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
GOP: Incoherent Party, Incoherent Candidates
Republicans are clearly not too enthused about Mitt Romney. Nor are they wild for any of the alternatives. This week Ross Douthat wrote a column arguing that it’s no surprise the current crop of Republican presidential candidates is no great shakes since, well, great presidential candidates are pretty rare animals. He then wrote a blog post arguing that the whole problem could have been avoided if the better Republican candidates, particularly Mitch Daniels, hadn’t decided not to run this year. Daniel Larison ridicules this notion; the fantasy candidates, he says, look strong because they haven’t been subjected to the withering attacks real candidates have to face. The ones Mr Douthat touts “don’t have the qualifications that Romney has, they all have their own weaknesses with conservatives and/or with the general electorate, and all of them decided for various reasons to save themselves the trouble, toil, and humiliation that a presidential bid would have entailed.”
Jonathan Bernstein takes Mr Larison’s point a step further and imagines what it would have taken to give Republicans a candidate they could get enthusiastic about.
What Republicans could have used both this cycle and last is a candidate who raised no suspicion from any important party faction and also had conventional credentials. Rick Perry, Tim Pawlenty, and perhaps Fred Thompson all came close, but none of them really achieved that. Given the GOP’s wild pivots on so many issues over the last decade, perhaps no one can, and someone like Romney — who holds orthodox views on all issues right now, but hasn’t for long enough to build long-term trust — is the best they can do.
This is an extremely important point to keep in mind. Mitt Romney looks like a weak phony in this election campaign because he has to pretend to believe with all his heart in orthodox tea-party conservative positions that he transparently doesn’t really believe in. We know this because in the past, Mr Romney supported health-care reform including an individual mandate along the lines of the system he instituted in Massachusetts, essentially the same system as Obamacare. And in the past, he supported a cap-and-trade system for limiting greenhouse-gas emissions to address climate change. But at the time, both of those were orthodox Republican Party positions. The fact that they are anathema today is a legacy of the reactionary fury that has driven the party for the past three years. Conservative voters responded to their epic loss in 2008 with a partisan kulturkampf that labeled every major initiative launched by the Obama administration socialism, and declared the very existence of global warming to be some kind of Communist-scientist hoax. There were very few established Republican politicians who hadn’t taken positions in the George W. Bush era (or the Newt Gingrich era!) that pose ideological problems for them in the tea-party era. Mr Gingrich himself can fleetingly outrun the problem because, like most voters, he has the long-term intellectual consistency of a goldfish. But YouTube never forgets.
Republicans’ disenchantment with their current presidential candidates is not an incidental characteristic of this crop of candidates. It’s a structural feature of a contemporary Republican Party whose pieces don’t hang together. Pro-Iraq-war neoconservative Republicans cannot actually live with Ron Paul Republicans. Wall Street-hating anti-bail-out Republicans cannot actually live with Wall Street-working bail-out-receiving Republicans. Evangelical-conservative Republicans cannot actually live with libertarian, socially liberal Republicans. Deficit-slashing Republicans cannot live with tax-slashing Republicans. Medicare-cutting Republicans cannot live with Medicare-defending Republicans. These factions have been glued together over the past three years by the intensity of their partisan hatred for Barack Obama, and all of the underlying resentments that antipathy masks. Republicans have buried their differences by assaulting everything Mr Obama supports, and because Mr Obama is a pretty middle-of-the-road politician, that includes a whole lot of things that many Republicans used to support. They are disenchanted with their candidates because their candidates are incoherent, but their candidates are incoherent because the base is incoherent. If the GOP wins this election, the party’s leaders are going to be confronted with that incoherence pretty quickly. Unfortunately, so will the rest of us.
By: M.S., Democracy in America, The Economist, January 24, 2012
“BFF’s”: Mitt Romney And Freddie Mac
To get an edge in advance of Florida’s Republican presidential primary, Mitt Romney has gone after Newt Gingrich this week on his ties to Freddie Mac. At first blush, it’s not a bad move; Gingrich is clearly vulnerable on the subject.
