“Gingrich’s Revisionist History Of Himself”: Bizarre Anyone Would Take Newt’s Advice About How To Engineer A Government Shutdown
Newt Gingrich has often relied on short memories of his political career (as I can attest from the shocked reaction I got in 2011 when writing about his well-known history as a Rockefeller Republican), but he’s clearly going too far in pretending the government shutdown he engineered in 1995 was some sort of triumph. Conservative Ramesh Ponnuru slaps him down pretty emphatically today:
Newt Gingrich is telling Republicans not to fear a government shutdown because the last one went so well for them. This is pure revisionist history, and they would be fools to believe him….
Gingrich’s current spin on the events of 1995-96 is just wrong. The election of a Republican Congress in 1994 put government spending on a lower trajectory, as the election of a Republican House did again in 2010. Whether the shutdowns contributed to that result is a different matter.
Almost nobody back then believed it. Democrats thought that they had won the battle over the shutdowns, and that the agreement to end them was a Republican surrender. Clinton made a point, in his next State of the Union address, to criticize Republicans for their strategy. It was an applause line. Clinton’s job-approval numbers started to rise as soon as the shutdown fight was over, and they never really sank again.
Republicans thought they had lost, too. A minority of them thought that they should have kept the government shuttered longer, and that Gingrich and Senate Republican leader Bob Dole had caved. (Gingrich was widely reported at the time to have told unhappy colleagues, “I melt when I’m around him,” referring to Clinton.) Most of them decided that bringing on a shutdown at all was a mistake.
It’s true, as Gingrich now says, that Republicans lost only a few House seats in the next election. But it’s also true that the shutdowns ended what had been called the “Republican revolution” of the mid-1990s. Before the shutdowns, the Republicans had talked about eliminating four cabinet departments. Afterward, they quit….
Gingrich himself accepted the conventional wisdom that his party had lost. That’s what associates of his told me (among others) at the time, and that’s how they recollect it now.
I’d say Ramesh is really pulling his punches here. The rationalization that the GOP “lost only a few seats” reflects some serious amnesia. This was the only time in U.S. history that the party holding the White House for two consecutive terms gained House seats in the second midterm election. It was perceived as a disaster at the time–after all, Gingrich stepped down as Speaker almost immediately–and was largely blamed on Gingrich’s handling of the budget negotiations that led to the shutdown. Ponnuru mentions Clinton’s rising approval ratings after the confrontation with Newt, but here’s what Gallup’s Frank Newport had to say about the saga’s effect on Gingrich’s popularity:
The public appeared to turn particularly strongly against the Speaker after his budget confrontation with Bill Clinton and the resulting U.S. Government shutdown in late 1995. (Publicity at the time, including a famous front page caricature in the New York Daily News, included the allegation that Gingrich had closed down the government because he was given a bad seat at the back of Air Force One when returning from the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin in Israel.) By January of 1996, 57% of Americans said that their image of Gingrich was unfavorable, compared with 37% who had a favorable image of him. This nearly two-to-one negative-to-positive image ratio persisted throughout most of 1996 and 1997.
It’s just bizarre that anyone would take Newt Gingrich’s advice about how to engineer a fiscal confrontation involving a government shutdown threat, and an example of the man’s invincible chutzpah that he’s offering it.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, August 12, 2013
“Richard Nixon Runs The Republican Party, Again”: A Contempt For The Regular Norms And Institutions Of Politics
The current Republican Party isn’t the party of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. It isn’t a conservative party. It’s the party, instead, of Nixon and Gingrich. And that’s why it’s a dysfunctional mess, and a problem for the nation.
I said something to that effect the other day, and a commenter got all upset about it:
The party of Nixon? The guy who created and implemented the EPA? The guy who normalized the US international relationship with China? The guy who intervened in escalating fuel markets to fix prices, in order to protect consumers?
They are so far away from Nixon’s policies and governance.
I’ve seen this reaction before, and because it’s such an important point it’s worth spelling it out. It’s not about ideology. It’s not about specific policies. A healthy party, one that is able to cut deals and work with others, can be healthy even if their policies are far from the mainstream.
We can get at this a couple of ways. One is that everyone should be very careful about what “Nixon” did, as opposed to what the government did while he was president. Give Nixon the Congress and the policy environment of 1947 — or 1997 — and you get very different results.
