Newt Taken In, Done In by Own Bluster

Gosh, I miss Newt Gingrich already. We columnists aren’t quite as desperate as editorial cartoonists for subjects that lend themselves to caricature, but there was many a time in the wee hours of the morning, hard on deadline and frantically searching news databases for some foolishness to criticize, when a Newtism would miraculously appear.

Not all his ideas were dumb, dangerous or naive. It was just the way he burbled on about them as if he were the first person to think it might be good for kids to read or eat their spinach. No matter how banal or disconnected the proposal, if it was uttered by Gingrich, it was, by his definition, inherently “revolutionary” and would forever change the world, even if never implemented.

One example was Gingrich’s proposal to give every poor child in the country a laptop computer, a thought that apparently came to him in a taxi on the way to a press conference. Great idea, but how are you going to pay for it when the Congress you control refuses to appropriate money to keep aging schools from collapsing? Never mind the details, the joy was in the proposing, not the execution, which is why Bill Clinton, who insisted on funding for 100,000 new teachers, beat him cold with the voters.

It was no contest. While Clinton the pragmatist focused on win-win solutions, sometimes so minor a palliative as to be demagogic, Gingrich politicized every issue into the stuff of bitter ideologically driven partisanship. The nadir of Newtism came when he blamed liberal Democrats for a South Carolina mother’s drowning of her two children. The insufferable stupidity of his argument was underscored by the revelation that the young mother had been raised and molested by her stepfather, a local leader of the pro-Gingrich Christian Coalition.

Gingrich was marked by all the bad habits of a provincial professor who had spent too many years impressing students given to low expectations with his professorial elocution. Even in the world of politicians, his constant rhetorical excesses were judged to be out of control.

Every blip of his brain was regurgitated as grand theory mysteriously connecting the wisdom of the founding fathers with the blinding speed of the Internet. He was given to the annoying habit of confusing his personal journey with the grand saga of American history. One had the sense that even when he brushed his teeth, he thought of it as yet another “defining moment in American civilization,” to which he constantly referred. Who else would have the arrogance to proclaim, “I have an ambition, I want to shift the entire planet.”

The problem was not that Gingrich was always wrong, but rather his insistence that no one on the other side of the political aisle could ever be right. Even reasonable goals, like strengthening families or teaching kids to read, became rhetorical clubs to use against anyone who might not submit to his leadership.

But there was method to his madness, and the fact that a governing Republican coalition held together as long as it did is attributable in large measure to his blustery skills. The party is composed of two irreconcilable wings--the theocrats of the Christian right and the tax-cut free marketers. The former believe in government coercion, the latter in consumer sovereignty, and it will no longer be possible for Gingrich’s successor to ignore this fundamental distinction.

It was Gingrich’s gambit to placate the religious right by playing the morality card. This proved disastrous in the run-up to the election as the work of Congress came to resemble a dangerously simplistic morality play. But the public refused to accept that the Democratic Party was the work of the devil.

Now it’s the turn of Republican leaders who emphasize conservative economics rather than moral redemption. In his first statements, speaker-in-waiting Bob Livingston has declared that he will oppose attaching social issues like abortion to budget legislation and that he will reach for compromise with the Democratic opposition.

Early on election day, Gingrich uttered his penultimate Newtism, predicting that the election would continue “an ongoing slow-motion collapse of the Democratic majority that Franklin Roosevelt created.” To the contrary, it was just that coalition that proved to be revitalized.

The electoral tide turned on the votes of unionized workers, minorities and women concerned that the politics driving the Republican Party did not take their interests and the common long-run interests of the country to heart. Divisive rhetoric can only take you so far.

Bye-bye Newtie.