Gingrich isn't a historian; he's history

Gingrich isn't a historian; he's history
Published: Tuesday, November 22, 2011, 1:04 AM     Updated: Tuesday, November 22, 2011, 7:54 AM
by Paul Mulshine/The Star Ledger

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KBPiKSg9jjo

It's an old story. The idealistic young man comes to Washington to do great things. Gradually, he is seduced by the charms of the Beltway. Before long he's selling his services to the highest bidder.

It never ends well and I suspect it won't be ending well for Newt Gingrich, not after the way George Will dissected him Sunday morning on ABC's "This Week." 

Will dismissed Gingrich's absurd claim that the mortgage giant Freddie Mac paid him $1.6 million in consulting fees because of his skills in the field of history.

"He's not a historian," Will said. He went on to term Gingrich "the classic rental politician."

But it was a comment by Paul Krugman of the New York Times that summed up Gingrich perfectly. Krugman quipped that "somebody said he's a stupid man's idea of what a smart man sounds like."

I don't know who that somebody was, but he might have been sitting next to me in the press gallery at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington last winter.

CPAC is a sort of debutantes' ball for potential contenders for the Republican presidential nomination, and all the usual suspects gave their speeches. Gingrich's speech offered a classic example of the phenomenon described by both Will and that anonymous wag.

Gingrich has but one rhetorical trick and he employs it over and over. He long ago proclaimed himself a "conservative futurist." This pose permits him to adopt an air of deep thought as he peddles whatever product he's being paid to push.

In this appearance, that product was ethanol. Gingrich devoted 10 minutes of his half-hour speech to energy policy. Most of it was red-meat stuff guaranteed to get applause, such as a call for more offshore oil drilling.  In the middle of the spiel, though, was a segment that should have been preceded by the phrase, "and now a word from our sponsor." As he was attacking the Obama administration for imposing too many mandates on industry, Gingrich proposed even more mandates.

The federal government, he declared, should require that every car sold in America be a flex-fuel vehicle, one that can run on 85 percent ethanol. After all, that worked in Brazil.

He then proposed that the same requirement be imposed on American carmakers.

"It's not a question about dictating what you ought to do," he said. "It's a question of giving you a range of choices of what you ought to do."

Nonsense. No consumer in his right mind would choose ethanol of his own free will. The United States gets its ethanol from corn, not from sugar as in Brazil. Corn-based ethanol costs much more than gasoline and produces much less energy per gallon. Absent federal mandates, not a drop of ethanol would ever enter your fuel tank. (Note at the 24:50 mark of the video above where Newt, after decrying government mandates, says "We should also insist on flex-fuel cars.")

The futurist got that past the audience, though. Gingrich certainly earned his pay that day.

Now, we've learned just what that pay was. News reports said one of his many companies had accepted more than $300,000 from the ethanol interests. That may sound like a lot. But it's peanuts compared to the $37 million that Gingrich got from the health care industry.

Gingrich's defense to these charges is that he never acted as a lobbyist. Perhaps, but in comparison to Gingrich, the typical lobbyist is an honest man. He or she collects a fee from a client to advocate the client's interest in a straightforward and aboveboard manner.

What Gingrich was up to was a lot more devious. Instead of lobbying legislators, he lobbied the people themselves. If the speeches I witnessed were any indication, the people in question were incapable of discerning that every word out of his mouth was bought and paid for.

It's shaping up to be an ignominious end to a once-promising career, one similar to that of another fabled orator from the heartland. When William Jennings Bryan died shortly after the Scopes Monkey trial, H.L. Mencken summed him up with this epitaph: "He was born with a roaring voice and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits."

As for Gingrich, even a half-wit can see what he's been up to. This futurist has too much of a past.

http://blog.nj.com/njv_paul_mulshine/2011/11/gingrich_isnt_a_historian_hes.html