But I suppose more to the point is that there’s just no way to read the contemporary Republican Party as some sort of principled ideological party. It just isn’t.
Think, on the one hand, how easily they took to George W. Bush’s support of an intrusive federal government program on education, or to Bush’s support of a major Medicare expansion.
Or think about their convoluted path on healthcare reform over the last 20 years – how an outline originally concocted by Republicans as a reaction to Bill Clinton’s initiative, and eventually implemented in one state by a Republican governor and a Democratic legislature, became (once adopted by Democrats) the essence of tyranny.
And don’t even get started on Republicans and the federal budget deficit.
That’s not a principled conservative party.
As no one knows better than real hardcore ideologues, the ones who know well that George W. Bush and the Republican Congresses he served with were never “real” conservatives. They’re right about that! Even though most of those saying that now are wannabes who never dissented during those years.
Unlike those ideologues, I’m not complaining about pragmatism; I think ideological parties are a terrible idea in a democracy. But while they aren’t the ideal conservative party that some want, they’re certainly not a healthy (conservative) pragmatic party, either.
That’s where Nixon and Newt come in.
Both of these very successful (pre-disgrace, anyway) Republicans became national figures as conservatives. Neither, however, was a principled conservative. Nixon was covered above; Gingrich was a Rockefeller Republican when he first ran for Congress, and both of them shifted back and forth as they saw opportunities to exploit.
But that kind of opportunism isn’t what make Newt and Nixon stand out. No, what they have bequeathed to Republicans is a contempt for the regular norms and institutions of the American political system, along with a Leninist belief that contradictions must always be heightened. Nixon broke laws, to be sure, but other presidents have broken laws. What made Nixon different – what made everyone, including his own party, so eager to be rid of him – was that he refused to accept that others within the system, whether in Congress or the press or the bureaucracy, were as legitimate as the president. What made Gingrich different is his consistent strategy of tearing down institutions (the House, and then the presidency) in order to save them. For both, politics was never about the normal promotion of interests and reconciliation of differences, but instead, very simply, about destroying their opponents.
Because they are the party of Newt and Nixon, the principles that today’s GOP worships aren’t market economics or personal liberty; look instead at a “principle” such as a refusal to compromise.
Or brinkmanship as a principle. The quintessential GOP stance, in a lot of ways, is the current insistence by many in the party that they must shut down the government to prove they are serious about the Affordable Care Act. What makes it such a great example — so much a Newt-inspired example — is that they’ve been flailing around all year trying to figure out what to ask for when they blackmailed the nation over the debt limit and funding the government. And that half or more of the party is insisting on it even as experienced legislators and analysts tell them that it can’t possible work. Because as I said back in the spring, the faction that wants the shutdown isn’t really sure about what it wants to demand; it’s only certain that it wants to take hostages. Extortion for the sake of extortion. As principle.
It’s of a piece with the series of almost-shutdowns we’ve endured (all of them echoing the Gingrich train wreck of 1995-1996). With the debt limit showdown of 2011. With the explosion of the filibuster far beyond previous use in the Senate. With a series of “constitutional hardball” examples over the years. With the choice to attempt to undermine the ACA rather than fix or improve what they could, with the goal – the goal! – of causing as much policy failure as possible.
A party only does those things if its leaders and many of its members have taken as a principle Nixon’s standard operating procedure of treating the rest of the United States government beyond the White House as illegitimate; a party only does those things if it no longer accepts the basic constitutional constraints that most politicians, no matter what their views on public policy, have by and large accepted. And a party only does this if it believes, as Newt Gingrich did, that the best way to gain control of institutions is to first destroy them.
That’s the Republican Party we have. Not every single member of it, of course, but it’s a strong enough influence that it’s what really matters. And while I have no brilliant suggestions for how to do it, I do believe that the most urgent task facing the political system right now is to figure out some way for Republicans to shake off the influence of Newt and Nixon.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, Salon, August 10, 2013
“The Most Common Kind Of Racist”: Like Many On The Right, The One That Doesn’t Realize He Is One
Best I can tell, the furor over Jack Hunter, a long-time South Carolina-based neo-Confederate who co-authored a book with Rand Paul and then joined his Senate staff, is more or less “blowing over.” But Hunter himself may be keeping it alive by protesting his innocence and trying to cover his tracks. Even Will Folks, the famously provocative South Carolina conservative blogger (and Paulite fellow traveler) who regards the original Washington Free Beacon piece about Hunter as a neocon “hit job” on his boss, thinks he’s jumped the shark:
“The role of a radio host is different from that of a political operative,” Hunter said in a statement responding to the story. “In radio, sometimes you’re encouraged to be provocative and inflammatory. I’ve been guilty of both, and am embarrassed by some of the comments I made precisely because they do not represent me today. I was embarrassed by some of them even then.”
