« Newt Gingrich
March 6, 2008
Gingrich Games Surveillance Survey
The imaginary Newt Gingrich presidential campaign is an idea that just won’t die. Now that John McCain has earned enough delegates to secure the GOP nomination for 2008, Robert Novak is taking Gingrich 2012 seriously:
Newt Gingrich's efforts to restore his standing among Republican conservatives for a possible future presidential bid have suffered a self-inflicted setback because of the former House speaker's support for liberal Rep. Wayne Gilchrest's unsuccessful attempt to save his seat in Congress representing Maryland's Eastern Shore. …
But even if the prospect of Gingrich running for president is illusory, his bid to be the GOP’s futuristic guru—with a steady stream of book deals and media appearances—seems to be progressing just fine. Gingrich’s “527” advocacy group recently announced it will be opening an office in Menlo Park, California to focus on “[o]nline political technology.”
If Gingrich is hoping to make inroads in Silicon Valley, he would be well advised to cool his over-the-top rhetoric on domestic spying and telecom immunity. Gingrich has focused on the issue in his online commentaries over the last few weeks, accusing Democrats of tendering a “declaration of unilateral disarmament in the War on Terror” and of perpetrating “the most amazing anti-national security action by Congress in decades.”
In addition, Gingrich’s group, which has specialized in presenting polling data on platitudes as new political facts, released a survey showing agreement with things that are presented in the survey as being absolutely necessary to stop us from all being killed by terrorists:
Current U.S. law allows the National Security Agency to conduct electronic surveillance of certain telephone calls originating overseas to or from a person suspected of having links to terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda without obtaining a warrant as typically required by law. The success of this program relies on the cooperation of the U.S. phone companies.
Do you agree or disagree that if a company assists the United States government in tracking down terrorists it should be protected from lawsuits related to that assistance since otherwise no company could afford to help our own government stop terrorists?
So far, most people have been kind enough to ignore Gingrich’s comical polls. (Seventy-five percent agree “We must defeat America’s enemies”! “[I]nnovation and new technology,” whatever that means, is better than “more litigation and more government regulation,” etc.) But over at the Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Julian Sanchez takes a closer look, concluding that “even by the standards of this incredibly dishonest debate [over FISA reform], a new survey being touted by Newt Gingrich's American Solutions group is simply jaw-dropping.”
The survey purports to show that Americans overwhelmingly approve of both the surveillance powers and the grant of immunity sought by the president and his allies. Yet the two central questions posed to survey respondents were premised on clear falsehoods. It is almost impressive how many different lies and misrepresentations the survey takers managed to squeeze into each sentence. …
After detailing exactly how misleading Gingrich’s poll questions are, Sanchez writes:
If you're curious about what Americans say about warrantless wiretaps when the survey takers don't repeatedly lie to them in the course of their inquiries, you might consult this poll commissioned by the ACLU. The civil liberties group found that 63% of Americans believe the government should "get a warrant from a court before wiretapping the conversations U.S. citizens have with people in other countries". A solid majority also believed that courts should determine whether phone companies can be held liable for releasing customer records to the government without a court order, and that the lawsuits against them should be heard. So really, we shouldn't blame Mr Gingrich for approving a survey jammed to the gills with lies. When you describe the wiretapping controvery to people honestly, after, all, they stubbornly refuse to give you the "right" answer. What's an apologist for the surveillance state to do?
Posted by Ezra at 11:57 AM | Permalink
February 12, 2008
'Run, Newt, Run' (?!)
How finicky were the activists at the Conservative Political Action Conference? Romney, McCain, and Huckabee each bent over backwards to cater to the far-right sentiments of the audience, but the speaker who got the most “presidential” reception was Newt Gingrich.
“Hillary and Obama talk about real change—Newt Gingrich delivers real change!” trumpeted David Bossie of Citizens United in introducing this “one-man think tank.” Bossie’s “only regret,” he said, was that Gingrich was not a candidate for president. (Bossie, incidentally, was forced out of his job investigating the Clinton Administration for House Republicans by then-Speaker Gingrich in 1998, but the two have apparently made up, working together on Gingrich’s “Rediscovering God” DVD.)
Rather than take the podium immediately, Gingrich spent about five minutes shaking hands with the cheering audience as bombastic march music blasted in the background. The only thing missing was a balloon drop.
“Run, Newt, run!” someone shouted. “Run for president!” cried another.
