Prepping for 2012, Newt Gingrich Dusts Off His Old Playbook
David Corn
Columnist
Posted:
07/30/10
The other day an associate of Newt Gingrich surprised me: He told me there's a 97 percent chance that Gingrich will run for president in 2012. Really? I replied, with a laugh. Yes, he said seriously. He noted that he had recently spoken to the former Republican House speaker and had picked up a he's-going-for-it vibe and that, more telling, he had seen that Gingrich was surrounding himself with veteran political operatives who would only likely flock to Gingrich for a presidential bid. Then on Thursday, Gingrich delivered a speech at the American Enterprise Institute -- one with a highfalutin' title: "America at Risk: Camus, National Security, and Afghanistan" -- that sure made it seem he's looking to be the darling of GOP primary voters who yearn for Dick Cheney.
In his typical bombastic style, Gingrich blasted President Obama and his aides for being national security wimps. He declared, "America is at risk of a catastrophic disaster here at home, and that is a reality our elites are hiding from." He proclaimed that it is "clear the Obama administration is willfully blind to the nature of our enemies and the forces which threaten America." And he essentially charged Obama-ites with treason: "It is the natural path of secular socialist intellectuals to prefer our opponents to us and to accept their lies over our truths."
This is all nonsense. Obama and Co. prefer "our opponents" and knowingly ignore threats? This president is sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan (for good or bad) and has ordered far more drone attacks on al-Qaeda and other insurgent targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan than were conducted during the Bush-Cheney years. These are not the acts of a man who fancies the nation's foes.
Gingrich likes to pose as a serious thinker and idea man, but his embrace of such melodramatic hyperbole is more befitting a cartoon character. But Gingrich has always undermined his attempts to be seen as a statesman by immature bomb-throwing. After the 2008 campaign -- during which he originated the GOP's "Drill, Baby, Drill" initiative -- he positioned himself as a post-partisan player, declaring that he wanted to promote a "tri-partisan" approach to politics that would bring together Democrats, Republicans, and independents. He denounced the Republican Party for releasing an ad attempting to tie Obama to disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, decrying "the sort of negative attack politics that the voters rejected in 2006 and 2008." Yet now -- after the Tea Party explosion has made attack politics rather popular on the right -- Gingrich is willing (and eager) to engage in the most foul of attacks: accusing the president of purposefully endangering the country because he and his crew prefer America's enemies. This is the worst form of calumny.
Gingrich's use of such poison -- and his abandonment of "tri-partisan," let's-work-together rhetoric -- is no shocker. He's not a man of high-minded consistency. When he was House speaker in the 1990s, he led the family-values GOP during its impeachment crusade against President Bill Clinton (for lying about a sexual affair with intern Monica Lewinsky) -- wasting much time and energy that could have been used to address challenges facing the nation, such as the troubled health care system, flat wages for middle-income Americans, and the nation's dangerous dependency on fossil fuels. At the same time, Gingrich was carrying on an extramarital affair of his own.
Worse, in those days, he advocated making politics more negative than it had been. During his AEI speech, Gingrich fleetingly referred to George Orwell's classic essay "Politics and the English Language," in which the British author excoriated routine political rhetoric. In the 1990s, Gingrich's political action committee, GOPAC, mounted a deliberate effort to debase political debate. It disseminated to GOP candidates a memo called "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control." Orwell would have been amused. The memo contained a list of suggested words Republicans should use when describing Democratic opponents. That list included "sick," "pathetic," "betray," "bizarre," "cheat," and "traitors." Yes, traitors. Which brings us back to Thursday's speech. This old dog is sticking with the old tricks -- claiming that his foes do not truly care for this country. He is trying to whip up and exploit the paranoia and fear of the Tea Party right. Perhaps with some desperation: His above-mentioned colleague told me that Gingrich, who's 67 years old, realizes 2012 is his last chance to take a shot at the big prize.
Last week, the liberals who gathered at the Netroots Nation conference were polled on whom they'd like to see as the GOP presidential nominee in 2012. Forty-eight percent went with Sarah Palin, figuring she'd be a big loser. Only 8 percent picked Gingrich. But either as a primary candidate or the party nominee, Gingrich would prove entertaining, as he would be forced to explain the personal and political excesses of his past. (He left not one but two ill wives for other women. Imagine him defending that on "The View.") There are plenty of bombs that could go off.
