The Establishment Vs. Newt: A Long List Of Republicans Who Want Anybody But Gingrich
As a former Republican House speaker and veteran of the culture wars of the 1990s, Newt Gingrich understandably earned his share of liberal detractors. But who knew how many enemies he’d made among the Republican political elite? As Gingrich’s recent surge in the polls moves ever closer to bearing electoral fruit in the Iowa Caucuses, it’s fair to say that the GOP political establishment is freaking out. Here’s just a sampling of the nice things Newt’s Washington colleagues have had to say about him lately.
George Will: “Gingrich … embodies the vanity and rapacity that make modern Washington repulsive. … There is almost artistic vulgarity in Gingrich’s unrepented role as a hired larynx for interests profiting from such government follies as ethanol and cheap mortgages. … His temperament—intellectual hubris distilled—makes him blown about by gusts of enthusiasm for intellectual fads, from 1990s futurism to ‘Lean Six Sigma’ today.”
Wall Street Journal Editorial Page: “In Mr. Gingrich’s telling, his ideas are bold and even radical, but the irony is that they’re often much less revolutionary than his rhetoric suggests. … Take Mr. Gingrich’s 49-page manifesto on entitlement reform, which his campaign rolled out shortly before Thanksgiving. It is a fundamentally Newtonian document, both in its ambition—it promises to ‘reduce federal spending by half or more’—and in its lack of discipline.”
Gene Healy, Cato Institute vice president: “[Gingrich is] Mitt Romney with more baggage and bolder hand gestures. … It seems that, if you clamor long enough about “big ideas,” people become convinced you actually have them. But most of Gingrich’s policy ideas over the last decade have been tepidly conventional and consistent with the Big Government, Beltway Consensus. … There’s no denying that Newt is smart, but there’s a zany, Cliff Clavin aspect to his intellect. At times, Gingrich, who’s written more than 150 book reviews on Amazon.com, sounds like a guy who read way too much during a long prison stretch.”
Karl Rove: “He is the only candidate who didn’t qualify for the Missouri primary, and on Wednesday he failed to present enough signatures to get on the ballot in Ohio. … [It’s] embarrassing to be so poorly organized.”
Ramesh Ponnuru: “Conservatives who dislike George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism have Gingrich to thank for it. After Gingrich lost the budget battles with President Bill Clinton, it took 15 years for any politician to take up the cause of limited-government conservatism that he had discredited. Although Gingrich isn’t solely responsible for the Republican policy defeats of those years, his erratic behavior, lack of discipline and self-absorption had a lot to do with them.”
Charles Krauthammer: “Gingrich has his own vulnerabilities. The first is often overlooked because it is characterological rather than ideological: his own unreliability. Gingrich has a self-regard so immense that it rivals Obama’s—but, unlike Obama’s, is untamed by self-discipline.
Representative Peter King: “He’s too self-centered. He does not have the discipline, does not have the capacity to control himself.” If Newt were elected president, “The country and congress would be going through one crisis after another, and these would be self-inflicted crises.”
Christopher Barron, head of GOProud: “Newt is the establishment. He’s antithetical to what the Tea Party is talking about.”
Senator Tom Coburn: “There’s all types of leaders. Leaders that instill confidence, leaders that are somewhat abrupt and brisk. Leaders that have one standard for the people that they’re leading and a different standard for themselves. I just found [Gingrich’s] leadership lacking.”
Jennifer Rubin: “[W]hen he does think big, it is often in clichés. … When not predictable, Gingrich’s ideas can range from irresponsible (go see his website for the list of tax cuts, but no talk of spending cuts) to the crazed.”
Ross Douthat: “[Gingrich’s] candidacy isn’t a test of religious conservatives’ willingness to be good, forgiving Christians. It’s a test of their ability to see their cause through outsiders’ eyes, and to recognize what anointing a thrice-married adulterer as the champion of “family values” would say to the skeptical, the unconverted and above all to the young.”
Joe Scarborough: “When [Gingrich] puts on his political helmet he is a terrible person. … Let me tell you something: the Republican establishment will never make peace with Newt Gingrich. They just won’t! They won’t. This is an important point. Because the Republicans I talk to say he cannot win the nomination at any cost. He will destroy the party. He will re-elect Barack Obama and we’ll be ruined. That’s going to happen. I mean Newt Gingrich would possibly win 100 electoral votes.”
By: The New Republic, Staff, December 9, 2011
GOP Still Clueless About Resentment Of Inequality
In his New York Times opinion piece, “Let’s Not Talk About Inequality,” Thomas B. Edsall does a good job of tracing the change in public attitudes toward Republican economic policies in the wake of the 2008 meltdown.
Edsall quotes Gingrich’s and Romney’s pious pronouncements about workers needing to “become more employable” (Newt) and achieving “success and rewards through hard work” (Mitch), which is a little hard to digest, coming from a guy who gets six figures for a speech and another who made his fortune in hedge funds. This in “an American economy sharply skewed towards the affluent, with rising inequality, a dwindling middle class and the persistence of long-term unemployment.”