No, Newt Gingrich was not jumping in to save these poor right-wing activists from John McCain. (Sorry, Michael Reagan.) In fact, Gingrich said they have an “absolute requirement to support the Republican nominee this fall.” Instead, Gingrich played the role of a medicine-show man—telling the crowd they have a serious condition and he has just the elixir to cure what ails them.
“There is something big happening in this country,” said Gingrich ominously. “We don’t understand it. We’re not responding to it. And we’re currently not competitive.”
I want to suggest to you—and I’ve spent a lot of time since 1999 thinking about this, and it’s part of why I wrote the book “Real Change” and tried to lay out, at American Solutions, a fundamentally different approach to how we thinking about solving our problems—I think there are two great lessons for the conservative movement since 1980. The first, which we still haven’t come to grips with, is that governing is much harder than campaigning. Our consultants may be terrific at winning one election. They don’t know anything about governing. And unfortunately most of our candidates listen to our consultants. And so you end up with people who don’t understand briefing people who don’t know so that together they have no clue.
Gingrich is hardly the first to suggest that anti-government politicians might not be the best at running a government. Still, it’s a little counterintuitive to hear Gingrich railing against “consultants”—after all, he has spent the last year on the periphery of the presidential race, pushing the kind of futuristic hokum that would make any consultant envious.
Under the mind-bending motto “Real change requires real change,” Gingrich has promised dispirited Republicans access to “the world that works”—something like Fedex, but with more 3-D animation. And as he did at the Values Voter Summit, Gingrich passed out copies of his inane polling data (e.g., a majority of respondents said yes when asked whether “we must defeat America’s enemies”)—which he now calls “The Platform of the American People.” Throw in a flashy web site and I’d say he’s in business.
In the end, though, Gingrich’s “real change” was just more red meat for the Right. His first example of “real change” was for Republicans in Congress to razz the Democrats by holding a symbolic vote on English-only every week during the presidential race. Following this path, said Gingrich, “we will win one of the most cataclysmic elections in history” in November. Now, the Right has found anti-immigrant sentiment to be a powerful bludgeon in recent years, but it’s hardly been an electoral winner. Is this really the “world that works,” or one of Gingrich’s “alternate histories”?
Posted by Ezra at 9:52 AM | Permalink
January 25, 2008
Who You Gonna Call?
The wide-open Republican presidential race narrowed a bit with Fred Thompson’s withdrawal, but some pundits are speculating that the primaries will be inconclusive, and that the various camps will choose a consensus nominee at a brokered convention. Indeed, the desperate hope that a dark horse could seize such an opportunity at the last minute appears to be the campaign strategy of Alan Keyes. But right-wing commentator Michael Reagan is counting on another spectral candidate: Newt Gingrich.
Who, then, could conservatives end up backing? Well, who recently has come out with a new book? Who's doing all the shows talking about his new book? Who is advocating common-sense solutions to the most pressing problems America faces?
Newt Gingrich, that's who. He was out of the race for a long time, he toyed with the idea of running until Fred Thompson entered the race, and then he more or less pulled back.
… I wouldn't be surprised if he was out there quietly working the phones and hoping for a wide-open convention where the delegates -- not the primaries that selected many of them -- decide for themselves who they want to carry the GOP banner in the presidential election in November.
If Newt throws his hat in the ring he knows that in the blink of an eye he will have the grass roots behind him. … As a result, if the nomination gets thrown open in a brokered convention, the person who comes out of the struggle the winner will most likely be Newt Gingrich.
There’s no question the former House Speaker wants to be thought of as a contender. Gingrich teased the Right with his candidacy for months before laying it to rest in October, blaming campaign-finance laws that would have prevented him from maintaining control of his 527 political group (American Solutions) and its unrestricted funding. Nevertheless, he soon came back on the scene, showing up in Iowa before the caucuses to tout his dopey “Platform of the American People.”
Despite the efforts of some right-wing fans to replace Gingrich’s old, unpopular image with a futuristic and brainy image, it’s still hard to imagine Gingrich as a national candidate. But one thing it has done is let Gingrich bask in the attention. And it seems to be paying off: American Solutions, which still appears to be something of a one-man show, raised $5.8 million through November. And he’s churned out four books since he set about “winning the future” last summer.
Posted by Ezra at 5:50 PM | Permalink
December 7, 2007
Brand Newt
Newt Gingrich has descended upon the Iowa caucuses again, promoting a “Platform of the American People” –and, incredibly, raising the specter of running for vice president:
The timing of his appearances a month before the Jan. 3 Iowa presidential caucuses is leading political observers to suspect he's angling to be on the short list of running-mates for former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney or former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee or whoever is the Republican nominee. …
The former House speaker who flirted with a Republican presidential nomination run earlier this year said in a C-SPAN interview on Sunday that he might accept being the presidential nominee's running mate if offered.