Meanwhile, as Gingrich reaches back to his 1990s playbook to attack Obama and his allies for purposefully endangering the nation, it is indeed appropriate to bear Orwell in mind. In that essay, Orwell observed that political language "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
You can follow David Corn's postings and media appearances via Twitter.
In his typical bombastic style, Gingrich blasted President Obama and his aides for being national security wimps. He declared, "America is at risk of a catastrophic disaster here at home, and that is a reality our elites are hiding from." He proclaimed that it is "clear the Obama administration is willfully blind to the nature of our enemies and the forces which threaten America." And he essentially charged Obama-ites with treason: "It is the natural path of secular socialist intellectuals to prefer our opponents to us and to accept their lies over our truths."
This is all nonsense. Obama and Co. prefer "our opponents" and knowingly ignore threats? This president is sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan (for good or bad) and has ordered far more drone attacks on al-Qaeda and other insurgent targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan than were conducted during the Bush-Cheney years. These are not the acts of a man who fancies the nation's foes.
Gingrich likes to pose as a serious thinker and idea man, but his embrace of such melodramatic hyperbole is more befitting a cartoon character. But Gingrich has always undermined his attempts to be seen as a statesman by immature bomb-throwing. After the 2008 campaign -- during which he originated the GOP's "Drill, Baby, Drill" initiative -- he positioned himself as a post-partisan player, declaring that he wanted to promote a "tri-partisan" approach to politics that would bring together Democrats, Republicans, and independents. He denounced the Republican Party for releasing an ad attempting to tie Obama to disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich, decrying "the sort of negative attack politics that the voters rejected in 2006 and 2008." Yet now -- after the Tea Party explosion has made attack politics rather popular on the right -- Gingrich is willing (and eager) to engage in the most foul of attacks: accusing the president of purposefully endangering the country because he and his crew prefer America's enemies. This is the worst form of calumny.
Gingrich's use of such poison -- and his abandonment of "tri-partisan," let's-work-together rhetoric -- is no shocker. He's not a man of high-minded consistency. When he was House speaker in the 1990s, he led the family-values GOP during its impeachment crusade against President Bill Clinton (for lying about a sexual affair with intern Monica Lewinsky) -- wasting much time and energy that could have been used to address challenges facing the nation, such as the troubled health care system, flat wages for middle-income Americans, and the nation's dangerous dependency on fossil fuels. At the same time, Gingrich was carrying on an extramarital affair of his own.
Worse, in those days, he advocated making politics more negative than it had been. During his AEI speech, Gingrich fleetingly referred to George Orwell's classic essay "Politics and the English Language," in which the British author excoriated routine political rhetoric. In the 1990s, Gingrich's political action committee, GOPAC, mounted a deliberate effort to debase political debate. It disseminated to GOP candidates a memo called "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control." Orwell would have been amused. The memo contained a list of suggested words Republicans should use when describing Democratic opponents. That list included "sick," "pathetic," "betray," "bizarre," "cheat," and "traitors." Yes, traitors. Which brings us back to Thursday's speech. This old dog is sticking with the old tricks -- claiming that his foes do not truly care for this country. He is trying to whip up and exploit the paranoia and fear of the Tea Party right. Perhaps with some desperation: His above-mentioned colleague told me that Gingrich, who's 67 years old, realizes 2012 is his last chance to take a shot at the big prize.
Last week, the liberals who gathered at the Netroots Nation conference were polled on whom they'd like to see as the GOP presidential nominee in 2012. Forty-eight percent went with Sarah Palin, figuring she'd be a big loser. Only 8 percent picked Gingrich. But either as a primary candidate or the party nominee, Gingrich would prove entertaining, as he would be forced to explain the personal and political excesses of his past. (He left not one but two ill wives for other women. Imagine him defending that on "The View.") There are plenty of bombs that could go off.
Meanwhile, as Gingrich reaches back to his 1990s playbook to attack Obama and his allies for purposefully endangering the nation, it is indeed appropriate to bear Orwell in mind. In that essay, Orwell observed that political language "is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
You can follow David Corn's postings and media appearances via Twitter.