the guy. And for good reason.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The Washington Post, December 2, 2011
Dear Red America, Newt Gingrich Does Not Respect You
Ross Douthat offers a fleshed-out version of what a lot of conservative intellectuals are saying about Jon Huntsman: that the former Utah governor is genuinely conservative, more likely than anyone to prevail in a general election, and possessed of substantive policy answers to the nation’s most serious problems.
There’s just one problem.
“His salesmanship has been staggeringly inept. Huntsman’s campaign was always destined to be hobbled by the two years he spent as President Obama’s ambassador to China,” Douthat writes. “But he compounded the handicap by introducing himself to the Republican electorate with a series of symbolic jabs at the party’s base. He picked high-profile fights on two hot-button issues — evolution and global warming — that were completely irrelevant to his candidacy’s rationale. He let his campaign manager define his candidacy as a fight to save the Republican Party from a ‘bunch of cranks.’ And he embraced his identity as the media’s favorite Republican by letting the liberal journalist Jacob Weisberg write a fawning profile for Vogue.”
Summing up, Douthat comments that “This was political malpractice at its worst. Voters don’t necessarily need to like a candidate to vote for him, but they need to think that he likes them.”
Is he right?
If so, I have some information for the GOP base that should change how they feel about the relative merits of Huntsman and Newt Gingrich. Let me level with you, Red America: Huntsman does indeed believe that many of you are wrong about evolution and global warming. But he hasn’t shown anywhere near as much contempt and disrespect for you as Gingrich.
Yes, I know, you remember Gingrich as the man who conceived of the Contract With America. But there’s a lot more to him than that. This is a D.C. insider who thinks you’re dumb enough to believe that he got paid $1.6 million from Freddie Mac for his services as “a historian”; a man who ridiculed Freddie publicly after privately working to advance its favored policies; Gingrich still expects you to believe his disingenuous claim that he never engaged in lobbying for special interests; he is a man who tried in a televised debate to pretend that he hadn’t supported an individual mandate in health care, only to be successfully called out by an opponent; he is even someone who tried to tell you, with a straight face, that the breakup of one of his marriages could be blamed partly on how passionately he felt about America (he had an extramarital affair).
That’s just for starters.
So if any of you felt disrespected by Huntsman for forthrightly saying that he thinks you’re wrong about a couple of things, understand that it could be much worse. You could embrace a nominee who just lies to you when he thinks you won’t like hearing the truth. And who tells such audacious whoppers that part of him has to believe that we’re all stupid.
What shows more contempt and disrespect, telling someone you think one of their ideas is wrongheaded? Or lying to them over and over about your record, your character, and your business dealings?
Your call, Red America.
By: Conor Friedersdorf , The Atlantic, December 2, 2011
GOP Governors Taught How To Describe Occupy Wall Street
During a meeting of the Republican Governors Association in Orlando this week, Frank Luntz, one of the most well known political communications strategist in the country, talked to GOPers about how they could do a better job talking about the Occupy Wall Street movement.
Yahoo News’ Chris Moody reports that “Luntz offered tips on how Republicans could discuss the grievances of the Occupiers, and help the governors better handle all these new questions from constituents about ‘income inequality’ and ‘paying your fair share.’”
“I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I’m frightened to death,” said Luntz, a Republican strategist and one of the nation’s foremost experts on crafting the perfect political message. “They’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.”
According to Moody, this was Luntz’s advice:
1. Don’t say ‘capitalism.’
“I’m trying to get that word removed and we’re replacing it with either ‘economic freedom’ or ‘free market,’ ” Luntz said. “The public . . . still prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we’ve got a problem.”
2. Don’t say that the government ‘taxes the rich.’ Instead, tell them that the government ‘takes from the rich.’
“If you talk about raising taxes on the rich,” the public responds favorably, Luntz cautioned. But ”if you talk about government taking the money from hardworking Americans, the public says no. Taxing, the public will say yes.”
3. Republicans should forget about winning the battle over the ‘middle class.’ Call them ‘hardworking taxpayers.’
“They cannot win if the fight is on hardworking taxpayers. We can say we defend the ‘middle class’ and the public will say, I’m not sure about that. But defending ‘hardworking taxpayers’ and Republicans have the advantage.”
4. Don’t talk about ‘jobs.’ Talk about ‘careers.’
“Everyone in this room talks about ‘jobs,’” Luntz said. “Watch this.”
He then asked everyone to raise their hand if they want a “job.” Few hands went up. Then he asked who wants a “career.” Almost every hand was raised.
“So why are we talking about jobs?”
5. Don’t say ‘government spending.’ Call it ‘waste.’
“It’s not about ‘government spending.’ It’s about ‘waste.’ That’s what makes people angry.”
6. Don’t ever say you’re willing to ‘compromise.’
“If you talk about ‘compromise,’ they’ll say you’re selling out. Your side doesn’t want you to ‘compromise.’ What you use in that to replace it with is ‘cooperation.’ It means the same thing. But cooperation means you stick to your principles but still get the job done. Compromise says that you’re selling out those principles.”
7. The three most important words you can say to an Occupier: ‘I get it.’
“First off, here are three words for you all: ‘I get it.’ . . . ‘I get that you’re. I get that you’ve seen inequality. I get that you want to fix the system.”
Then, he instructed, offer Republican solutions to the problem.
8. Out: ‘Entrepreneur.’ In: ‘Job creator.’
Use the phrases “small business owners” and “job creators” instead of “entrepreneurs” and “innovators.”
9. Don’t ever ask anyone you want them to ‘sacrifice.’
“There isn’t an America today in November of 2011 who doesn’t think they’ve already sacrificed. If you tell them you want them to ‘sacrifice,’ they’re going to be be pretty angry at you. You talk about how ‘we’re all in this together.’ We either succeed together or we fail together.”
10. Always blame Washington.
Tell them, “You shouldn’t be occupying Wall Street, you should be occupying Washington. You should occupy the White House because it’s the policies over the past few years that have created this problem.”
The Occupy movement has scored a number of small victories since September, when the Occupy Wall Street protesters first assembled in downtown New York. Bank of America announced it would not be charging debit card fees, one of the many triggers that sparked the protests, and a congressman introduced an amendment called the OCCUPIED Amendment that would reform campaign finance laws. Campaign finance rules that favor corporate power are a chief Occupy Wall Street target.
By: The Washington Independent, Admin, December 1, 2011
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