"Depending on the circumstances, I'd be honored to be considered and under some circumstances, I'd probably feel compelled to say 'yes,' " said Mr. Gingrich, who says he will work until this summer's presidential nominating conventions "to get both parties to adopt a unity platform on a handful of things they could enact in the first 90 days of 2009."
It was just two months ago that Gingrich’s incipient presidential run was mercifully laid to rest, but some on the Right are apparently holding out hope that the former House speaker will save them, perhaps fondly recalling the “Contract with America” that he put together shortly before the Republicans took control of the House in 1995 and that served as a right-wing rallying cry after the elections.
Of course, a lot has happened since 1995. Gingrich quickly established his lack of popularity—within two years, his favorability rating was at 15 percent. His skills as a political strategist were put to the test as he pursued the impeachment of Bill Clinton in the run up to the 1998 elections, which resulted in a devastating loss for Republicans and his stepping down from leadership. Many Americans no doubt remember the hypocrisy of Gingrich prosecuting Clinton for sexual indiscretion while he himself was having an affair.
Gingrich was a key figure in creating the era of highly-polarized politics, but today he is branding himself, ironically, as a seeker of common ground, launching a campaign earlier this year of platitudes (“Real change requires real change,” etc.). Now, the Right is looking to him as its “ideas man,” gushing over his “intellectual heft.” “Newt Gingrich is the intellectual cornerstone of our modern conservative movement," said the American Conservative Union’s William Lauderback at this year’s CPAC.
While such a reputation on the Right may be hard to believe, it may ultimately doom his vice-presidential aspirations; ACU’s David Keene warns that Gingrich’s “articulateness and willingness to speak out on virtually every issue” would put candidates at risk of being “upstag[ed]” by him. That would indeed be embarrassing.
In any event, we’re sure Gingrich is enjoying all the attention, and it brings to mind the words of longtime Gingrich ally Matt Towery after Gingrich announced he wouldn’t seek the presidency. "The question is, around Washington: Was it a scam?”
Posted by Ezra at 6:20 PM | Permalink
November 14, 2007
Smells Like Christmas Spirit
It’s mid-November, and we are well into this year’s “War on Christmas,” the seasonal campaign in which a melodramatically aggrieved Right—occupying a fantasy world where we’re not all surrounded by Christmas music and commerce—claims that Christianity is under attack, pointing to retailers that say “Happy Holidays” and the decoration regimes of a handful of small-time local administrators.
Yesterday morning, for example, the American Family Association sent an alert to its members warning that Lowe’s was selling Christmas trees without using the word “Christmas” enough in its catalog. “Lowe's evidently did not want to offend any non-Christians, therefore they replaced ‘Christmas tree’ with ‘Family tree.’ Of course, if Christians are offended that is evidently ok,” sniffed AFA. (AFA retracted the alert later in the day after assurances from Lowe’s that “Christmas trees” would appear in its advertising.)
Long before 2005, when Fox News host John Gibson penned a book on how it was all a “liberal plot,” right-wing commentators have reached for a conspiracy theory that would place such petty gripes in a context they would be able to use to attack their political opponents, and this year is no different.
Last week the American Family Association pounced on a nursing home in Plant City, Florida, where a decoration policy stopped “an 85-year-old grandmother” from putting up her mistletoe. This small-city nursing home claimed that it was following federal guidelines from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, leading AFA to conclude, “Their tradition is now banned by the federal government.”
Of course, there is no such HUD policy on decorations in nursing homes, and AFA later corrected itself; nevertheless, AFA spokesman Randy Sharp claimed the Plant City debacle as proof of a nation-wide trend: “It does give credence to the fact that there is a strong anti-Christian bias in this country by those who would like to place God inside a box, leave the wrapping on it, and never take him out.”
Newt Gingrich similarly uses the poor Plant City nursing home as evidence of so-called elites “imposing” their “anti-religious bigotry” on the American people:
It's another example of the biases of the elites -- in this case, anti-religious bigotry -- being imposed on the American people.
According to Gingrich, then, the director of a small nursing home in Florida is example number one of the “legal and governmental elites,” a group that presumably does not include Gingrich himself, a jet-setting former House speaker who has made his living as a political consultant and author.