Really?
That certainly seems to be at odds with what Hunter said eight years ago when The (Charleston, S.C.) Post and Courier filed a report on his controversial commentary. Back then he was totally unapologetic about his racially tinged comments – saying he “stood by every word.”
An even stronger pushback to the Hunter apologia came from his one-time editor at the Charleston City Paper, Chris Haire:
Long before last’s week Washington Free Beacon story kicked up a two-day media storm, Jack Hunter knew that the Republican establishment was working to out him as a neo-Confederate and a racist, a move he believed could hurt the one-time City Paper columnist’s boss, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul. He’d even sent me an e-mail asking me to remove dozens of posts, ones that he said no longer reflected his current worldview.
While I told him that I would have removed one or two posts — it’s not uncommon for writers to hastily pen a column they later regret — I found the breadth of the request to be excessive, and to be honest, quite cowardly. Doing so, I told Jack, was a repudiation of the very persona he had created as a writer and radio personality. It was a denial of the very views that had made him a local media celebrity and a rising star in the so-called liberty movement, and as such, a slap in the face to all those who had ever supported him. It was best, I said, that if those points of views no longer applied to him, Jack should pen a column detailing how he had changed his mind, but he declined. And frankly, that told me all I needed to know about Jack’s conversion. It was solely for appearances only.
After reading Jack’s statement about last Wednesday’s controversy du jour — the one that let the rest of the U.S. know that a neo-Confederate secessionist was part of Sen. Paul’s inner circle — I still haven’t changed my mind. In his statement, Jack — much like Rand himself — tends to treat the damaging information as something akin to a youthful indiscretion, a one-time accident, or as something that was nothing more than an over-the-top personality that he had created while he was a member of the 96 Wave crew and had long-since abandoned. Rubbish. The Jack Hunter of the Charleston City Paper years was every bit as radical as the Jack Hunter of [local radio] 96 Wave.
Then Haire kinda gets mad:
Over the course of editing Jack for years, it was clear to me that when he spoke of Southerners, Southern values, and the Southern way of life, it was as if the South to him was solely populated by white people, and everyone else was an intruder or at best a historical inconvenience. Jack Hunter may have never railed against miscegenation, championed segregation, uttered a racial slur, or participated in a lynching, but it was my opinion then and it is my opinion now that Jack is the most common kind of racist, the one that doesn’t realize that he is one. In fact, like many on the right — from Pat Buchanan to Newt Gingrich to Rick Perry to Rush Limbaugh — Jack traffics in race-baiting rhetoric and repeatedly aligns himself with racists but then refuses to own up to the meaning and purpose of his actions….
And the same applies to Rand Paul.
This is why if Jack Hunter really cares about Rand Paul he’ll quit his staff and find himself a new career. The more he talks and the more his very recent history is discussed, the more it raises questions about Paul–not just for associating with the likes of Hunter, but for the parallels between Hunter’s views and his own, if not on race, then on many elements of public policy and history that touches on race.
As for Paul, he should probably spend less time lecturing African-Americans on why they should be conservatives and a lot more time convincing conservatives to listen to his arguments about the invidious racial effects of the War on Drugs. Then we’d have a lot less reason to suspect that Rand Paul is a friend of Southern Avengers everywhere.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, July 19, 2013
“All They Have Is Their Anger”: Why Republicans Can’t Destroy President Obama
Over the past few years, liberals like me have pointed out countless times that the Republican party was being (or would be soon, as the case might have been) terribly damaged by the ideological extremism and general nuttiness of the faction that took over the party between 2009 and 2010. But we have to be honest and acknowledge that it didn’t always work out that way. They were able to win a number of tangible victories despite the fact that the public doesn’t look favorably on the things they wanted to do. In many cases, an extremist Republican ousted a perfectly conservative Republican in a primary, and now the extremist Republican is in possession of a safe seat. And of course, they won a huge victory in the 2010 elections. For all the fun we’ve had at the expense of people like Michele Bachmann, the damage they did to the GOP wasn’t always as serious as we thought it would be.
