Save the Rich!

The Republicans' War on (Almost) Everyone

by ANTHONY DiMAGGIO


The remaining Republican candidates are gearing up for the March 6th Super Tuesday primary elections, with Mitt Romney carrying forward his momentum from wins in Arizona and Michigan over competitors Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul. As the primary season progresses and the race increasingly turns into a close one between Romney and Santorum, it’s worth reflecting on just how reactionary this bunch of misfits has become, and what’s at stake as their proposals are seriously by the American public.

This primary season has increasingly degenerated into a shootout between candidates seeking to prove they are the true heir to Reagan’s conservative legacy. No matter that these candidates are significantly further to the right than the tax-hiking Reagan. The myth of Ronald Reagan has become far more potent than the actual Reagan – and Republican candidates have exploited that myth to push some of the most noxious policies imaginable. A review of their statements is enlightening – and disturbing.


Mitt Romney’s Attacks on the “Entitlement Society”
As the most “respectable” and “mainstream” of this Republican clique, Romney’s positions are nothing to write home about. He has gone on record lambasting America’s “entitlement society,” a blatant stab at widely popular social programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. These programs, despite being supported by a strong majority of Americans, are becoming cannon fodder for a bi-partisan system increasingly dedicated to dismantling the safety net for the masses of working, middle class, and poor Americans. Romney’s anger is targeted at an Obama administration that “has been replacing our merit-based society” with one increasingly reliant on federal welfare benefits. To prove his point, Romney cites evidence that federal payments to individual Americans increased by nearly $600 billion since 2009. He also cites census data suggesting that nearly half of Americans (a five percent increase since 2008) rely on at least one federal program such as Social Security, food stamps, worker’s compensation, some sort of housing subsidy, or unemployment benefits. Why such increased reliance should be surprising in a terrible economy is not discussed in Romney’s diatribes. His attempts to eliminate these programs are symptomatic of just how out of touch Republicans are with distressed Americans.

Romney’s attacks are not merely rhetorical. He went on record in December of 2011 supporting Republican Representative Paul Ryan’s plan for Medicare reform, which proposed to privatize and transform it into a program in which seniors are required to purchase their health insurance from private providers. The Ryan plan was widely condemned for threatening to end Medicare as we know it, with the vouchers being wholly inadequate to cover rising private health care costs. As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities reported, the Ryan plan would decrease Medicare coverage by increasing the age of eligibility for Medicare from 65 to 67, while contributing to growing costs. Federal voucher subsidies for private health insurance would grow at only the rate of inflation, which has increased at a slower rate than the growth of health care costs in the last few decades. By relying on a voucher system, the federal government would redirect a massive amount of taxpayer money to private health insurers, while reducing access and quality of care for the elderly. As the Congressional Budget Office estimates, by 2022 (the first year a voucher system would be implemented), a 65 year old voucher recipient’s costs would more than double from $6,150 to $12,500.


Newt Gingrich’s War on Teachers and Children
Not to be outdone by Romney’s reactionary politics, Newt Gingrich has done the unthinkable by suggesting that Americans return to the good old Dickensian days when children enjoyed the human “right” to engage in child labor, rather than remain in repressive public schools dominated by “nearly criminal” teachers unions. Condemning child labor laws as “stupid,” Gingrich has offered a “radical” proposal that public schools be allowed to fire their union janitors and empower children to take their place: “Most of these schools ought to get rid of 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.”

Gingrich has also condemned union teachers, accusing (specifically the city of Los Angeles’ teacher union) of “protecting bad teachers” and for “almost criminal” behavior – presumably suggesting that there is some positive (albeit undocumented) correlation between unionization of schools and poor student performance. For the record, there is no evidence suggesting that unionization is correlated with lower student performance, nor is there evidence that unionized public school teachers are overpaid when compared to those of equal education in the private sector, or that private charters schools (which conservatives claim are the solution to underperformance in public schools) perform any better than public ones. Incendiary language, however, speaks louder than facts or data in the Republican primaries. It’s far easier to scream at public school teachers and condemn them as lazy. It’s easier to condescendingly advise Occupy Wall Street protesters (as Gingrich does) to “take a bath” and “get a job” than it is to propose effective solutions for improving education of for creating jobs at a time when reports indicate (as recently as mid 2011) that there are five workers for every available job in the U.S. economy.

Newt has also renewed George W. Bush’s dead-on-arrival plan to privatize Social Security. One would have hoped that this proposal would never again see the light of day, especially after the 2008 economic collapse demonstrated the tremendous dangers of casino style gambling with worker’s retirement funds. Privatization schemes represent a boon for Wall Street, but a massive risk for Main Street. These risks alone should be enough to give us pause, not to mention the tremendous costs of privatization to the federal government – considering that taxpayers would have to find a way to fund not only current retirees’ checks, but also investment accounts for those still working today. That privatization schemes represent a major expansionof federal spending and responsibility, however, are an afterthought of a Gingrich candidacy more interested in looting Social Security for private gain.

Rick Santorum, Hero of the Right-Wing Fringe
Pick the issue, and Rick Santorum is far to the right of the American people – and even rank-and-file members of the Republican Party. Voting record analyses from citizens groups such as Americans for Democratic Action suggest that Santorum was among the most reactionary of Republicans in terms of his voting record in the U.S. Senate. It’s not hard to see why after looking at his 2012 campaign rhetoric. Santorum opposes the entire Medicare system, and favors Paul Ryan’s privatization plan, arguing that “we should not have a government-run health care system on Medicare or anything else, because it completely distorts the market. It’s top down. It’s not the way America works best.” Of course, government also would remain intimately involved in Medicare under the Ryan plan, with taxpayer dollars being redirected from a government funded and paid insurance system to a government-funded, privately profitable system. The only difference between Ryan’s plan and the current system is that government would no longer pay for seniors’ insurance by themselves, but would funnel that money through private insurance middlemen, who could charge radically more for the same service. This would allow costs for insurance to rise, while doing nothing to “get government out of Medicare.” Quite the contrary, government debt obligations would likely increase as seniors (most of which are on fixed incomes) would be unable to pay their insurance premiums. This prescription, then, is yet another plan for increasing government spending subsidies for the private sector, under the guise of promoting “small government” and privatization.

Santorum has also called for deep and immediate cuts to Social Security. He was a strong supporter of Bush’s 2005 effort to privatize Social Security, a red flag if there ever was one for those wondering about his long term “vision” for the program. Similar to other Republican candidates, Santorum also supports extremist positions on education that suggest a total lack of interest in increasing educational opportunity for the poor and disadvantaged. Among the most controversial of Santorum’s claims was his labeling Obama a “snob” for promoting the idea that all Americans deserve access to higher ed. As Santorum argued: “there are a lot of people in this country that have no desire or no aspiration to go to college, because they have a different set of skills and desires and dreams that don’t include college.” Santorum’s comment is all the more perverse (aside from his contempt for adult access to higher ed) in light of the fact that Obama has done little to deliver the $12 billion he promised community colleges in 2009. This failure is all the more tragic at a time when four year college and university funding has approximately doubled over the last decade, and as higher learning becomes a luxury under a system that only the upper middle and upper class can afford.

The current crop of Republican primary contenders has done little more than expound upon the most extreme rhetoric embraced by past contenders. Former frontrunners Rick Perry and Herman Cain gained notoriety respectively for attacking Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” and blaming the victims (the unemployed) for their failure (and alleged unwillingness) to find work during tough economic times. These candidates (past and present) are impervious to data that challenge the foundations of their ideology. Why let evidence get in the way of a good argument?

This is clearly Mitt Romney’s rationale as he attacks Obama’s “entitlement society,” and forecasts that over the next few years “we will have created a society that contains a sizable contingent of long-term jobless, dependent on government benefits for survival…government dependency can only foster passivity and sloth.” Dismissal of inconvenient facts is clearly a motivation of Rick Santorum’s when he claims that the “reach of government” spending is “systematically destroying the work ethic” of America. Such propaganda from Romney and Santorum has little to do with observable reality. In the real world, federal “welfare” spending on programs such as supplemental nutritional assistance (food stamps) amounted to a meager two percent (or $78 billion in spending of the $3.834 trillion 2011 federal budget. Temporary Assistance to Needy Families spending (formerly Aid to Families with Dependent Children) accounted for just less than one percent of the federal budget. Why even focus so much energy on demonizing these programs, when they make up such a miniscule portion of the budget, the cutting of which can’t possibly be effective in trimming the $1.56 trillion in federal deficit spending for 2011? Why direct so much anger at the millions of Americans reliant on welfare spending more generally, considering that (as a recent study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities shows), 90 percent of welfare entitlement benefits go to the elderly, the disabled, or working families, rather than those who are “too lazy to work” and “don’t want a job?” To those interested in improving the state of Main Street, attacks on the poor are a red herring – a distraction from the real economic problems we face today. Unfortunately, however, such demonization fits the ideology of a bi-partisan system which has declared war on the poor, and views the state as a weapon of class war to be used against the poor and in favor of redistributing wealth from the masses to the wealthiest ten to twenty percent of Americans (who have captured most all of the income gains in the U.S. over the last thirty years).

The contemporary party system has moved greatly to the right. The Democrats are the modern day equivalent of Eisenhower Republicans, talking regularly about smaller government, budget cuts, and reducing the size of the welfare state and safety net. Modern day Republicans would be unrecognizable in their extremism to liberal Republicans of the Eisenhower or Nixon variety. None of those leaders were running on platforms to gut what’s left of the American welfare state, and they certainly knew better than to anger such a powerful voting bloc as seniors, who rightly take attacks on Medicare and Social Security quite seriously. Sadly, the party system’s drift to the right appears to show no sign of abating this election season, with Republicans all seeking to outflank each other in their embrace of reactionary politics. It will take a major rebuking of the party at the polls to beat back this most recent assault on the American safety net.