The “War on Christmas” is an example of a common tactic among the Religious Right, what we’ve called the “persecuted majority syndrome”: Creating an absurd storyline in which Christianity is imperiled in the U.S., religious-right activists rush to its defense and merge this sentiment with their own reactionary politics.
Take Bishop Harry Jackson’s column this week:
I have been shocked that many Christians just don’t seem to grasp the fact that we are in very sophisticated power struggle. We don’t seem to want accept that there is an all-out assault against Christians being waged in the legislature, teamed with the mainstream media.
According to Jackson, three of the “four major attempts to thwart faith in the U.S.” are federal hate-crimes protections for gays, workplace discrimination protection for gays, and the Fairness Doctrine. (The fourth is an investigation into possible tax fraud on the part of several high-rolling televangelists.) It’s one thing to oppose policies like civil rights for gays; it’s quite another to claim these policies constitute “an all-out assault against Christians.”
Posted by Ezra at 11:04 AM | Permalink
October 5, 2007
Citizens For The Republic Reborn
Marc Ambinder reports that Newt Gingrich, Gary Bauer, and others plan to bring back the pre-Reagan era Citizens For The Republic in hopes of revitalizing the conservative movement.
Posted by Kyle at 2:17 PM | Permalink
October 3, 2007
Your Futuristic Campaign Has Been Killed by an Ogre
After months of teasing—all the way up to last week—former House Speaker Newt Gingrich announced over the weekend that he would not, in fact, run for president. According to Gingrich, his plan to campaign for $30 million in commitments would conflict with his role as chairman of “American Solutions for Winning the Future” due to “misguided and destructive campaign finance laws.” Reactions on the Right ranged from relief (“there were lots of people ... who are glad that he made the decision not to run,” said Marvin Olasky) to bitter disappointment (“Was it a scam? That's what people are sort of hinting at,” speculated long-time Gingrich ally Matt Towery).
Gingrich founded the futuristic American Solutions (zen-like motto: “Real change requires real change”) as a 527, the controversial IRS category known for its use as a way to channel unrestricted “soft money” toward “issue advocacy,” occasionally—as with the Club for Growth and the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth—for the transparent purpose of supporting or opposing the election of candidates. When Gingrich founded his group, it was immediately suspected as a way for him to build a mailing list and rehabilitate his national profile while avoiding the protracted primary season, which he called “stupid.” Maintaining leadership of the 527 while dropping the pretense that he was not running would have made the group’s practical aim almost explicit, despite his cheeky claim that it is “a unique non-partisan institution -- the only 527 of its kind.”
“It was a curious argument, since both the 527 group and Gingrich's apparent White House ambitions have been around for about a year. Why did it take so long for Gingrich and his crack team of lawyers to realize that he couldn't have it both ways?” asked the National Journal blog.
While Gingrich says he’s standing down from candidacy because he’s “not willing to sacrifice American Solutions” and its efforts to transcend politics through the use of hokey platitudes, it may be more likely that he’s unwilling to give up what the Washington Times called a “lucrative empire as an author, pundit and consultant” for a doomed presidential bid.
Nevertheless, Gingrich was able to demonstrate his power as a “citizen leader” on “Solutions Day,” the futuristic holiday he organized as a climax for American Solutions. Commemorating the anniversary of the 1994 “Contract with America,” which he and other House Republicans announced dramatically in front of the U.S. Capitol, Gingrich reprised the occasion in an appropriately futuristic setting: a scale model of the Capitol building rendered in 3-D in “Second Life,” an online virtual world.
Gingrich’s specter floated in virtual space before landing in front of a small audience of motley spectators, variously attired in virtual suits or skimpy outfits with purple panda ears. There was reportedly even a virtual streaker. Although its lips weren’t moving, the cyber-Gingrich lauded “Second Life” as a triumph of “the world that works,” the theme of American Solutions.
(Video via the Weekly Standard, which notes that Gingrich’s speech apparently plagiarized the magazine. Gingrich's speech begins at around 1 minute and 12 seconds into the clip.)
Posted by Ezra at 6:15 PM | Permalink
October 1, 2007
Gingrich Won't Run
Would rather stay head of group. UPDATE: Is it about his "lucrative empire"?
Posted by Ezra at 9:30 AM | Permalink
September 26, 2007
Gingrich Threatens 'Transformational Change'—As GOP's Losing Candidate?