But I think we’re seeing the limits that the House Republicans’ extremism imposes on their ability to accomplish a practical political task. The task in question is taking full advantage of an administration scandal or two in order to do maximum damage to the President. And they can’t seem to manage it.
Let’s look, for instance, at the point man on all these questions, Darrell Issa, who runs the House Oversight Committee. On Sunday, in an impolitic moment, Issa called White House spokesman Jay Carney Obama’s “paid liar,” making him seem not like a sober-minded investigator looking for the truth, but an angry partisan. Sensing an opening, David Plouffe tweeted, “Strong words from Mr Grand Theft Auto and suspected arsonist/insurance swindler. And loose ethically today.” Plouffe was referring to some rather colorful episodes from Issa’s pre-politics career (details here); though he was never convicted of anything, there were credible charges on both counts. In any case, it makes him something of an imperfect messenger for suggestions of administration wrongdoing.
But more importantly, Issa just doesn’t seem to be all that effective at this role. You might say that even if the Republicans had a real ace in that chairmanship it wouldn’t much matter, because the facts of the mini-scandals just don’t leave them much to work with. On the ultimate questions, like “Can they impeach the President over this?” that’s probably true, but along the way they might be having more of an impact.
And Issa isn’t the only one making himself look a little foolish. You’ve got all kinds of Republican members of Congress, including quite influential ones, talking about a fictional White House “enemies list” and making one baseless accusation after another which fall apart under even cursory scrutiny. As Steve Benen says, “Initially, GOP leaders saw value in avoiding cheap shots—they knew that if the story became a partisan food fight, it wouldn’t be taken seriously, and the political costs to President Obama would be limited. But as is usually the case, the overreach instinct among Republican partisans is simply uncontrollable.”
I think these kinds of outbursts happen because hatred today’s Republicans have for Barack Obama is completely genuine. If you compare it to how Newt Gingrich felt about Bill Clinton, it has a much harder edge. Yes, Gingrich wanted to destroy Clinton (and his rank-and-file despised Clinton), but he was driven more than anything else by his own grandiosity. He made plenty of strategic miscalculations, but it wasn’t because his rage got the better of him.
Anger can be useful. It motivates your supporters to work, organize, and vote. But eventually it can be your undoing if what the moment requires is something more careful and methodical. And there isn’t even anyone leading and coordinating this effort. It isn’t Issa, who’s blundering about. It isn’t John Boehner, who can barely hang on to his job (read this story, which contains the interesting news that a group of House Republicans were about to oust Boehner until God told them to back off for a while). Nobody’s in charge. All they know is that they hate Barack Obama, but that isn’t nearly enough.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 5, 2013
“Arrested Governance”: Do Everything You Can To Sabotage Government To Keep It From Operating Effectively
The Internal Revenue Service was closed today, as employees were furloughed due to sequestration’s budget cuts. Conservatives found this to be an occasion for side-splitting humor; Sarah Palin, for example, tweeted, “The IRS is closed today, feel free to use your phones.” Get it, because the IRS was tapping … um … well, never mind. In any case, today is a reminder that this scandal could be an opportunity for reform that clarifies the law on political and non-political groups, leads to a greater professionalization of the agency, and makes future misconduct less likely. Or it could wind up being just the opposite.
As Kevin Drum reminded us yesterday, one of the low moments of the Gingrich years in Congress was a series of hearings meant to expose IRS wrongdoing, in which horror stories of the agency’s abuse of taxpayers were told to lawmakers eager to hear them. In response, the IRS’s authority was curtailed and its budget slashed. The predictable consequence was less enforcement of tax laws (warming Republicans’ hearts, no doubt), but also an agency that had to do more with less.
If anyone was forced to do more with less, it was the office in Cincinnati, where a small number of poorly trained employees had to process thousands of new applications from groups seeking tax-exempt status after 2010. That isn’t to say there was no wrongdoing, but if you want an agency that does its job well and upholds the highest standards of professionalism, cutting its resources is not the way to get it.
But that could well happen again, and Republicans would be only too happy about it. It would be of a piece with the way they approach so much of what passes for their attempts at governing: Do everything you can to sabotage government and keep it from operating effectively, and then when it falls short, shout “See?!? We told you government can’t do anything right!”
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 24, 2013
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