But Romney may not have thought the attacks all the way through.
According to his personal finance disclosure forms, Romney invested pretty heavily in Freddie Mac and made a fair amount of money doing so.
Asked about this on Fox News this morning, Romney was reduced to lying.
BRIAN KILMEADE: Yesterday Newt Gingrich joined us and said, “I just found out that Mitt Romney was in investor in Fannie & Freddie.” What’s the truth?
MITT ROMNEY: [Laughs] That’s pretty funny. My investments, of course, are managed not by me. For the last 10 years they’ve been guided and managed by a trustee, they’re in a blind trust. And the trustee invested in mutual funds and so forth and apparently one of the funds had Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac bonds.
We already know that’s not true. The Boston Globe reported on some of Romney’s finances a few months ago, and specifically noted, “[U]nlike most of Romney’s financial holdings, which are held in a blind trust that is overseen by a trustee and not known to Romney, this particular investment was among those that would have been known to Romney.”
The “blind trust” line isn’t going to cut it.
For that matter, Romney is slamming Gingrich for lobbying on behalf of Freddie Mac, but at the same time, a top Romney campaign surrogate and advisor is also — you guessed it — a former lobbyist for Freddie Mac.
Romney’s campaign really ought to be paying closer attention to these details.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, January 25, 2012
President Obama’s Best State Of The Union Speech
The State of the Union was upbeat and positive, and that’s saying a lot from me, a pessimist. Now I know those on the right will tell you everything that was wrong with the president’s speech; heck, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Gov. Mitt Romney told America what they thought of the president’s speech before he even uttered a word!
Personally, I felt the president hit it out of the park—his best State of the Union speech and hopefully his fourth, not his last.
Starting out with thanking the U.S. military, he pointed out that for the first time in nine years we’re no longer in Iraq, and more importantly, that we’re safer and we’re more respected throughout the world. And of course, there was the huge applause when he mentioned that for the first time in over two decades, we’re no longer fearful of the wrath of Osama bin Laden.
I personally loved when the president referred to how our military operates, and how we as a nation and how the government should operate: focus on the mission at hand and do it working together. With the lowest approval rating of Congress ever and polls showing that Americans clearly want both sides of the aisle to work together to get things done, the president, I believe, was speaking to all Americans and to all of our frustrations with our government.
I also liked how the president painted a picture of what could be. He pointed out America’s values; except for one remark about the administration that preceded him, he didn’t blame former President Bush, which I found refreshing and necessary.
He was bold when he specifically stated that the banks were wrong and irresponsible in lending money to people who couldn’t afford to pay it back.
He gave facts about job loss: 4 million jobs lost before he entered office, millions more before his policies were implemented.
I found that the president was being humble when he spoke of the jobs that businesses created–not he, his administration, or Congress.
When the president spoke of American values, it didn’t have to do with church or religion; it had to do with our work ethic—from American manufacturing to GM regaining its title as the number one automaker in the world. Even the Republicans had to clap on that one.
And for a president who is constantly accused of wanting to tax America to death, he was talking about a lot of tax credits going around: tax credits for making products here in America, tax breaks for small business owners—rewarding those who keep and develop jobs here, and stopping the rewards going to companies that send their jobs overseas. (Sidenote: Eric Cantor looked angry about that–hmm…)
Then the president went on to other things America values, other things that make our nation great, and what could make us greater: education. He linked education with the ability to increase a person’s income in the future. And he made it personal when he spoke of every person in the chamber who has a teacher they liked, remembered, etc. I found myself nodding at that remark.
He reached out to Hispanics with the DREAM act, although never mentioning it by name. He touched the unions in speaking about manufacturing, teachers, and the auto industry. And he even gave a shout out to us ladies with the desire for us to earn equal pay for the jobs we do that men do. (Woo hoo!)