Judge keeps Gingrich, Perry, Huntsman off Virginia ballot

By Reuters
Friday, January 13, 2012

 

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A federal judge in Virginia on Friday refused to order that candidates Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich and Jon Huntsman be added to the ballot in the state’s March 6 Republican presidential primary election after they failed to qualify.

Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and congressman Ron Paul were the only two candidates to qualify for the primary in Virginia by submitting the 10,000 verifiable signatures by the deadline. Romney is the frontrunner in the race for the Republican nomination to face Democratic President Barack Obama on November 6.

Perry and the other candidates sued Virginia election officials to be added to the ballot, arguing that the state’s qualification process limited voter access to the candidates of their choosing.

But Judge John Gibney ruled the candidates filed their legal challenge too late, finding the harm they suffered began when they started collecting the necessary signatures because they were required to use Virginia residents to do so.

Such a requirement was likely unconstitutional and had the candidates sued earlier, the judge said he could have granted permission to use people from outside Virginia to collect signatures.
“It is too late for the court to allow them to gather more signatures – the absentee ballots must go out now,” Gibney wrote in a 22-page opinion issued after a hearing in Richmond.

The state argued those ballots must be mailed to absentee voters by January 21 to comply with election laws.

Gibney did rule the requirement of 10,000 verifiable signatures legal, saying it was “a minimal number” and that six candidates made the primary ballot four years ago under the same rules.

The candidates could appeal his ruling.

Super PACs, thanks to the Citizens' United decision, face no contribution limits

Saturday, December 31, 2011 by the New York Times
Group’s Ads Rip at Gingrich as Romney Stands Clear
by Nicholas Confessore and Jim Rutenberg

DES MOINES — The attacks began three weeks ago and have not let up since: Television ad after television ad slamming Newt Gingrich for having “more baggage than the airlines,” for being fined by Congress for ethics violations, for his position on illegal immigration, even for admitting that he has made mistakes on the campaign trail.

Super PAC 'Restore Our Future' has spent close to $3 million in Iowa alone. Democrats and Republicans alike have singled out the $2.8 million-and-counting air deluge as the biggest factor in Mr. Gingrich’s precipitous drop in polls of Iowa voters and Mitt Romney’s corresponding rise, reshaping the critical first contest of the Republican primary season to Mr. Romney’s benefit.

The ads, which continue to blanket Iowa days before the caucuses here, were created and paid for by people with deep knowledge of the Romney campaign’s strategic thinking, close relationships with Mr. Romney’s most generous donors, and even research on what television viewers like and dislike most about Mr. Romney himself.

Yet neither Mr. Romney nor his staff has had to lift a finger or spend a dollar to make it happen. In a stark illustration of how last year’s landmark Supreme Court ruling on campaign finance has created powerful new channels for outside money to influence elections, the negative onslaught is the work of a group called Restore Our Future.

The most prominent of the “super PACs,” which can accept unlimited donations for purposes of supporting or attacking candidates, it operates independently of the Romney campaign but under the direction of former Romney aides who do not need to be told what the candidate needs.

They include Carl Forti, the political director of Mr. Romney’s 2008 campaign; Charles R. Spies, Mr. Romney’s former chief counsel; and Larry McCarthy, an alumnus of Mr. Romney’s media team who was known for producing some of the more compelling positive spots for Mr. Romney four years ago, but has nonetheless earned a reputation as one of the most fearsome political ad makers in the country — he produced the Willie Horton commercial that devastated Michael S. Dukakis’s presidential campaign in 1988.

Restore Our Future’s fund-raiser, Steve Roche, led the Romney campaign’s own finance team until this summer. He now spends his days meeting with the New York hedge fund managers, Utah businessmen and Boston financiers who have contributed almost $30 million to the group this year, according to people with knowledge of the group’s fund-raising. Among the donors are some conservatives who have a long history of backing attack-oriented outside groups like Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which in 2004 went aggressively after Senator John Kerry, the Democratic presidential nominee that year.

The result: Mr. Romney has effectively outsourced his negative advertising to a group that has raised millions of dollars from his donors to inundate his opponents with attacks — all without breaking the rules that forbid super PACs to explicitly coordinate with candidates. Polls showed Mr. Gingrich’s support in Iowa tumbling immediately after the Restore Our Future ads began running in early December. An NBC News/Marist poll released Friday showed a 19 percentage point increase over the last month, to 35 percent, in the number of likely Republican caucusgoers who said they judged Mr. Gingrich to be unacceptable as the party’s nominee.

“Restore Our Future has been very important,” said Mel Sembler, a top Republican donor and a member of Mr. Romney’s Florida finance team. “They’ve had an impact, there’s no question about it.”

The battle in Iowa has underscored what advocates for tighter campaign finance restraints have warned for months: that the new groups will be deployed to devastating effect, in the primary season and then in the general election.

“Iowa is ground zero of what we can expect in every competitive state for the rest of the presidential election,” said Ellen S. Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks outside money in politics.

“Iowa is ground zero of what we can expect in every competitive state for the rest of the presidential election,” said Ellen S. Miller, executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, which tracks outside money in politics.

Since they began advertising in earnest several weeks ago, groups like Restore Our Future have spent millions of dollars in the early primary states, rivaling and in some cases surpassing the spending of the candidates they support. While the candidates can raise just $2,500 from each individual donor for the primary, super PACs, thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, face no such restrictions.

Speaking on Fox News last week, Mr. Romney played down the significance of Restore Our Future’s advertisements against Mr. Gingrich, arguing that Mr. Gingrich was falling in polls as voters focused on his record. Mr. Gingrich has also been under intense assault from other groups, including Ron Paul’s campaign; Mr. Romney’s campaign itself called attention to Mr. Gingrich’s tumultuous departure from Congress in a mailing it sent to Iowa voters.

But one thing is clear: Restore Our Future has spent more on advertisements in Iowa and elsewhere than any other super PAC, according to tracking by NBC and Smart Media Group Delta. The group has already begun buying television time in two other Republican primary states, Florida and South Carolina, running ads that hammer Mr. Gingrich and Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.

A super PAC supporting Mr. Gingrich, Winning Our Future, has spent just $263,000 on advertising in Iowa, according to figures from NBC and Smart Media Group Delta, without explicitly attacking Mr. Romney. (Another pro-Gingrich group, Strong America Now, has attacked Mr. Romney in mailings to voters.) Restore Our Future has spent twice as much money in the state as Mr. Romney has, most of it on advertisements savaging his opponents. Meanwhile, Mr. Romney’s campaign has run only positive television ads, featuring sunny portrayals of him and his family, with the occasional jab at President Obama.

That has helped Mr. Romney avoid the classic conundrum of political attack advertising in a nominating battle: Negative commercials tend to harm both the candidate making the claim and the one on the receiving end. One aide said Mr. Romney has apparently suffered “no collateral” damage from Restore Our Future’s negative advertisements against Mr. Gingrich, which are not identifiably connected to Mr. Romney.

In recent days, Mr. Romney has tried to distance himself from the group. “We really ought to let campaigns raise the money they need and just get rid of these super PACs,” Mr. Romney said on MSNBC.

But in July, Mr. Romney appeared before dozens of potential donors to Restore Our Future at an organizational meeting, effectively blessing its work.

Should Mr. Romney win his party’s nomination, the group is poised to play as pivotal a role in a general election matchup against Mr. Obama, whose aides are keeping a close watch on it. (Former Obama aides have also formed a super PAC, Priorities USA Action.)

Restore Our Future will not be required to disclose its most recent donors until the end of January. But in disclosures filed this summer, the group reported $12 million in contributions, much of it from friends and past business associates of Mr. Romney.

Edward Conard, who gave a million dollars to Restore Our Future, is a former top executive at Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mr. Romney helped start. Another donor is J. W. Marriott Jr., chairman of the hotel chain, on whose board Mr. Romney served on until January. The group has also raised money from Sam Fox and Bob Perry, conservative businessmen who helped finance Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

The group’s backers appeared to be briefly spooked when word circulated that Sheldon Adelson, a wealthy casino magnate who is close to Mr. Gingrich, had committed $20 million to a super PAC supporting him. One of Restore Our Future’s donors called Mr. Sembler in a panic, he said, and asked him to call Mr. Adelson — the two men are friends — to find out if it was true.

“I did call Sheldon,” Mr. Sembler said. “And he said, ‘I’m not only not giving $20 million, I haven’t given any money at all.’ ”

Gingrich, Perry, Bachmann, Santorum, Huntsman All fail to qualify for VA primary

Sunday, December 25, 2011

Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich failed to qualify for Virginia's Super Tuesday primary ballot, the latest setback for a candidate whose standing in polls has been slipping.

Gingrich's campaign said he would pursue an aggressive write-in campaign, though state law prohibits write-ins on primary ballots.

The state party said early Saturday that Gingrich and Texas Gov. Rick Perry had failed to submit the required 10,000 signatures to appear on the March 6 ballot.

Failing to get on the ballot in Virginia, where Gingrich lives, underscores the difficulty first-time national candidates have in preparing for the long haul of a presidential campaign.

And it illustrates the advantage held by Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, who has essentially been running for president for five years. Romney's team, larger than those of most of his opponents, has paid close attention to filing requirements in each state. He will appear on the Virginia ballot along with Texas Rep. Ron Paul, who also has run a national campaign before.

Ironically, Gingrich had a slight lead over Romney in a Quinnipiac poll of Virginia Republicans released earlier in the week.

The former House speaker surged in popularity in early December and tried to use that momentum to make up for a stalled campaign organization. But his standing in polls has slipped in recent days amid a barrage of negative ads in Iowa, where the Jan. 3 caucuses begin the contest for the Republican presidential nomination.

Three other candidates — Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman — did not submit signatures before Virginia's deadline of 5 p.m. Thursday.

Gingrich's campaign attacked Virginia's primary system on Saturday, saying that "only a failed system" would disqualify Gingrich and other candidates and vowing to run a write-in campaign.

"Voters deserve the right to vote for any top contender, especially leading candidates," Gingrich campaign director Michael Krull said in a statement. "We will work with the Republican Party of Virginia to pursue an aggressive write-in campaign to make sure that all the voters of Virginia are able to vote for the candidate of their choice."

