Newt Gingrich

politics.salon.com — It wasn't long ago that the mere hint of an association with Bill Clinton was the kiss of death in Republican politics. Contempt for all things Clinton was the animating force on the right for more than a decade, from the moment Bill was elected in 1992 until well after he left the White House, with the prospect of a Clinton restoration hovering over American politics for most of the aughts. But when Barack Obama unexpectedly beat out Hillary in 2008 and became the face of national Democratic politics, it gave the right a new all-purpose villain — and an incentive to embrace a revised, more Clinton-friendly version on the 1990s. Nowhere is this shift more evident than in the presidential campaign of Newt Gingrich, whose own career arc neatly reflects both the right's pre- and post-Obama consensus about Bill Clinton.

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washingtonpost.com — In a sense, the fuss over a 2002 video in which Mitt Romney describes his views as progressive is absurd. After all, from 2003 to 2007 Romney was governor of Massachusetts. His record as governor is public. That record is either progressive or not, depending on your definition of the term. Romney’s comments don’t add any new information into the mix. And yet, this isn’t about his record, is it? In 2002, Romney was doing exactly what he’s doing now: assuring a skeptical audience that he was, in some essential way, one of them. But he wasn’t. At least, that’s what he says now that he’s trying to convince another skeptical audience with very different views that he’s actually one of them. And ultimately, it’s this question that separates the policy flip-flops of Romney and Gingrich.

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robertreich.org — Newt Gingrich has done it again. With his new tax plan he has raised the bar from irresponsibility to recklessness. First off, Newt’s plan increases the federal budget deficit by about $850 billion — in a single year! Can Newt get away with this? Probably — because his plan also comes at a time when Americans are so cynical about the major institutions of our society that someone who offers huge, outrageous plans holds a special fascination: The whole system is so awful, people tell themselves, why not just jettison everything and start from scratch? Let’s throw caution to the winds and do something really big — even if it’s colossally stupid. This is why the more outrageous Newt can be, the better his polls. The more irresponsible his bomb-throwing, the more attractive he becomes to a sizable portion of Americans so fed up they feel like throwing bombs.

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epi.org — Given presidential contender Newt Gingrich’s recent surge to frontrunner status in the polls, it was only a matter of time before the Tax Policy Center dug into Gingrich’s doozy of a tax plan. Howard Gleckman’s analysis on TaxVox notes that Gingrich’s plan represents such a gargantuan tax cut for upper-income households that it will blow a hole of nearly $1 trillion in the federal budget annually (more than doubling projected budget deficits). To date, Gingrich is winning the voodoo economics derby for peddling the steepest tax cuts for top earners and the biggest deterioration in the fiscal outlook. I somehow doubt that Gingrich’s proposed lunar mineral mining colony would pay for a fraction of these highly regressive and dear tax cuts. Not even eliminating Medicare would pay for this tax proposal.

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washingtonpost.com — For a man who likes to tout his expertise as a historian, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has a decidedly revisionist approach when it comes to his own history. In 1997, Gingrich became the only speaker in history to be reprimanded by the House of Representatives. He agreed to pay $300,000 to settle the matter, which involved using charitable groups to promote his political views and submitting misleading documents to the House ethics committee. The ethics charges sound like ancient history. They involve dreary matters of tax law. But the episode is worth revisiting because it offers insights into Gingrich’s bombastic, push-the-boundaries style. More troubling, in recent days, Gingrich has been blatantly dishonest in his self-interested rewriting of this history, dismissing the ethics sanction as the action of “a very partisan political committee.”

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inthesetimes.com — Newt Gingrich’s recent utterances about poor children — they “have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works” — reflect not only the inability of conservatives to talk seriously about poverty, but a mean-spiritedness that, unfortunately, largely eludes public scrutiny. Gingrich’s false and primitive protestations about the poor were distinguished by what he left out. The GOP’s newest presidential frontrunner failed to mention the constellation of forces that conspire to marginalize and degrade poor communities — including policies he and his party have long championed. Of course, no one expects Gingrich and the right-wing crowds to which he panders to engage in critical thinking about race and poverty. They are invested in avoiding systemic analysis that illuminates the influence of external factors on the human condition.

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robertreich.org — Two important reforms are stopping the revolving door between Washington and the nation’s financial giants, and preventing financiers from flipping companies (making short-term profits by borrowing big sums to buy them, then squeezing payrolls and firing employees, and reselling the stripped-down companies at a profit — unless the debt-laden firms fall into bankruptcy first). Remarkably, the frontrunners for the Republican nomination for president seem to agree. At least, that’s the clear implication from what they’ve said today.

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politics.salon.com — The chorus of Republican voices now raising doubts about Newt Gingrich (and, in some cases, bluntly attacking him) represents an obvious threat to the new GOP presidential front-runner. But the assault doesn’t have to sink him. In fact, it could actually fortify Gingrich’s position as the conservative movement’s consensus alternative to Mitt Romney. At least that’s the lesson suggested by a pivotal episode in Gingrich’s political rise that played out 21 years ago. Then as now Newt found himself targeted by influential Republican players, who saw an opportunity to undermine his influence within the party and arrest his career growth — only to watch their efforts backfire and accelerate Gingrich’s climb to the House speakership.

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