The bottom line is, although this speech is about governing, it is a campaign year. I felt the president reminded Americans of where we are, how far we’ve come, and where we could be headed with him at the helm. He spoke of the facts rather than the fiction Americans so often hear in the media. And if America were a ship, he showed us with his words that he is more than up to the task of being the ship’s captain for the next four years.
By: Leslie Marshall, U. S. News and World Report, January 25, 2012
Why The Tea Party Is Responsible For Newt Gingrich
We may not be attributing Newt Gingrich’s rise to the tea party. But maybe we should.
Even as the movement’s influence in the GOP appears to have waned over the past year, there remains one major remnant of what happened in 2010: anti-establishment fervor.
The tea party spurred momentum and turnout for the GOP two years ago, but it also caused it some headaches in the primaries, turning aside candidates who were clearly favored by the party establishment in favor of conservative wild cards that went on to mixed results in November.
Sound familiar?
That very same anti-establishment mentality has spurred any number of anti-Mitt Romney candidates to frontrunner status in the 2012 GOP presidential race. And when it finally looked like Romney was the presumptive nominee before South Carolina, the base recoiled in much the same way it did in a series of 2010 Senate races, delivering a huge win for Gingrich.
And in doing so, the tea party movement served notice that it’s still very much alive, albeit not as cohesive or well-branded.
In recent days, some smart political analysts have begun to question the theory that the major party elites have overwhelming influence when it comes to picking their nominees.
The New York Times’s Nate Silver wrote about this at length on Sunday, referring to political scientist Marty Cohen’s book “The Party Decides.”
Cohen’s theory states that, while candidates and voter preferences matter, nominees are almost always chosen in a sort of long-running negotiation among party elites, who effectively pave the way for voters to make the most logical choice and/or pick the most electable candidate. In other words, voters have a choice, but it’s heavily influenced by party bigwigs.
That theory, according to some, simply doesn’t apply to the 2012 GOP presidential race.
“The competing paradigm might be called ‘This Time Is Different,’” Silver writes. “Under this interpretation, elite support and the ground game do not matter as much as usual. Instead, success is more idiosyncratic: personalities matter a lot, and nominations are determined based primarily on momentum and news media coverage.”
This makes a lot of sense — particularly when it comes to Gingrich — but there seems to be more to it.
Namely, the tea party.
After all, exit polls from Saturday’s South Carolina primary showed 64 percent of voters identified as tea party supporters, and Gingrich won nearly half of their votes — almost twice as many as Romney. Indeed, the fact that nearly two-thirds of voters in any primary say they support a certain political movement shows what kind of influence it has.
But even if you look beyond the exit poll, it’s pretty clear that the tea party mentality is very much a part of what Gingrich has been able to accomplish. The same tea party mentality that was responsible for Sharron Angle, Christine O’Donnell, Ken Buck, Marco Rubio and Rand Paul is now helping Gingrich.
In most of those cases, there was another GOP candidate who was favored by the GOP establishment but didn’t light any fires among the conservative base. So the base chose somebody else.
That’s not to say that Gingrich hasn’t been a capable candidate who was able to swing a state by 25 points in a week’s time. In fact, it’s just saying that his stealth maneuvering has more impact today, because voters are acting more independently of party leaders.
For some reason, political observers have stopped attributing this to the tea party. But it’s very much a lingering effect of what the tea party did in 2010 or, at the very least, is a result of the same set of circumstances that gave rise to the tea party.
The question now is whether it’s enough, as it was in 2010 Senate races, to push a supposedly less-electable wild card candidate to a major party’s presidential nomination.
As we have written before, that is a much steeper hill to climb, and we remain skeptical that the tea party will actually pick the GOP nominee.
But the influence of the tea party lives on in today’s Republican Party.
By: Aaron Blake, The Washington Post, January 24, 2012
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