However, according to state law, "No write-in shall be permitted on ballots in primary elections."

"Virginia code prohibits write-ins in primaries. He can't do it," said Carl Tobias, a law professor at University of Richmond.

Tobias said Gingrich may have had trouble meeting a requirement that he must submit 400 signatures from each of Virginia's 11 congressional districts.

Gingrich's campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Gingrich had been concerned enough to deliver his signatures personally. Rushing Wednesday from New Hampshire, which holds its primary on Jan. 10, he had supporters sign petitions before entering a rally in Arlington, Va.

Virginia GOP spokesman Garren Shipley said in a statement that volunteers spent Friday validating signatures on petitions that Romney, Paul, Perry and Gingrich had submitted.

"After verification, RPV has determined that Newt Gingrich did not submit required 10k signatures and has not qualified for the VA primary," the party announced early Saturday on its Twitter feed. Shipley did not respond to telephone calls Saturday seeking comment.

Forty-six delegates will be at stake in Virginia's Super Tuesday primary. That's a small fraction of the 1,144 delegates needed to win the nomination. But they could prove pivotal in a close race, especially for a candidate like Gingrich, who expects to do well in Southern contests.

Gingrich already missed the deadline to appear on the ballot in Missouri's Feb. 7 primary, though he insists it doesn't matter because the state awards delegates based not on the primary but on a Republican caucus held in March.

Meanwhile, Virginia's Democrats said President Barack Obama's re-election campaign gathered enough signatures to get him on the state's primary ballot though he was the only candidate who qualified.

 

The Thirty Percent

The Politics of Self-Deception

by ANDREW LEVINE

 

As long as our elections pass for “free and fair,” there is always a chance that one or another of Donald Rumsfeld’s “unknown unknowns” will make them interesting.  Who, after all, would have predicted Bush v Gore?

But barring what we cannot foresee, it will be grim indeed between now and November.   Polling data indicate that more than two-thirds of the electorate already wishes the election over.  It is surprising that the number isn’t higher. The problem is not apathy; thanks to Occupy Wall Street, there are significant numbers of people in motion for the first time in decades and, by all accounts, the occupations enjoy wide popular support.  But money-driven electoral politics is largely irrelevant to the changes OWS is about.  More importantly, there is a yawning enthusiasm deficit in the offing.  Unlike in 2010, this time it will affect Democratic and Republican voters alike, though for different reasons.

On the Democratic side, the reasons not to enthuse have been obvious since even before Barack Obama took office.  The case has been gone over so often that it scarcely bears repeating.  In brief, apart from his much touted health insurance legislation, which, like the Clintons’ failed efforts two decades ago, will set the cause of genuine reform back a generation, Obama has continued George Bush’s policies on almost all matters of substance — except in the one area where it was reasonable to expect that a Constitutional law professor would do better, and where he has done worse.  That would be in protecting constitutional rights and freedoms, including due process rights, and assuring legal accountability, not just for the ninety-nine percent, but for rich and powerful “persons” (corporate and otherwise) too.

Instead Obama announced at the get go that, in order to move “forward,” he’d not be bringing George Bush or Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld or any of the lesser war criminals who operated under their authority to justice.  And, from that time on, he has indeed moved forward relentlessly – to the point that today Bradley Manning, by all rights a national hero, after having been subjected to eighteen months of pre-trial punishment amounting to torture and having already been declared guilty by the Commander-in-Chief, is now a prop in a show trial designed to intimidate whistle-blowers and others who might embarrass the empire and its stooges; and to prepare the way for who knows what affront to the rule of law Obama & Company have in mind for Julian Assange, a man who has helped make more crucial information available to the public than all the world’s media combined.

Yes, Republican obduracy has thwarted Obama’s every move.  But only the willfully blind can still doubt that he and his fellow Democrats have been more than willing capitulators. 

And yes, he and they sometimes do say things liberals want to hear.  But, when it comes down to it, they have consistently been on the wrong side of everything – to a degree that cannot plausibly be ascribed to their blundering or pusillanimity, or to the strategic adeptness of the other side.

The only reason the vast majority of Obama’s 2008 supporters haven’t abandoned him entirely is the fear and loathing the other side conjures up.   Obama understands this, even if he is more inclined to blame the economy than himself.  Thus he too has taken to falling back upon the Lesser Evil argument.  In a recent interview on Sixty Minutes, Obama pointed out that he’s not running against the Almighty but against the alternative.  Expect to hear that argument repeatedly in the months to come.

[To his credit, the President acknowledged that this gem of a sound bite was voiced first by the Vice President, a man famously disinclined to cite his sources].

By now, most lesser evilists understand that Obama and the Democrats are not on the side of the ninety-nine percent, and that being coopted into their electoral campaigns is not the way forward.  This was already a fact of political life before the 2010 mid-term elections; it is why many who would have voted Democratic stayed home instead, and why the Democrats got the “shellacking” they deserved.  Predictably, Obama learned all the wrong lessons from the 2010 election.  And so the enthusiasm of the Democratic base has, if anything diminished further.

But since most voters can still claim to have the sense they were born with, there is much less willingness now to give the other side a tumble.  This is why Obama will probably win in 2012, even if the economy goes south again and even if, as is very likely, Iraq and Libya come back to bite him in the ass.  He will win because he is running against the alternative.  The alternative is so God awful that, confounding the conventional wisdom of just a few months ago, Obama may even carry enough Democrats with him to hold on to the Senate and take back the House.

But, if that happens, it won’t be because very many voters like the prospect; it will be to ward off the most wretched collection of bought and paid for low lives and charlatans ever to present themselves as potential rulers of a land teetering on the edge of economic disaster and overflowing with weapons of mass destruction.

A similar fear and loathing moves sane Republicans too.  But sane Republican voters are few and far between outside the ranks of the one percent, where greed concentrates the mind.

And so all the enthusiasm nowadays resides with Tea Partiers and values voters, some thirty percent of the total electorate.  In their ranks, passionate intensity abounds – so much that most of them cannot alight for long on any single candidate.  They love them all, in series, for a few weeks at a time.

But even they understand at some level that, barring the outbreak of a pandemic psychosis, none of their love objects are electable, and so they face the prospect of having to vote for the only plausible Republican candidate running – Mitt Romney.  Since it has been clear for months that between seventy and eighty percent of the thirty percent hate his guts, this is a recipe for an enthusiasm deficit likely to dwarf the one afflicting Obama’s disaffected supporters.

Democratic voters have by now mostly resigned themselves to the idea that Obama is useless except for keeping a Greater Evil at bay.  Because Republicans hardly bother even to pretend that they champion the interests (as opposed to the “values”) of the thirty percent upon whom they count for votes, their problem is different.  Instead of having to depend on fear, they have a yawning cultural contradiction to contend with — between the plutocrats who recruited the thirty percent and who still own the party, and their benighted accomplices who nowadays run the show.   If there is a candidate acceptable to both camps – a very unlikely prospect – he or she has yet to come forward, and it’s getting to be too late to expect that one will.  And so when it comes to working up enthusiasm for their candidate this time around, Republicans are likely to find themselves at a loss.  Both parties face an enthusiasm deficit, but this time the enthusiasm gap will fall on the Republican side.

* * *

What gives with that thirty per cent?  Their educational level is said to be “above average,” though that statistic, if true, says more about American education than anything else.  But most of them are at least able to negotiate their way through life with some success.   How then can they contemplate, much less enthuse over, a Michele Bachmann or Rick Perry presidency?  How can they take Donald Trump or Herman Cain or Rick Santorum seriously?  And, to go from the merely ridiculous to the utterly contemptible, how could they let Newt Gingrich skip to the head of the class?

[Ron Paul is the outlier.  Although he is more principled and consistent than the others, particularly on matters of individuals’ rights and liberties, most of his views – on matters of war and peace and foreign policy, he, not Obama or any of the other Republicans, is the lesser evil.  Though hardly an anti-imperialist, he is the one anti-interventionist in the race; and also the only one in favor of holding back the blank check the United States gives Israel, though for reasons that have more to do with his understanding of Biblical prophecy than with justice or solidarity with an oppressed people. 

Because many of his positions are unacceptable in the Home of the Brave, the media treat Paul in much the way that they treated Jesse Jackson two decades ago – they ignore him as much as they can.  Even so, if the one percent can’t win the thirty percent over to Romney’s side and if all the other anti-Romney candidates self-destruct, he could become someone to reckon with.   But, whatever happens, Paul’s candidacy has little to do with the enthusiasms so far evident in the ranks of the thirty per cent, and so, following the lead of those who would marginalize him, I will say nothing more about him here.]

Familiar explanations for the insanity on the Republican side don’t quite cut it.  One view, voiced by Obama himself in 2008 at a fund-raiser in Northern California, is that it has to do with identity — that at a time of social dislocation, there are desperate people who cling to their religion and their guns because that is what they take their heritage to be.  He regretted saying this, but he was not wrong: a perverse kind of identity politics does draw people into the thirty percent.  But that wouldn’t account for the enthusiasm so many thirty per centers evince for preposterous candidates who, like the kids on the old Art Linkletter program, say the darndest things.

Some fifty years ago, Richard Hofstadter drew attention to a “paranoid style” in American politics which surfaces from time to time.  Aversion to reason and indifference to evidence is not new on our shores either, and neither is anti-intellectualism.  It is telling, though, that Newt Gingrich is, by his own lights and in the view of many thirty per centers, a deep thinker and an important historian.  So much for anti-intellectualism; even a blowhard, as risible as they come, still counts as an intellectual heavy weight to those who don’t know better.

These explanations are helpful, but they don’t quite make sense of the tolerance for, indeed enthusiasm over, the absurdity on the Republican side.   To account for that, we need to acknowledge the presence in our intellectual – and political — culture of ressentiment, a phenomenon identified and discussed by some insightful nineteenth century German and Scandinavian philosophers — Friedrich Nietzsche, Søren Kierkegaard and Max Scheler, among others.

The idea is not quite what the ordinary word “resentment” suggests.  Ressentiment involves anger, but on the part of persons unaware of, though in the grip of, a sense of their own inferiority.  The phenomenon therefore  involves self-deception, and is always inauthentic – it is not what it seems or purports to be.  Ressentiment is a product of frustration brought on by a felt inability directly to express anger towards those who challenge one’s dignity.  It is indirect and distorted, and therefore inherently pathological.

As cultural contradictions in the Republican fold become increasingly irrepressible, a politics of resentment has taken hold among the thirty percent.  However it is directed not against those who truly do victimize the thirty percent, along with the rest of the ninety-nine, but against those they perceive to comprise America’s intellectual and cultural elites.  What better way to flip the bird at “effete, intellectual snobs,” as Spiro Agnew put it, than to endorse the positions and candidates who have won the hearts and minds of the thirty percent!

If anyone doubts this, reflect on the Gingrich phenomenon.  The man was deemed unethical even by Congressional standards; he was even forced to resign the speakership.  Since then, he has been an overpaid lobbyist who has run up astronomical tabs on cruise lines and at Tiffany’s and other purveyors of baubles to “high net worth” individuals.  He is a philanderer and not a nice one at that.  He is a narcissist.  And he is a servant of the Anti-Christ, having forsaken the old time (Baptist) religion for the Church of Rome.  You’d think all this and more would make him a non-starter in Tea Party and values voter circles.  But No.  He pisses off cultural elites, along with everyone else whose head is screwed on more or less the right way, and that’s good enough for them.

* * *

But the thirty percent are part of the ninety-nine percent, just as are the objects of their (repressed) fury.  Why can’t they all get along?

In principle, they can and they should.  But our politics has been dominated by divisive culture wars for so long that it will take more than just a dawning awareness of growing inequality to overcome the divisions that afflict the ninety-nine percent.  Convictions protected by impenetrable layers of in-your-face stupidity are particularly difficult to dislodge, especially when they serve a pathological function.

OWS consciousness is a step in the right direction, but only a step, and the goal is a long way away.  And so, for now and the foreseeable future there is no choice but to be resigned to a political landscape in which thirty percent of the population drags our politics to retrograde extremes.  Lets not bother about those hapless souls now.   One of William Blake’s proverbs of Hell has it that “if the fool would persist in his folly, he would become wise.”  No doubt, but we don’t have time to wait.

For us now the challenge is to move OWS consciousness forward to such an extent that change for the better comes onto the agenda again – not in the meretricious way it did four years ago but genuinely.  If we succeed in that, a by-product, not to be despised, will be a change in the immediate political environment far-reaching enough to compel even Obama and the Democrats to take notice and perhaps even to change the worst of their ways.

Gingrich Calls Palestinians 'Invented' People

Saturday, December 10, 2011 by Al-Jazeera-English

Republican presidential hopeful defends Israel and says Palestinians are Arabs who "had a chance to go many places".

Republican White House hopeful Newt Gingrich has stirred controversy by calling the Palestinians an "invented" people who could have chosen to live elsewhere.

Gingrich mocked the US policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, calling it 'out of touch with reality'.

The former House of Representatives speaker, who is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination for the 2012 presidential race, made the remarks in an interview with the US Jewish Channel broadcaster released on Friday.

Asked whether he considers himself a Zionist, he answered: "I believe that the Jewish people have the right to a state ... Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire" until the early 20th century, "I think that we've had an invented Palestinian people who are in fact Arabs, and who were historically part of the Arab community.

"And they had a chance to go many places, and for a variety of political reasons we have sustained this war against Israel now since the 1940s, and it's tragic."

Most historians mark the start of Palestinian Arab nationalist sentiment in 1834, when Arab residents of the Palestinian region revolted against Ottoman rule.

Israel, founded amid the 1948 Arab-Israel war, took shape along the lines of a 1947 UN plan for ethnic partition of the then-British ruled territory of Palestine which Arabs rejected.

More than 700,000 Palestinians were forced from their lands by Zionist armed groups in 1948, in an episode Palestinians refer to as the Nakba or "catastrophe".


'Irrational hostility'Gingrich's comments drew a swift rebuke from a spokesman for the American Task Force on Palestine, Hussein Ibish, who said:

"The idea that Palestinians are 'an invented people' while Israelis somehow are not is historically indefensible and inaccurate.

"Such statements seem to merely reflect deep historical ignorance and an irrational hostility towards Palestinian identity and nationalism."

Sabri Saidam, adviser to the Palestinian president, told Al Jazeera, "This is a manifestation of extreme racism and this is a reflection of where America stands sad, when Palestinians don't get their rights...this is sad and America should respond with a firm reaction to such comments that, if let go, more of which will come our way." 

"Let me ask Newt Gingrich if he would ever entertain the thought of addressing Indian Americans by saying that they never existed, that they were the invention of a separate nation, would that be tolerated?"

"Let's also reverse the statement; let's put ourselves in "the shoe of Jews who are listening now. Would they ever accept such statements being made about them?"

Saidam said, "I think it's time that America rejects such statements and closes the door to such horrendous and unacceptable statements."

Gingrich also sharply criticised US President Barack Obama's approach to Middle East diplomacy, saying that it was "so out of touch with reality that it would be like taking your child to the zoo and explaining that a lion was a bunny rabbit."

He said Obama's effort to treat the Palestinians the same as the Israelis is actually "favouring the terrorists".

"If I'm even-handed between a civilian democracy that obeys the rule of law and a group of terrorists that are firing missiles every day, that's not even-handed, that's favouring the terrorists," he said.

He also said the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, share an "enormous desire to destroy Israel".

The Palestinian Authority, which rules the occupied West Bank, formally recognises Israel's right to exist.

President Mahmoud Abbas has long forsworn violence against Israel as a means to secure an independent state, pinning his hopes first on negotiations and more recently on a unilateral bid for statehood via the UN.

Gingrich, along with other Republican candidates, are seeking to attract Jewish in the US support by vowing to bolster Washington's ties with Israel if elected.

He declared his world view was "pretty close" to that of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and vowed to take "a much more tougher-minded, and much more honest approach to the Middle East" if elected.

Newt, the Ultimate Beltway Swindler

DC as ATM

by MICHAEL WINSHIP

 

You maybe should think twice when even Jack Abramoff thinks you’re beneath contempt. Not that Newt Gingrich cares.

Abramoff, America’s favorite convicted influence peddler, told NBC’s David Gregory that presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Gingrich is one of those “people who came to Washington, who had public service, and they cash in on it. They use their public service and access to make money.”

Newt, he continued, is “engaged in the exact kind of corruption that America disdains. The very things that anger the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement and everybody who is not in a movement and watches Washington and says why are these guys getting all this money, why do they go become so rich, why do they have these advantages?”

Why indeed? Granted, Abramoff’s in the middle of his promotion tour of confession and attempted redemption, a pot obscenely eager to call his kettle and former mentor black — especially if it sells books. But Casino Jack does have a point.

Gingrich personifies everything rotten about the ATM machine we call Washington: the merchandising of favors and votes;  the conversion of  past incumbency into insider information, making your contacts and the ability to play the system available to the highest bidder; the archetypal revolving door between government service and shilling for corporate America.

Yet there he is, suddenly riding at the top of the polls, his debate skills lauded, his churlish dismissal of the media praised, and infused with sufficient cheek to portray himself to gullible elements of the electorate as an outsider. It’s as if Kim Kardashian proclaimed herself American Housewife of the Year.

(Gingrich now is trying to play the inside-outside game both ways, proclaiming last week, “We just tried four years of amateur ignorance and it didn’t work very well. So having someone who actually knows Washington might be a really good thing.”)

In fact, a quick look at just a few of Newt’s activities since his GOP colleagues tossed him out of the speakership in 1998 is sufficient to expose him as the ultimate poster boy for inside-the-Beltway game playing — adherence to ideology often shoved aside in favor of expedience and the chance to make a buck.

You’ll remember hearing just this past spring about Mr. and Mrs. Gingrich’s revolving, no-interest credit line at Tiffany’s, a luxury store they treated like a diamond encrusted version of the Home Shopping Network, and Tim Carney’s report in The Washington Examinerthat, “Christy Evans, formerly a top staffer to… Gingrich, is a registered lobbyist for Tiffany’s.”

Now Carney writes, “We know that Gingrich has been paid by drug companies and by the drug lobby, notably during the Medicare drug debate. A former employee of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (the main industry lobby), told me Gingrich was being paid by someone in the industry at the time. A spokeswoman for Gingrich’s health care consulting firm, Center for Health Transformation, told me that drug companies have been CHT clients. PhRMA confirmed in a statement that they had paid Gingrich. Bloomberg News cited sources from leading drug companies AstraZeneca and Pfizer saying that those companies had also hired Gingrich…

“Three former Republican congressional staffers told me that Gingrich was calling around Capitol Hill and visiting Republican congressmen in 2003 in an effort to convince conservatives to support a bill expanding Medicare to include prescription-drug subsidies.

Conservatives were understandably wary about expanding a Lyndon Johnson-created entitlement that had historically blown way past official budget estimates. Drug makers, on the other hand, were positively giddy about securing a new pipeline of government cash to pad their already breathtaking profit margins.”

On Monday, the chair of Gingrich’s Center for Health Transformation estimated its revenues over the past decade at $55 million. Fees are flexible, she said, with “charter memberships” going for an annual fee of $200,000. According to the November 21 Wall Street Journal, ”The health think tank also charges for consulting sessions with the former speaker and Mr. Gingrich’s speeches, according to two health care trade groups.”

More dynamically, the center’s PR materials promised “direct Newt interaction”(!) and as per The Washington Post, “The biggest funders, including such firms as AstraZeneca, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Novo Nordisk, were also eligible to receive discounts on ‘products and workshops’ from other Gingrich groups.” Sounds like the Potomac edition of “The Price Is Right.”

Another Center for Health Transformation charter member was Gundersen Lutheran Health System of La Crosse, Wisconsin. The November 17 New York Times reported that in July 2009, without reporting his connection, Gingrich praised the company in The Washington Post ”for its successful efforts to persuade most patients to have ‘advance directives,’ saying that if Medicare had followed Gundersen’s lead on end-of-life care and other practices, it would ‘save more than $33 billion a year.’”

Advance directives means helping families determine future care for the terminally ill, but when Tea Partiers and others started yelling about “death panels” during the healthcare reform fight, Gingrich made a quick flip-flop to the right and changed sides.

Listening to Newt attack child labor laws this week, I thought one of his clients might be Miss Hannigan’s Orphanage. In reality, others who have anted up for his advice include GE, IBM, Microsoft, Growth Energy (a pro-ethanol lobby group that between 2009 and 2011 paid him $575,000) and the US Chamber of Commerce. The Wall Street Journalnotes that, “The Chamber, the largest lobbying organization in Washington, paid Mr. Gingrich about $840,000, according to people familiar with the arrangement, or about $120,000 a year for seven years, beginning in 2001, to serve on an informal board of advisers to its president and senior staff.”

And then, of course, there’s Freddie Mac, which triggered this recent tsunami of scrutiny when Gingrich claimed at the November 9 candidates’ debate that it was for his expertise as an historian that the home mortgage giant had paid him $300,000.

Bloomberg News then reported that the number was actually as much as $1.8 million, paid as consulting fees right up until 2008, when the failing agency was taken over by the government and such outside contracts were suspended. Gingrich claims he warned Freddie about “insane” loans and then told USA Today, “I was advising them over a period when they weren’t in crisis. I’m pretty happy to say, I gave these guys advice… on how do you build opportunity for the poor to learn to be non-poor?” Until caught, he hadn’t bothered to mention his own involvement, even as he attacked Barney Frank and others for taking Freddie Mac’s campaign contributions.

Through it all, Gingrich has denied being a lobbyist, apparently adhering to a very narrow definition – he’s not officially registered with Congress under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995, as amended by the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2007.

But you do the math: according to Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Kristin Jensen at Bloomberg News, “The former Georgia congressman reported assets in 1997 of between $197,000 and $606,000, according to his last House personal financial disclosure report, which permits lawmakers to record their wealth in broad ranges. According to his 2011 presidential disclosure report, the Republican primary candidate today is worth between $7.3 million and $31 million.”

Not bad for government work.

Gingrich finance team quits as campaign faces $1 million debt

By David Edwards | RAW
Tuesday, June 21st, 2011

A comeback for Republican presidential candidate appeared less likely Tuesday as two more high level staffers reportedly departed with the campaign carrying at least $1 million in debt.

Fundraising director Jody Thomas and fundraising consultant Mary Heitman both resigned, according to The Associated Press.

The setback comes less than two weeks after 16 other staffers quit en masse.

Officials told the AP that the campaign was facing more than $1 million in debt, which Gingrich may be forced to personally cover if he wishes to continue.

Recent reports have also said that the campaign did not have cash on hand for the $25,000 Ames Straw Poll filing fee or $30,000 for a list of previous Iowa caucus atendees.

Gingrich said last week that he would continue his quest for the Republican nomination "no matter what it takes."

"Newt 2012 continues its reorganization and alignment as a grassroots driven, substantive, solutions-oriented campaign," spokesman R.C. Hammond said Tuesday.

Gingrich recently returned from an extended vacation cruise around the islands of Greece. He left for that cruise after his scathing criticism of the House Republican Medicare invited a barrage of conservative attacks that damaged his prospects.

Secret Cash: The Worst Political Scandal of All

Saturday, June 4, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
by Michael Winship

Sometimes I feel like Gus, the father in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" -- you know, the guy who thinks you can cure all maladies with a spritz of Windex and declares, "Give me a word, any word, and I show you that the root of that word is Greek."

Only in my case, it's give me a scandal, any scandal, and I'll show you how the corrosive influence of money on politics is at its root and makes what's bad even worse (okay, maybe not in the case of Anthony Weiner -- yet). It's not an especially effective party trick, I know, unless you're at a really dreary policy wonk picnic, but you work with what you've got.

John Edwards' illegitimate child? The legal case being built against the freshly indicted, former presidential candidate isn't about paternity or custody or any of that kind of stuff, but revolves around felony campaign finance charges; whether or not two wealthy backers -- his now deceased fundraising chair Frederick Baron and 100-year-old heiress Rachel "Bunny" Mellon -- provided hundreds of thousands in contributions that in reality paid for the hiding of Edwards' mistress, Rielle Hunter, and their baby.

Newt Gingrich and his wife Callista's big fat, revolving, no interest credit account at Tiffany's? It might be tin-eared and wrong for someone who purports to be a fiscal conservative and a man of the people to throw around big bucks for expensive bling, but that ain't necessarily the scandal. Look a little deeper. On May 24, Jeff Stein of The Washington Post blog "Spy Talk" reported, "At the same time Tiffany & Co. was extending Callista (Bisek) Gingrich a virtual interest-free loan of tens of thousands of dollars, the diamond and silverware firm was spending big bucks to influence mining policy in Congress and in agencies over which the House Agriculture Committee -- where she worked -- had jurisdiction, official records show."

Until 2006, Ms. Gingrich was chief clerk at the committee. During the years between 2005 and 2009, Tiffany's annual lobbying costs shot up from around $100,000 to $360,000, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

The jewelry giant strongly denies any connection: "We had no reason to lobby the Agriculture Committee and we did not... Our focus has been on the Natural Resources Committee." The company also said it had never spoken with Newt or Callista Gingrich about federal mining policy.

But hang on, there's more. Tim Carney of The Washington Examiner reports, "Christy Evans, formerly a top staffer to then-whip Newt Gingrich, is a registered lobbyist for Tiffany's, the high-end jeweler where Gingrich and his wife enjoy an extraordinary line of credit. Evans, former floor assistant to Gingrich and now a lobbyist at the legendary K Street firm Cassidy & Associates, has represented Tiffany's on mining issues since 2000, according to lobbying filings."

The revolving door between government and corporate interests, revolving credit... the saga of Newt "Holly Golightly" Gingrich spins on. The whole affair is reminiscent of the preferential loan treatment now-collapsed subprime mortgage giant Countrywide Financial Corporation reportedly gave a few years ago to Fannie Mae CEO Jim Johnson (he resigned as a result), North Dakota Senator Kent Conrad (chair of the Senate Budget Committee), former Connecticut Senator Chris Dodd (who served as chair of the Senate Banking Committee), and former cabinet secretaries Alphonso Jackson and Donna Shalala.

Yet all this greed and venality pales against the dark heart of the worst political scandal of all, the continuing nightmare caused by Citizens United and other court decisions that have unleashed a monster of unlimited and frequently anonymous private and corporate campaign cash against a nearly defenseless citizenry.

The recent disclosure that the conservative, "grass roots" advocacy organization American Action Network received first year revenues of $2.75 million from fewer than a dozen unnamed, wealthy donors (and 82% of the money from only three of them) led Melanie Sloan, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethic in Washington, to cite AAN as just one example of how "very few people are having a disproportionate impact on our country's elections."

(The group, affiliated with Karl Rove's American Crossroads political action committee, raised another $24 million in the four months before the 2010 midterms, funding attack ads against Democratic Senate candidates in Wisconsin, Florida, Washington State and Florida described by progressive watchdog Media Matters as "bogus," "deceptive" and "stripped of the facts.")

This revelation follows superb investigative reporting by a Bloomberg News team last month headlined "Secret Donors Multiply in U.S. Election Spending." They found that outside, or non-party organizations, including "trade groups, unions and non-profits started by political operatives that raise and spend money for advertising" spent $305 million on the 2010 elections, four times more than similar groups spent four years ago. They plan to raise even more money for the 2012 campaign. Contrary to law, five of those groups have failed to report to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) more than $4 million spent on attack ads in last year's races.

"The organizations face little scrutiny from the FEC, where split votes between Republican and Democratic commissioners have stymied enforcement in case after case for almost three years," Bloomberg reported. "As a result, voters may find themselves choosing the next U.S. president knowing less about those trying to shape their views of the candidates than they have since secret money helped finance the Watergate burglary and re-elect President Richard Nixon in 1972."

The journalists quoted Donald Simon, a director of pro-disclosure organization Democracy 21: "The amounts of corporate money involved in Watergate will look quaint by the standards of secret corporate funding that will take place in 2012."

Republicans and many Democrats oppose all new attempts at campaign finance reform, including a proposed White House executive order requiring corporations seeking government contracts to reveal their political contributions. On May 26, a federal district court in Alexandria, Virginia, ruled that a long-standing ban on corporate contributions to federal candidates is unconstitutional. Unless the composition of the Supreme Court shifts in a new direction, a constitutional amendment that reverses Citizens United and other federal rulings may be our only prayer, the solitary hope we have to prevent the total usurpation of representative government by big businesses with bottomless pockets.

The Greeks had a word for it -- "oligarchy" -- political clout based on economic dominance. It is, in the words of economist Simon Johnson, "an antithesis to democracy... a small group with a lot of wealth and a lot of power. They pull the strings. They have the influence. They call the shots."

No accountability, no scruples, no shame. It's the biggest scandal of all: a republic struck down by a possibly fatal malady that even Gus the Greek's magic bottle of Windex can't cure.

John Lithgow Performs Gingrich Press Release

vidlink

Newt Gingrich: Shining Knight of the Post-Reagan Right

(No way this two-time adulterer--who cheated on two of his three wives while they were hospitalized with serious illnesses--gets nominated. Republicans will have lost their minds to go with the consciences they lost long ago if they pick this scumbag.--jef)

Original spread from the November 1984 issue 
of Mother Jones. Illustration by Rudy Vanderlans.

<<<-- A must read for 2011: Mother Jones' epic 1984 profile of Newt Gingrich.  

By David Osborne | Thu Nov. 1, 1984

Editor's Note (5/13/11): This week, Newt Gingrich made official what observers had been speculating about for years: He's running for president [1]. Nearly three decades earlier, this profile by David Osborne offered the definitive portrait of the future Speaker of the House as a young man. As his first ex-wife later put it, Mother Jones "scooped the world on Newt Gingrich [2]." The article revealed sides of Gingrich that continue to dog him to this day: the reports of infidelity, the now-infamous story of his hospital-room visit with his first wife, and a mile-long trail of aggrieved colleagues. Gingrich later called the article's publication "one of the saddest things in my public career." Also: See our guide to Newt's 33 years of overheated rhetoric [3].

Last May, US Representative Newt Gingrich stood in the well of the House to rebut charges made by Speaker Tip O'Neill. For months, Gingrich had been harassing the Democrats in evening speeches broadcast over C-Span, the cable channel that carries House sessions. He called them "blind to communism"; he threatened to "file charges" against ten Democrats for a letter they wrote to Nicaraguan leader Daniel Ortega; he accused one Democrat of placing "communist propaganda" in the Speaker's lobby. In retaliation, O'Neill ordered the C-Span cameras to sweep the floor every few minutes to show the world that Gingrich and friends were declaiming before empty seats. And on May 14, he attacked Gingrich for questioning the patriotism of members of Congress.

Now the showdown was at hand. The chamber was full, the hubbub audible. Cocksure and articulate, Gingrich repeated his attack on Democratic foreign policy. O'Neill's words, he said, came "all too close to resembling a McCarthyism of the Left." He had accused no one of being un-American, he insisted: "It is perfectly American to be wrong." When Democrats rose to challenge him, he deflected their criticisms, ignored the tough questions, pounced on the easy ones, and demonstrated all the techniques of a master debater.

Finally O'Neill took the floor, repeatedly interrupting Gingrich. Back and forth they went, the brash young Republican from Georgia and the indignant white-maned Democrat from Massachusetts. "My personal opinion is this," O'Neill roared at last, shaking his finger at Gingrich. "You deliberately stood in that well before an empty House, and challenged these people, and challenged their patriotism, and it is the lowest thing that I've ever seen in my 32 years in Congress."

Immediately, Minority Whip Trent Lott rose and asked that the Speaker's words be ruled out of order and stricken from the record. In the House, normally a bastion of civility, members are forbidden from making personal attacks on one another. After five minutes of nervous consultation, the chair ruled in Lott's favor. That night, the confrontation between Gingrich and O'Neill made all three network news programs. The third-term Republican from Georgia had arrived.

Confrontation is not new to Gingrich, and the battle with O'Neill was no accident. Before interviewing Gingrich for this story, I watched him give a speech to a group of conservative activists. "The number one fact about the news media," he told them, "is they love fights." For months, he explained, he had been giving "organized, systematic, researched, one-hour lectures. Did CBS rush in and ask if they could tape one of my one-hour lectures? No. But the minute Tip O'Neill attacked me, he and I got 90 seconds at the close of all three network news shows. You have to give them confrontations. When you give them confrontations, you get attention; when you get attention, you can educate."

Nor is it an accident that Gingrich has since emerged in the media's eyes as a rising star of the conservative movement. In his six years in the House, the 41-year-old former history professor has virtually ignored the traditional goals of a young member of Congress: authoring legislation and steering it through to passage. Instead, Gingrich has concentrated on building a movement capable of remaking the Republican party. In the process, he has created a disciplined band of Young Turks loyal to his leadership, forged a new conservative ideology for the post-Reagan years, and forced his party's leaders—long content to go along and get along in a House dominated by Democrats—into a more combative stance. This summer, he, along with presidential prospect Jack Kemp, led the successful Republican platform fight that symbolized the ascendancy of the hard Right within the party.

Gingrich combines qualities rarely found in one politician: He is a brilliant speaker and debater, he is an effective guerrilla on the House floor, and he is a genuine political strategist and theorist, who by the force of his ideas has begun to reshape Republican politics. David Broder of The Washington Post, the dean of political columnists, touted him several years ago as one of America's future leaders. Richard Viguerie, leader of the New Right, told me he considered Gingrich "the single most important conservative in the House of Representatives." Gingrich's ideology is an unusual blend of hard-right conservatism on economic issues, foreign policy, and the family, tempered by moderation on civil rights, women's rights, and the environment. What stands out as particularly unique, however, is his fascination with "the future." Quoting futurists such as Alvin Toffler (The Third Wave) and John Naisbitt (Megatrends), Gingrich believes we are at the dawn of an entirely new era, a leap forward akin to the industrial revolution. His goal is to fashion a political ideology relevant to that future, an ideology capable of creating a new American majority. "I see myself," he explained, "as representing the conservative wing of the postindustrial society."

Gingrich has coined a slogan to communicate his vision: a "conservative opportunity society"—the opposite, at least in language, of the liberal welfare state. Its three pillars are free enterprise, high technology, and traditional values. But unlike the Republicans of the past 50 years, Gingrich is not content simply to object to every liberal spending program; he seeks to develop a new, positive agenda for the nation. He is not antigovernment, but antiliberal. "I believe in a lean bureaucracy, not in no bureaucracy," he said. "You can have an active, aggressive, conservative state which does not in fact have a large centralized bureaucracy...This goes back to Teddy Roosevelt. We have not seen an activist conservative presidency since TR."

In many ways, Gingrich is an unabashed probusiness, anticommunist, Moral Majority version of Gary Hart. "The opportunity society," he predicts, "will answer the cries of the baby-boom generation for a new politics responsive to the future's needs."

There is a problem here, of course. Baby boomers generally distrust the anti-Equal Rights Amendment, antiabortion, anticommunist politics of the Bible and flag. Gingrich seeks to blur some of these distinctions. He works closely with the Moral Majority, but at times votes against its positions, or is absent on key votes. He opposes the ERA, but maintains that he would support an ERA amended to keep women out of combat, protect noncoed schools, and so on.

At bottom, however, he believes that the cultural rebellion of the baby boomers has run its course. Today's crisis is "a culture in dissolution": teen-age pregnancy, child pornography, and rampant crime. "I would argue that you can make a very effective traditional values pitch that child pornography is obscene, and that those people ought to be thrown in jail. Most of my baby-boom friends, when they were 18, would have argued intellectually at the coffee house that people ought to be allowed to do what they want to. Now that they're 37 and they have six-year-olds, they're real tough on child pornography.

"I can carry the baby boomers," Gingrich boasts. "I could kill Gary Hart in that group, on those issues."

For many who have encountered Gingrich, this is intriguing stuff. His politics clearly hold potential-if not the "opportunity to seize the baby boomers for a lifetime" that he claims, at least the chance to siphon away a portion of the Hart vote. To look into that potential, and to discover more about this new-age Republican, I journeyed to Georgia, whence he hails.

The Sixth Congressional District, which stretches from the suburbs south of Atlanta into rural west Georgia, fits Gingrich perfectly: It is booming, middle class, and economically revolves around the high-tech Atlanta airport, which vies with Chicago's O'Hare as the world's busiest.

This is the New South, where spanking new highways crisscross the countryside, shopping centers seem to sprout up overnight, and the sparkle of new restaurants, new businesses and new homes is everywhere. This is the future.

The district may be tailor-made for Gingrich, but I was unprepared for what I found in Carrollton, the prosperous west Georgia town where he launched his bid for Congress. I expected great pride in a native son; instead, I found great bitterness. To many of his former supporters, Newt Gingrich is not the cutting-edge politician one sees in Washington. He is a man who campaigned on themes of ethics and morality, then betrayed his words; a candidate who speaks constantly of restoring traditional values, but whose private life tells a very different story.

"I will do everything I can to make it possible for the public to hear the whole truth about my record and my beliefs," Gingrich proudly declared in 1974. In that spirit I set out to discover what was behind the bitterness in Carrollton.

Newt Gingrich arrived in Carrollton in 1970, fresh out of graduate school but already a veteran of two political campaigns. Gingrich likes to tell the story of his "calling" to politics. At 15, while in France where his stepfather was stationed, he visited Verdun, where hundreds of thousands of French and German soldiers died in World War I. He stared at the immense pile of bones that could not be identified after the battle, recoiling in horror. "I left that battlefield convinced that men do horrible things to each other, that great nations can spend their lifeblood and their treasure on efforts to coerce and subjugate their fellow man," he later wrote. The next fall, he handed in a 180-page paper on the balance of world power, and announced to his astonished English teacher that his family was moving to Georgia, where he would "form a Republican party and become a congressman."

"It was the most amazing decision of my life," Gingrich later told a reporter. "And it gives me certain inner strengths that other politicians don't have, because I see this as a calling, as something that someone has to do if America is to keep the freedoms we believe in."

"He always thought big thoughts," says Chip Kahn, who met him when Gingrich was a grad student at Tulane, in New Orleans. "We would talk for hours about what being a leader was all about, what leadership meant, what politics were all about...He would tell me about talking with Jackie [his wife] about what would happen if she or the kids were kidnapped. He thought he would be in a position of power someday, and might have to make decisions about things like that. He knew he would have to be tough. He and Jackie agreed that if it came down to that, he would have to make decisions for the society, not for his family."

This grandiose vision was not idle dreaming; it was part and parcel of Gingrich's personality.

He was confident, ambitious, often arrogant. When he arrived at Baker High School, in Columbus, Georgia, he made an instant impression on his classmates by regularly thrusting his hand into the air and announcing, "Question here!" Like a number of his classmates, he also developed a crush on his math teacher. But unlike the other boys his age, Gingrich didn't leave it at that. She moved to Atlanta; he enrolled at Emory University. One day, Jackie recalls, there was a knock on her door, and there stood Gingrich, seven years her junior. She still remembers the conversation:

"I'm here," he announced.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, I came. I'm here."

"He had made up his mind," she says with a smile. "We dated and went together for that year his freshman year in school, and we got married the next June." Newt Was always very "persistent, and persuasive."

“Newt understands the basic principle that one should never say you want to be president…But he will be whatever he can be, as high as he can go.”

By the time they reached Carrollton, eight years and two daughters later, the grand plan was well under way. In 1964 Gingrich had managed a congressional campaign; in 1968 he had coordinated Nelson Rockefeller's presidential campaign in the Southeast. In 1971, after a year on the faculty of West Georgia College, he stunned his colleagues by applying, unsuccessfully, for the chair of his department. Later he considered applying for the college presidency.

If he shocked his friends by announcing his congressional candidacy, that was the least of it.

"During the first campaign back in '74, Newt told me he was going to be the kind of congressman that David Broder would come to and like, that he would be the kind of congressman that the media would turn to when they wanted to know what the thinking people in the Republican party wanted to do," says Lee Howell, his press secretary in 1974. "He said, 'I'm going to be one of the intelligentsia who sets the course for this party.' He said that in 1974, when I was still laughing about the fact that he was running for Congress. Sure enough, in the space of a few years, he has achieved all that."

Gingrich told several intimates in 1974 that his goal was to be Speaker of the House. But Chip Kahn, who ran his first two campaigns and knows him as well as anyone, says his ambitions are loftier than that: "Newt understands the basic principle that one should never say you want to be president. People don't like somebody at that stage of their life: to be playing that game. But he will be whatever he can be, as high as he can go."

Though too cocky for some of his faculty colleagues, Gingrich was a popular figure on campus. His classes were exciting, experimental, unorthodox. He organized an environmental studies program and used it to teach the future. He loved the role of instructor, loved being the center of attention. "Newt was always pretty much the way he is now," remembers a close friend. "If we got together at his house, after a movie, he wanted center stage. He'd turn a social situation into a forum; he really turned my wife off that way. He's always had a big ego—which made him electable."

At the time, remembers Lee Howell, then editor of the student newspaper, Gingrich had "moddish" long hair and the tolerant cultural views of a young professor. He would come down to the newspaper office to talk and have a beer (though liquor was not allowed there), or have students over to his house for long philosophical discussions. He didn't mind if people drank, others remember, or even smoked a little dope. One of his friends lived with a girlfriend, and Gingrich provided emotional support for another couple going though an abortion.

To people on campus, Gingrich was a young liberal. There were so few Republicans in Georgia, and the Democrats were so conservative, that his Republicanism didn't typecast him. When he ran against Representative John Flynt in 1974 and 1976, Gingrich postured as the young reformer against Flynt, the aging, corrupt conservative. Gingrich's big issues were ethics—thanks to Watergate and Flynt's problems—and the environment. In 1976 he sought endorsements from both the liberal National Committee for an Effective Congress and the conservative Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress. He didn't talk much about the ERA or abortion.

"In 1974 I wrote this speech for his opening night kick-off," remembers Howell. "I come from a Southern Protestant background, and Southern Protestants quote the Bible. Newt had me take out all the references to God, because he was not very religious—and isn't very religious. He went to church in order to get a nap on Sunday morning. He became a deacon because of who he was, not what he believed. He did not like us to use God in his speeches; he didn't want people to think he was using God, because he said that would be hypocritical. He said, 'I'm not a very strong believer."' In his speeches today, Howell adds, "he uses God quite regularly."

Gingrich did, however, talk a great deal about ethics, traditional values, and the family.

"America needs a return to moral values," his literature announced, showing photos of the young candidate and his family and describing his church activities as a deacon and as a Sunday school teacher. His wife, Jackie, campaigned hard for him, covering hundreds of miles, visiting country stores, handing out leaflets at high school football games. "Everyone saw Jackie and Newt as a unit," says Mary Kahn, who covered Gingrich as a reporter before marrying Chip. "He was always talking about the family being a team, about family values. It was a constant, and a big part of his campaign."

Meanwhile, Gingrich's own behavior was painting a different picture. During or soon after the 1974 campaign, several of his closest advisors realized he was having an affair. After the campaign, Gingrich seriously considered divorce. He and Jackie went to see a marriage counselor, however, and finally decided to work it out.

This was not an isolated incident, according to others who were close to Gingrich at the time. One former aide describes approaching a car with Gingrich's daughters in hand, only to find the candidate with a woman, her head buried in his lap. The aide quickly turned and led the girls away. Another former friend maintains that Gingrich repeatedly made sexual advances to her when her husband was out of town. On one occasion, he visited under the guise of comforting her after the death of a relative, and instead tried to seduce her. In certain circles in the mid-1970s, Gingrich was developing a reputation as a ladies' man.

He was also developing a reputation as an effective but hard-luck candidate: In 1974 he ran into Watergate, which decimated the Republicans; in 1976 Georgia's own Jimmy Carter topped the Democratic ticket. Both times Gingrich came within 2 percent of victory. Then in 1978 John Flynt retired. This was Gingrich's year. With the ultraconservative Flynt gone and both the tax revolt and the fundamentalist New Right dominating the national scene, Gingrich swung right. "By '78," says Chip Kahn, "Newt was rock-hard conservative. He emphasized different things—he talked about welfare cheaters, he painted Virginia Shapard [his Democratic opponent] like she was a liberal extremist. On some of the social issues, he moved when he realized how central they were to the Republicans. It took him a while to figure that out. Newt understands waves, and he rides waves."

Gingrich also understands "negative" campaigning. In 1978 he hired Deno Seder, renowned for his hardhitting television spots. "We went and found three inconsequential bills that Shapard had voted against in the Georgia Senate-bills that were so badly drawn that nobody in their right mind would have voted for them," remembers L. H. (Kip) Carter, Gingrich's campaign treasurer from December 1974 through 1978. "One was to cut taxes. It was a horrible bill, and she voted against it. So I conceived this ad—it was a spotlight shining on a white piece of paper. A male arm comes out in a pinstriped suit, obviously somebody that you can believe and trust, and lays down this Senate bill. And a voice-over says, 'Virginia Shapard had a chance to cut your taxes. She knows how she voted; she only hopes you don't.' And then we got this fat arm-Virginia Shapard was a little on the hefty side with an iron bracelet that looked like it belonged to Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, and this big fat hand came out and stamped a big 'No' in the middle of the bill. We slaughtered her with that ad. And it was really unfair."

“Newt can handle political problems, but when it comes to personal problems, he’s a disaster. He handled the divorce like he did any other political decision: Cut your losses and move on.”

Another ad showed a similarly hefty arm pulling dollar bills out of a pile. The voice-over charged Shapard with giving money away to welfare people. Campaign literature referred to her as the wife of a wealthy textile magnate, a woman who had gone to "private schools." It failed to mention, however, that the private school she attended was a college, which made her no different than Gingrich himself.

To top it off, Gingrich seized upon the fact that Shapard, whose husband ran a business in the district, planned not to uproot her family if elected, but to commute to Washington (as Geraldine Ferraro had done for six years). "I drew up an ad—I feel embarrassed about this—where I showed a picture of her family and Newt's family, and I said, 'This time you have a choice,'" remembers Carter. In a list of contrasts, under the Shapard photo the ad said: "If elected, Virginia will move to Washington, but her children and husband will remain in Griffin." Under the Gingrich photo: "When elected, Newt will keep his family together."

Despite the solid family-man advertising pitch, however, some of Gingrich's associates could sense what was coming. On election night, several of them took bets on how long his marriage would last. Unknown to them, the Shapard campaign staff was doing precisely the same thing.

It seemed plain to many that while Gingrich had used his wife to get elected, he would now consider her a liability. "Jackie was kind of frumpy," explains Lee Howell, who asked Gingrich to be his best man in 1979 but pulls no punches about his friend's divorce. "She's lost a lot of weight now, but she was kind of frumpy in Washington, and she was seven years older than he was. And I guess Newt thought, well, it doesn't look good for an articulate, young, aggressive, attractive congressman to have a frumpy old wife."

The winning bet, as it turned out, was 18 months. In April of 1980, the candidate who had promised to "keep his family together" told his wife he was filing for divorce. According to sources in whom Gingrich confided at the time, he was already having an affair with the woman he later married.

When I asked Gingrich about this, he did not deny it. "I'm not going to get into those details or the questions about 1974. I think there is a level of personal life that is personal...I had married my high-school math teacher two days after I was 19. In some ways it was a wonderful relationship, particularly in the early years...But we had gone through a series of problems—which I regard, I think legitimately, as private—but which were real. There was an 11-year history prior to my finally breaking down, and short of someone writing a psychological biography of me, I don't think it's relevant."

Private behavior becomes relevant, I suggested, when it contradicts the rhetoric on which a public official has been elected. "Looking back, do you feel your private life and what you'd been saying in public were consistent?"

"No," Gingrich answered. "In fact I think they were sufficiently inconsistent that at one point in 1979 and 1980, I began to quit saying them in public. One of the reasons I ended up getting a divorce was that if I was disintegrating enough as a person that I could not say those things, then I needed to get my life straight, not quit saying them. And I think that literally was the crisis I came to. I guess I look back on it a little bit like somebody who's in Alcoholics Anonymous—it was a very, very bad period of my life, and it had been getting steadily worse...I ultimately wound up at a point where probably suicide or going insane or divorce were the last three options."

The divorce turned much of Carrollton against Gingrich. Jackie was well loved by the townspeople, who knew how hard she had worked to get him elected-as she had worked before to put him through college and raise his children. To make matters worse, Jackie had undergone surgery for cancer of the uterus during the 1978 campaign, a fact Gingrich was not loath to use in conversations or speeches that year. After the separation in 1980, she had to be operated on again, to remove another tumor While she was still in the hospital, according to Howell, "Newt came up there with his yellow legal pad, and he had a list of things on how the divorce was going to be handled. He wanted her to sign it. She was still recovering from surgery, still sort of out of it, and he comes in with a yellow sheet of paper, handwritten, and wants her to sign it.

"Newt can handle political problems," Howell says, "but when it comes to personal problems, he's a disaster. He handled the divorce like he did any other political decision: You've got to be tough in this business, you've got to be hard. Once you make the decision you've got to act on it. Cut your losses and move on."

People in Carrollton were particularly incensed by the fact that Jackie was left in difficult financial straits during the separation, after her surgery. According to Lee Howell, friends in her congregation had to raise money to help her and the children make ends meet, and Jackie finally had to go to court for adequate support, before the divorce decree. In his financial statement, Gingrich reported providing only $400 a month, plus $40 in allowances for his daughters. He claimed not to be able to afford any more. But in citing his own expenses, Gingrich listed $400 just for "Food/dry cleaning, etc."—for one person. The judge quickly ordered him to provide considerably more. When an article on the hearing appeared in the local paper, many in town were incensed. On election day, a few weeks later, Gingrich's winning margin in Carroll County fell from 66 percent in 1978 to 51 percent.

In part because of the divorce, in part because of the way he dealt with others, Gingrich has left behind him a string of disillusioned friends and associates, many of whom are now willing to air their feelings.

Listen, for instance, to Lee Howell, who is still friendly with Gingrich:

"Newt Gingrich has a tendency to chew people up and spit them out. He uses you for all it's worth, and when he doesn't need you anymore he throws you away. Very candidly, I don't think that Newt Gingrich has many principles, except for what's best for him, guiding him."

Or Chip Kahn, who ran two of his campaigns and has-known him for 16 years:

"I don't know whether the ambitious bastard came before the visionary, or whether because he's a visionary, he realizes you have to be tough to get where you need to be."

Or Mary Kahn:

"Newt uses people and then discards them as useless. He's like a leech. He really is a man with no conscience. He just doesn't seem to care who he hurts or why."

L.H. Carter was among Gingrich's closest friends and advisors until a falling out in 1979. "You can't imagine how quickly power went to his head," Carter says. The first time Gingrich flew back to the district, Carter remembers, he "pitched a fit" because Carter was still walking up to the gate to greet him when he arrived, rather than standing and waiting for him. Soon after, they were discussing a supporter who had complained to Gingrich about one of his votes. "I was sort of chiding him about not staying in touch with 'the people'," Carter says. "He turned in my car and he looked at me and he said, 'Fuck you guys. I don't need any of you anymore I've got the money from the political action committees, I've got the power of the office, and I've got the Atlanta news media right here in the palm of my hand. I don't need any of you anymore.'"

"The important thing you have to understand about Newt Gingrich is that he is amoral," says Carter. "There isn't any right or wrong, there isn't any conservative or liberal. There's only what will work best for Newt Gingrich. He's probably one of the most dangerous people for the future of this country that you can possibly imagine. He's Richard Nixon, glib. It doesn't matter how much good I do the rest of my life, I can't ever outweigh the evil that I've caused by helping him be elected to Congress."

“I would say to you unequivocally—it will probably sound pious and sanctimonious saying it—I am a sinner. I am a normal person. I am like everyone else I ever met.”

Gingrich knew that I had talked to people like Carter and the Kahns. As a parting thought during our second interview, he told me, "I have worked very, very hard to be in a position to help the country save itself and this is a very, very tough business. And I would say that along the way I've made a lot of friends and a lot of enemies. Hopefully up to now it's been marginally more friends."

In July of 1983, Gingrich made a name for himself in the House by demanding that Representatives Daniel Crane and Gerry Studds be expelled for having affairs with House pages.

"A free country must have honest leaders if it is to remain free.

"We are in deep trouble as a society... People are looking for a guidepost as to how they should live, how their institutions should behave, and who they should follow.

"Our decisions are not made today about two individuals; our decisions are made today about the integrity of freedom, about belief in our leaders, about the future of this country, about what we should become."

For many in Carrollton, the hypocrisy of these statements was too much:

"I understood totally that in my hometown and among people who knew me, there would be a lot of people who would be very cynical and would say, 'Who does he think he is?

"And part of my conclusion is the same one I'm sure you run into. If the only people allowed to write news stories were those who had never told a lie, we wouldn't have many stories. If the only people allowed to serve on juries were saints, we wouldn't have any juries. And I thought there was a clear distinction between my private fife, and the deliberate use of a position of authority to seduce and abuse somebody in your care. And I would draw that distinction.

"I would say to you unequivocally—it will probably sound pious and sanctimonious saying it—I am a sinner. I am a normal person. I am like everyone else I ever met. One of the reasons I go to God is that I ain't very good—I'm not perfect. "

Gingrich cleverly sidesteps the real issue, which is not his private life, but the fact that he misled his constituents, publicly campaigning as a crusader for traditional morality while making a sham of that morality in his own life. If he preaches one thing and does another when it comes to moral issues, his constituents have a right to ask how far his views can be trusted on other subjects. How sound are Newt Gingrich's ideas about the nation's future? Is there more than a touch of fraudulence here as well?

Let us examine the key issues Gingrich has pushed this year, beginning with his insistence that the budget could be balanced without tax increases.

In his book, Window, of Opportunity, Gingrich proposes at least a dozen new or expanded federal programs, plus several new tax breaks. When I suggested to him that the price tag would be $75 billion to $100 billion a year he did not flinch. Yet the book avoids specific proposals for cutting the budget. There is a chapter titled "Why Balancing the Budget Is Vital," but as Gingrich's former aide Frank Gregorsky puts it, "There's a declaration of war, but there's no ammo in the gun."

Gingrich and I spent the first half hour of our interview discussing this question. He laid out what he claimed would total $40 billion to $50 billion a year in budget cuts, which might balance some of his spending programs and tax cuts. He then briefly described a program calling for a simpler, less progressive tax system; elimination of waste in government; new "delivery systems" for government services, taking advantage of new technologies; and monetary and interest reforms. He made clear that on some of this—such as monetary and interest rate reform—his understanding was quite casual. Yet several days later he unveiled the package at a press conference and announced that it would "almost certainly" balance the budget by 1989.

Gingrich cheerfully admits that his entire economic agenda rests on the assumption that the US economy can average 5 to 6 percent annual growth—including recession years—for close to a decade, filling federal coffers without a tax increase. Look at "Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, West Germany for 20 years, the United States in the 19th century-there are times and places where you have that," he told me. In an article on the subject, he pointed to the 5.5 percent annual growth in the US between 1962 and 1967—neglecting to mention that the period fell between recessions, which would bring the average down, and that this spurt of growth, fueled in part by federal spending on the Vietnam War, was so rapid that it touched off the inflation we experienced in the 1970s. In the same article, he claimed we could simultaneously keep inflation down to 2 percent a year.

From 1970 through 1983, our average annual GNP growth—after inflation—was only 2.5 percent. Why would we suddenly come out of such a period into record growth? Gingrich's answer is instructive:

"The whole point of Toffler's Third Wave and Naisbitt's Megatrends and Peters and Waterman's In Search of Excellence and Drucker's Age of Discontinuity is we don't know crap about the near future. We are on the edge of an explosion in space and biology, and in electronics we're going through a revolution in computers. If we are creative, we are potentially where Britain was at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. We're on the edge of a take-off into what Toffler called the Third Wave."

In other words, we should bet the farm on Gingrich's optimistic interpretation of futurists such as Toffler—who made it clear after endorsing Gingrich's book that he does not agree with all of his politics. But even if Gingrich is right about technology—a dubious proposition in itself—that says nothing about economics. An explosion of technology in agriculture, during the teens and twenties, threw many people out of work and weakened consumer demand, helping to trigger the Depression. Some economists fear a similar impact from computer technologies, which make so much labor obsolete. In addition, Gingrich's rosy view ignores the short-term impact of the deficit, which has already pushed real interest rates to historic highs. If those rates go much higher next year, as economists predict, we may have another recession. At that point, the deficit could hit $250 billion a year with interest on the debt snowballing so fast that the gap might never be closed. Gingrich prefers to take our chances, however, betting on a decade of growth the likes of which we have not seen in this century.

Next, consider the issue of prayer in the schools. When speaking for this cause, Gingrich always describes the goal as "voluntary prayer"—ignoring the fact that students are already free to pray on their own, voluntarily. He maintains that current Supreme Court interpretation of the law does not even allow students to pray before eating their lunches, or to read their Bibles at school—both of which are simply false.

"The need for a moral revival is a major factor in my commitment to voluntary prayer in school," Gingrich writes. "For a generation, the American people have allowed a liberal elite to impose radical values and flaunt deviant beliefs." In a US News & World Report interview, he went so far as to claim that "our liberal national elite doesn't believe in religion." Making preposterous statements such as this allows Gingrich to set up a devil—the "liberal welfare state," run by the "liberal national elite"—and blame it for the decline of moral values in America.

Gingrich knows better, however. In our interview, I asserted that the roots of moral decline lay not in our government, but in our consumer society; which is constantly bombarding us with a glorification of instant gratification, hedonism, sensuality, and the self. In discussing Gingrich with people who know him well, I heard over and over how adept he is at telling people what they want to hear. And sure enough, Gingrich agreed with me, simply redefining "liberal welfare state" to mean the entire society.

If our consumer society is to blame, I next pointed out, the problem lies within private enterprise. "Oh yeah," he again agreed.. "But see, I'm not a libertarian. I say it pretty clearly in the book, I am not for untrammeled free enterprise. I am not for greed as the ultimate cultural value." In the book, however, there is no emphasis on regulating private enterprise or forcing corporations to change the advertising messages they constantly beam into our living rooms. How would he deal with the problem? By "preaching a collection of values which over time people come to believe are true. It is closer to a religious, educational... it's moral leadership."

And so we come full circle. A congressman who seems to keep two different sets of books when it comes to matters of morality would lead us in a moral crusade. Such are the ironies of American politics.

Links:
[1] http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/05/newt-gingrich-loves-lockheed-martin
[2] http://articles.latimes.com/1989-09-07/news/vw-2172_1_cholesterol-research/3
[3] http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/04/newt-gingrich-greatest-rhetorical-hits

And he cheated on his second wife, too.