RET about Mr. Newt

It seems that I’m not the only one to question Newt Gingrich’s qualifications for the presidency. In yesterday’s online edition of The American Spectator R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. has this to say about the “Boy Speaker”:

WASHINGTON -- The Hon. Newt Gingrich's recent oracular rumble to a luncheon audience at the Brookings Institution, during which he threatened to seek the Republican presidential nomination if a "vacuum" remains in the Republican field, reminded me of an inescapable insight I suffered sometime in 1998. Gingrich is the Republicans' Bill Clinton. Being a Republican, Gingrich is not as vacuous as the Arkansas huckster, nor as amusing. In fact, he can be boring.

Springing from the same late 1960s Jugendkultur as the Boy President, Gingrich is the career pol, the hustling, self-promoting narcissist, the sempiternal fantasist. When he was Speaker of the House I should have called him the Boy Speaker. He made his exit from politics like a troubled adolescent: whining, blustering, and guilty as charged.

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I once heard an English gentleman, fresh from bathing in Clinton's radiance, confide to the great British historian Paul Johnson that Clinton is "so intelligent." "Not intelligent," Johnson responded, "cunning." The word encapsulates Gingrich's thought process perfectly. Yet again, Gingrich is a Republican. He is not quite as cunning as Clinton. In fact, whenever he found himself up against Clinton, he was bested by the Boy President.

When all the brag and bounce of Gingrich's intellectual pretense is anesthetized, and the corpus of his intellectual work is subjected to scholarly analysis, what do we see? An eternal graduate student at a mediocre state university has been playing with bits and pieces of the large ideas of Milton Friedman and like-minded political scientists, for instance Edward Banfield. Down the hall is Bill Clinton. The bits and pieces that he plays with are those of Ira Magaziner or Robert B. Reich. Gingrich is a more adventuresome graduate student.

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Now he believes that he is a plausible candidate for the presidency. Given his erratic record, do I need to adduce any more evidence that he is a fantasist? He fashioned the Republican takeover of the House in 1994 with the indispensable assistance of his co-generationists from the gaseous 1960s, the Clintons. In 1998 he recklessly imperiled his party's dominance and disgraced his name. Since his fall he has, as has his Democratic look-alike, strutted and pontificated tirelessly. Both had their moment in history, and both blew it.

Newt gets credit for engineering the Republican upset which brought the GOP to congressional majority status for the first time in 40 years. The truth is that the massive losses that the Democrat Party suffered in that election were the result of a number of factors. Scandals like the affair with the House Bank made the Democrats appear to have a “we are above the law” attitude. The largest factor in the Republican takeover of the House and Senate was Hillary Clinton’s failed attempt to socialize medicine. The Clinton’s efforts to bring about a hostile takeover of one seventh of the American economy scared the crap out of the middle class. They decided to create a counterbalance to Clinton’s Democratic control of the Executive Branch by giving the other party control of the legislature.

Gingrich was clever enough to sense the changing political winds. He was clever, or cunning as RET puts it, enough to exercise Washington-style “leadership”. That is he figured out where the public was in the mood to go and ran real fast in that direction so that it would appear that everyone was following him. The Contract With America, who’s provisions were entirely worthwhile, was his vehicle.

Upon attaining power he was found to be unable to exercise it effectively and his character was revealed to be deeply flawed. Let us hope that his current attempt to rehabilitate himself will take less time to fail than his Speakership did.