Not all Republicans are quite so clueless. Edsall quotes GOP framing guru Frank Luntz, “I’m so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort” because “they’re having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism.” Edsalll also quotes Democratic strategist Geoff Garin, who explains “…The Republican/Tea Party narrative about the economy has been superseded by a different narrative – one that emphasizes the need to address the growing gap between those at the very top of the economic ladder and the rest of the country.”
Garin cites poll data indicating stronger support for “a set of policies generally favored by Democrats calling for the elimination of tax breaks for the rich and tougher regulation of major banks and corporations” and that the public believes the federal government should “pursue policies that try to reduce the gap between wealthy and less well-off Americans.” He also cites polling data spelling big trouble for the GOP:
The job ratings of Republicans in Congress have tanked at 74 percent negative to 19 percent favorable, dropping more steeply than Obama’s, which are 51 negative-44 positive. But the Post survey also found that congressional Republicans run neck and neck with the president when respondents are asked “who would you trust to do a better job” on handling the economy (42-42) and creating jobs (40-40). On an issue on which the public traditionally favors Democrats by wide margins, “protecting the middle class,” Obama held only a 45-41 advantage over congressional Republicans.
Republicans are scrambling to figure out how to blame Democrats for worsening inequality, explains Edsall. But “The issue of inequality is inherently dangerous for Republicans who are viewed by many as the party of the upper class.” Further,
An Oct. 19-24 CBS/New York Times poll asked respondents whether the policies of the Obama administration and the policies of Republicans in Congress favor the rich, the middle class, the poor or treat everyone equally. Just 12 percent said Obama favors the rich, while 69 percent said Republicans in Congress favor the rich.
And when Ryan’s budget scheme is explained to voters, they “are horrified by it,” according to Garin. Edsall marvels at the GOP’s blindness in making it possible for their two front runners to get bogged down in arguments about how much more to give the wealthy while weakening Medicare benefits for the middle class — “in a climate of stark economic adversity for millions of unemployed Americans.”
Edsall is right. Democrats could not have hoped for a more self-destructive scenario in the Republican camp. If Democrats can project a credible message that offers hope for a better future for middle class voters in the months ahead, the optimism that has begun to emerge in Democratic circles will be justified.
By: J. P. Green, The Democratic Strategist, December 13, 2011
Newt Gingrich Makes Dumb Marriage Pledge
Callista Gingrich can breathe a sigh of relief—Newt has pledged not to cheat on her. Sure he presumably made such a pledge before God when they exchanged marital vows, but now Newt is making his promise before a higher power, a social conservative group called The Family Leader.
Per Politico, Gingrich initially declined to sign Family Leader’s pledge on marriage and abortion over the summer, but has, in his own Newt way, signed on by way of a lengthy letter supporting the various stipulations of the marriage pledge. He writes in part:
I also pledge to uphold the institution of marriage through personal fidelity to my spouse and respect for the marital bonds of others.
As a general matter, the proliferation of signed campaign pledges (including the godfather of them all, Grover Norquist’s no-new-taxes pledge) is generally pernicious. The only pledge an office-holder should be bound by is his or her vow to support and defend the Constitution. Other iron clad pledges only serve to circumscribe the options available when a pol leaves the campaign trail and has to actually govern.
But even in the spectrum of signed pledges, this one is dumb. Put aside for a moment the fact that a politician’s personal life is frankly irrelevant and unrelated to actual policies.
Suppose for a moment that you believe the state of a politician’s marriage is actually relevant to his or her fitness for office. Does anyone honestly believe that Gingrich (or any other politician) will pull himself back from the brink of cheating because it would mean breaking his vow … to The Family Leader?
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, December 13, 2011
Beach Volleyball, Child Labor, and Other Crazy Newt Gingrich Comments
Gingrich’s surge has pretty much made him the GOP frontrunner. But will his past comments come back to haunt him? The Daily Beast rounds up some of the most out-there things the ex-speaker has said.
“When Secretary Sebelius said the other day she would punish insurance companies that told the truth about the cost of Obamacare, she was behaving exactly in the spirit of the Soviet tyranny.”
—Values Voter Summit, 9/17/11
“And if you want to put people in jail—I want to second what Michele said—you ought to start with Barney Frank and Chris Dodd and let’s look at the politicians who created the environment, the politicians who profited from the environment, and the politicians who put this country in trouble.”
—Republican debate, October 2011
“The poorest children in the poorest neighborhoods should have jobs in the schools that they go to…The kids could mop the floor and clean up the bathroom and get paid for it and it would be OK.”
—Fundraiser dinner in Iowa, 12/1/11
“I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time [my grandchildren are] my age they will be in a secular, atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”
—Address to Cornerstone Church in Texas, March 2011
“The idea that a congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument.”
—Interview with Mother Jones magazine, October 1989
“The secular socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.”
—In his book, To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine, May 2010
“A mere 40 years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. No bureaucrat would have invented it, and that’s what freedom is all about.”
—Speaking at the Republican National Convention, August 1996
“I want to say to the elite of this country—the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite: I accuse you in Littleton… of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made, and being afraid to take responsibility for things you have done, and instead foisting upon the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don’t have the courage to look at the world you have created.”
—Speaking about the Columbine shootings, May 1999
“This is, by the way, one of the great tragedies of the Bush administration. The more successful they’ve been at intercepting and stopping bad guys, the less proof there is that we’re in danger. And therefore, the better they’ve done at making sure there wasn’t an attack, the easier it is to say, ‘Well, there was never going to be an attack anyway.’ It’s almost like they should every once in a while have allowed an attack to get through just to remind us.”
—Speaking in Huntington, N.Y., April 2008
“I did no lobbying of any kind, period. For a practical reason, I’m gonna be really direct, okay. I was charging $60,000 a speech and the number of speeches was going up, not down. Normally, celebrities leave and they gradually sell fewer speeches every year. We were selling more.”
—Campaign stop in Bluffton, S.C., 11/30/11
“It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid. Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”
—Speaking at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, 11/21/11
“All the Occupy movement start with the premise that we owe them everything,” Gingrich said. “They take over a public park they didn’t pay for, to go nearby to use bathrooms they didn’t pay for, to beg for food from places they don’t want to pay for, to obstruct those who are going to work to pay the taxes to sustain the bathrooms and to sustain the park, so they can self-righteously explain they are the paragons of virtue to which we owe everything. That is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country, and why you need to reassert something by saying to them, ‘Go get a job right after you take a bath.’”
—Speaking at Iowa family values forum, 11/19/11
“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]? That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.”
—Interview with the National Review, 9/11/10
“How can you have the mess we have in New Orleans, and not have had deep investigations of the federal government, the state government, the city government, and the failure of citizenship in the Ninth Ward, where 22,000 people were so uneducated and so unprepared, they literally couldn’t get out of the way of a hurricane.”
—Speaking at CPAC, 5/3/07
“There’s no question at times of my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate. What I can tell you is that when I did things that were wrong, I wasn’t trapped in situation ethics, I was doing things that were wrong, and yet, I was doing them.”
By: The Daily Beast, December 12, 2011
The Problem Isn’t Mitt Romney’s $10,000 Bet Offer. It’s His Serial Dishonesty
One of the biggest pieces of news out of Saturday’s debate is that Mitt Romney offered to bet Rick Perry $10,000 over the latter’s claim that Romney wrote in his book that he viewed the individual mandate as a “model” for the country. Dems and Republicans alike are pouncing on the casual offer of a large wager as proof that Romney is out of touch, and reporters are predicting that this moment could crystallize a national media narrative about Romney.
But while the $10,000 moment is politically problematic and revealing in some ways, it doesn’t really deserve to rise to the level of national narrative. What’s more deserving of a national storyline about Romney is his serial dishonesty, his willingness to say and do anything to win.
This morning, Romney is pushing back on the idea that there was anything amiss about the $10,000 bet offer, arguing that he picked an “outrageous” sum to highlight just how “outrageous” Perry’s claim was. But Perry’s claim — while not completely accurate — wasn’t all that outrageous.
Perry argued that Romney wrote that the individual mandate he passed as governor of Massachusetts “should be the model for the country.” It’s true, as PolitiFact points out, that Romney’s book did also say that such reforms should be implemented at the state level. But Romney has in fact talked about the mandate as a national model: In 2007, he said he hoped that “most” states would adopt it, and added that he hopes to see “a nation that’s taken a mandate approach.” Romney is now trying to obscure the fact that he plainly saw his chief accomplishment as something that should ultimately be adopted on a national, or quasi-national, scale.
More broadly, political reporters and commentators are always tempted to seize on such moments as the $10,000 bet as defining of a candidate’s character. But this moment is ultimately almost as trivial as was John Edwards’ $400 haircut. More important is the broader pattern of dissembling and dishonesty that only begins with his equivocations over the mandate. To wit: Romney attacked Newt Gingrich for opposing mass deportation of longtime illegal residents without saying whether he supports such deportation. Romney continues to insist Obama apologized for America, even though this has been repeatedly proven flatly false. Romney released an ad ripping Obama’s quotes out of context in a highly dishonest way — and the campaign later boasted about the media attention the dishonesty secured. Romney falsely asserted that Obama is “bowing to foreign dictators” — then his campaign later insisted the claim was “metaphorical.” And so on.
This broader pattern is what deserves the status of national narrative about Romney’s character, not some throwaway line about a bet.
By: Greg Sargent, The Washington Post, The Line Plum, December 12, 2011
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