Newt Gingrich says he will run for president if he can convince people to donate $30 million, according to the Washington Times. As hard as it is to believe, Gingrich claims that “more and more people have been approaching me about running.” (Apparently Mike Huckabee didn’t get the memo: the struggling second-tier candidate is letting Gingrich guest-blog on his campaign web site.)
The former House speaker has been dancing around the 2008 campaign for almost a year, practicing his platitudes through a project called American Solutions for Winning the Future, which has also allowed him to gather a mailing list. Gingrich threatened to announce his candidacy if the GOP’s “pathetic” bunch of “pygmies” don’t shape up, but only after Solutions Day, his futuristic holiday scheduled for this very week, when Gingrich “will outline the challenges facing our country and how to address these challenges through fundamental transformational change. Real change requires real change.”
Most of the “workshops” organized for Solutions Day appear to be house parties hosted by Gingrich fans, but at least one features a far-right celebrity: The Texas chapter of the anti-tax group Americans for Prosperity will feature David Barton, a Republican activist and pseudo-historian known for promoting the idea of a “Christian nation” and the claim that the separation of church and state is a “myth.”
For supporters of American Solutions—aside from those who were bowled over by the “Real change requires real change” rhetoric—Gingrich may represent a conservative ideal embodied in his reputation for hard-line partisanship during the Clinton Administration. But that ideal is also embodied in the career Gingrich pursued after his growing unpopularity and scandal-ridden fall from grace—a novelist of books in which the Confederacy beat the Union at Gettsyburg. “Alternate history” may be effective in fiction, but such a strategy seems likely to be less compelling in a real political campaign, even with Gingrich’s futuristic makeover.
Which leads Newsweek’s Jonathan Darman to speculate that Republicans may nominate Gingrich as a “postmodern Goldwater”—a reference to the 1964 candidate who stuck by his far-right principles and went down in electoral flames, but inspired the Right to create the conservative movement that would elect Ronald Reagan 16 years later. Gingrich, writes Darman, may be positioning himself as “a candidate conservatives can be proud to vote for in a year when they face near-certain defeat.” But before GOP voters take that step, they may want to listen to the advice of one reviewer of Gingrich’s book: “Readers should be forewarned … they may come away from this exciting novel believing events really did happen this way.”
Posted by Ezra at 9:15 AM | Permalink
August 21, 2007
Anti-Immigrant Activists Descend on Newark
The idea that undocumented immigrants are causing a crime wave in the U.S.—while not supported by evidence—has been a mainstay of anti-immigrant activists for decades. For example, in instituting ordinances against hiring or renting to immigrants, Hazleton, Pennsylvania Mayor Lou Barletta claimed that immigrants were “terroriz[ing]” the city. But defending the ordinances in court, Barletta could not back this claim up. “The people in my city don’t need numbers,” the frustrated mayor declared when confronted with the city’s own statistics showing the opposite.
Similarly, Rep. Steve King (R-IA) and Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist have been touting phony numbers on immigrants and crime.
But if statistics don’t back up their claims, anti-immigrant activists can always latch on to anecdotes. A recent multiple-homocide in Newark, New Jersey has implicated illegal immigrants, and national activists quickly descended upon the city, claiming that the crime was linked to local police not questioning suspects’ immigration status.
Possible presidential candidate Newt Gingrich used a visit to the Ames, Iowa straw poll to call for a special session of Congress to pass a law ensuring that “Any city, county or state that refuses to participate in checking every felony arrest will immediately lose all their federal aid.” Bill O’Reilly and Michelle Malkin echoed his attack on so-called “Sanctuary Cities.” Jesse Lee Peterson of Brotherhood Organization for a New Destiny (BOND), who makes a career out of denouncing Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, claimed that the murders in Newark were indicative of a “growing phenomenon” of “ethnic cleansing of blacks from lower-income neighborhoods by Hispanic gangs and illegal aliens.”
And on Monday, Republican presidential candidate Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) spoke at a rally in Newark, calling on the victims’ families to sue the city over the police department’s policy on checking immigration status. He was joined by anti-immigrant activists from You Don’t Speak For Me, a front group for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, and New Jersey Citizens for Immigration Control.
Tancredo’s goal is to circumvent immigration reform in the U.S. Congress by pushing anti-immigrant measures in state legislatures and city councils—whether in small towns like Hazleton, which lack evidence of problems with undocumented immigrants but have leaders willing to rouse sentiment against them, or in places like Newark, where a brutal crime can become fodder for outside activists like him.
Posted by Ezra at 5:58 PM | Permalink
Older Newt Gingrich posts: