by Molly Ivins
Kaus went and found Gingrich’s 1986 Social Security proposal that advocates cutting off Social Security for everyone in the country under forty and then passing a national value-added tax of $200 billion per year. But—this is the beauty part—the accusation that Gingrich leveled at Rivlin and Clinton was hypocrisy. Which brings us to the First Rule of Newt-Watching: Whatever he accuses his opponents of, look for carefully in his own behavior.
Gingrich recently told a group of lobbyists he was, to put it crudely, shaking down that his election strategy was to portray Clinton Democrats as “the enemy of normal Americans” and proponents of “Stalinist measures.” I’m fond of hyperbole myself. But when politicians start talking about large groups of their fellow Americans as “enemies,” it’s time for a quiet stir of alertness. Polarizing people is a good way to win an election, and also a good way to wreck a country. Stay alert.
November 1994
The New Regime II
AW, ARMEY! DICK, my man, what’s wrong? Dr. No going soft! No fun, no fair.
Here I’ve been telling everyone how fabulous the new Texans at the top of Congress are going to be. Wait’ll you see, I gloated. Bill Archer! Tom DeLay! And best of all, Dick Armey! This guy makes Newt Gingrich look like a fuzzy, cuddly bear.
I guaranteed it. The reason I guaranteed is because Newt Gingrich has already achieved the improbable effect of making Bob Dole seem cuddly. I’ve already started thinking of him as Uncle Bob. This is the same Dole about whom Jay Leno joked just last winter, “It’s so cold in Washington, people are huddled around Bob Dole for warmth.”
When Gingrich started muttering about putting millions of children in orphanages to be raised by a government that he believes can’t do anything right, some of my compatriots here on what passes for the left were chilled to the bone. But no, I cried, you’ll learn to love Noot! Just wait’ll you get a good look at Armey.
I spoke with confidence, having followed Armey’s career faithfully from his first campaign in the old mid-Metroplex, when he ran on a platform of abolishing Social Security. Not many people, even at that high tide of Reaganism, were advocating the abolition of Social Security, and I knew I had a live wire even then. Abolish farm subsidies! Torch the Capitol! Go, Armey!
One of my all-time favorite Dick Armey moments was when he looked at Hillary Rodham Clinton during a health-care reform hearing and said: “I have been told about your charm and wit, and let me say, the reports on your charm are overstated and the reports on your wit are understated.” That was my man Armey—a noted authority, all agree, on both charm and wit.
But now, now, damned if we’re not getting a kinder, gentler Dick Armey. He no longer advocates phasing out Social Security. He’s not even going to fight for abolishing agricultural subsidies. Aaaawwww, Dick.
Where is the Dick Armey of yesteryear, the one who called the Family Leave Act “yuppie welfare”? The man who said the Clinton health-care program was “a Kevorkian prescription for the jobs of American men and women”? Heck, Armey used to say he was “embarrassed” ever to have been a college professor because so much education is “pure junk.”
For a while, I was even working on the theory that Armey’s scorched-earth approach to politics was genetic: He has a son, Scott, who has distinguished himself as a Denton County commissioner by pushing for prayer in the schools, an issue that some constitutional purists would consider outside the purview of county commissioners.
What do we get now? A kinder, gentler Dick Armey. Now we get Dick Armey telling The Dallas Morning News that in his early years in the House, he “risked being labeled a bomb-thrower, a loose cannon,” but he learned that “you can be so ideologically hidebound you can cut yourself off from the process.” He says that in 1990, when he was shut out of the budget summit, he learned that you have to have “a place at the table.” And so he ran for the No. 3 spot in the Republican leadership and learned to play the game. And now, here he is at No. 2, just another perfectly good bomb-thrower we sent to Washington, only to have him turn into a politician. Sure, Armey insists that he has learned about Washington from being in the Congress since 1984. I say it’s another reason for term limits.
At least Armey still believes in supply-side economics. It was such a success during the Reagan years that he wants to try it again. And he still believes in a flat tax rate. Why should Ross Perot pay any more in taxes than thee and me? But you can tell the old fire is gone from Armey. All this disgusting talk about being conciliatory and learning from experience—yuck. Sounds like Jim Wright.
Maybe Clarence Thomas will have some success in getting Armey back to his good old ways. The justice is Armey’s good friend, and when they go fishing together, they catch supply-side fish.
November 1994
Newt
WELL, HE IS a rare one, Mr. Gingrich is. But you have to admit, it takes a crew as gormless as the Washington press corps to take him seriously. The man is without question the single silliest public official east of the Texas Legislature.
The trouble with members of the D.C. press is that they are under the daffy impression they have to take him seriously just because he’s been elected to high public office. Great gravy, poor Mencken.
Nincompoopery has never been a bar to high office in our nation. Newt Gingrich’s sole claim to serious consideration is that he’s great copy. He has no ideas, no principles, no integrity, and by and large, he’s a damn fool.
On the other hand, what he does have is enthusiasm, and not just positive enthusiasm. Gingrich is just as positively negative as he is positively positive. He’s not a lukewarm guy at all, much less one with any judgment. Enthusiasm is an endearing trait.
According to Time magazine, Gingrich’s colleagues at West Georgia College called him Mr. Truth, because any time he finished a book, he’d come flying in, declaring, “This book is the truth! It’s the best book I ever read!”
On the other hand, when Gingrich is negatively enthusiastic, he’s just as positive. In January 1995 he declared, “There is no grotesquerie, no distortion, no dishonesty too great” for his political enemies to use against him. That remark echoed an earlier tirade in which Gingrich declared: “These people are sick. They are destructive of the values we believe in,” he said. “They are so consumed by their own power, by a Mussolini-like ego, that their willingness to run over normal human beings and to destroy honest institutions is unending.”
For those of you familiar with motivational speakers, Gingrich is the Zig Ziglar of Republican politics. In fact, there is an amusing parallel between the salesmen who drive between calls listening to Ziglar on “how to close” and Republican candidates who drive between campaign stops listening to Gingrich on “how to win.”
In addition to being an enthusiast, Gingrich is brazen. Isn’t that a lovely old-fashioned word? Shameless. Without scruple. Possessed of brass-faced gall. A man for whom the word hypocrisy has no meaning.
There are a couple of easy pointers for the neophyte Newtist on how to read the Speaker. One is that Gingrich constantly accuses others of that which he himself is guilty. The shrinks call it projection, but I have no interest in his psyche or private life. Projection is simply a fact of his political life. It goes back at least to 1978, during his first successful congressional campaign, when he accused his opponent Virginia Shapard of preparing to leave her family behind if she went to Washington, while Gingrich’s staffers were taking bets on how long his own collapsing marriage would last.
In Gingrich’s career, the most famous of all the instances of projection is his destruction of Speaker Jim Wright. It is fashionable to write about how ironic it is that Speaker Gingrich had problems with a book contract and that he currently has ethics problems—both ordeals suffered by Speaker Wright. Actually, the irony is quite old. At the time Gingrich called Wright “the least ethical Speaker in the twentieth century” because Wright had exceeded the House’s $20,000 limit on honoraria through bulk buying of his book, Gingrich himself had raised $10
5,000 from former campaign contributors to publicize his own book, Window of Opportunity. Gingrich’s political friends formed a limited partnership to promote his book through advertising and touring. Gingrich’s wife, Marianne, was paid $11,500 by the partnership and Gingrich made $24,000 off it. In Wright’s case, his political friends helped him out by buying his book after it came out. In Gingrich’s case, his friends helped by paying publishing-related expenses for his book. In both cases, special-interest money wound up in the authors’ pockets.
Another easy take on Gingrich is that whenever he becomes offensively defensive, when he issues a flat, repetitive denial, you’re on to something, and well advised to hone right in. For example, he said in March 1995, “Any liberal who tells you we are cutting spending and hurting children is lying. L-Y-I-N-G, lying!” The House Republicans then proceeded to propose cuts for Head Start, summer jobs for inner-city kids, prenatal care, education, Medicaid, assistance for poor and handicapped children, recreation programs for inner-city kids, school lunches, and, of course, welfare. According to a study by the Office of Management and Budget, the proposals could move 2.1 million children into poverty.
When asked about the Federal Election Commission’s lawsuit against GOPAC, Gingrich’s political action committee, he avoided details and called the charges phony. In fact, Gingrich used the word phony eleven times in the space of one minute. That’s easy for him. He regularly floors House stenographers by spitting out 350 words a minute. Nevertheless, Gingrich headed GOPAC from 1986 until May 1995, and the FEC has several thousand pages of evidence showing that GOPAC helped candidates for federal office without registering as a federal PAC and without meeting reporting requirements. According to the Democratic National Committee, GOPAC has received between $10 million and $20 million in large, secret donations from corporate executives who had major interests pending before the government.
When a New York Times poll in October 1995 showed that almost two thirds of the American people did not favor the proposed Republican tax cut, Gingrich went ballistic. “This poll is a disgraceful example of disinformation. What we get are deliberately rigged questions that are totally phony.” Gingrich wants to cut $270 billion from Medicare while giving out $245 billion in tax cuts that would significantly benefit those who make more than $200,000 a year. He is extremely sensitive about using the word cut in relation to Medicare. He says he is only slowing the rate of growth in order to “save” Medicare.
Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, concluded in a memo that the only way to cut Medicare was to scare people into thinking it was going broke and then claim to save it. Of course, when Democrats objected to the proposed $270 billion cut, the Luntz strategy did not prevent our man Newt from saying, “Think about a party whose last stand is to frighten eighty-five-year-olds, and you’ll understand how totally morally bankrupt the Democratic Party is.”
Although many of Gingrich’s critics would like to think he merely pops off all the time, in fact both his use of certain language and his repetition of certain ploys are quite deliberate. Connie Bruck, writing in The New Yorker, cites “polarization and oversimplification” as hallmarks of Gingrich’s rhetoric.
Gingrich pays attention to language with a concentration that would do credit to a professor of semiotics. In a 1990 GOPAC letter to Republican candidates, he wrote, “I have also included a new document entitled ‘Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,’ drafted by GOPAC political director Tom Morgan. The words in that paper are tested language from a recent series of focus groups where we actually tested ideas and language.”
Gingrich has a particular fondness for the words grotesque, sick, bizarre, and twisted, and regularly uses them in ad hominem attacks on his critics. He described a reporter whose question he didn’t like as “an incredibly stupid person,” and denounced another as “grotesque and offensive.” Demonstrators protesting Medicare cuts along his book tour were “would-be fascists.” Unfortunately, it’s catching. Gingrich’s critics respond with ad hominem attacks on him, and splendidly brazen as he is, he is not beyond posturing as a wounded innocent.
One of Gingrich’s regular ploys is to associate “the opposition”—whether he defines it as Democrats, liberals, or counterculture McGoverniks—with the most heinous event of the moment.
In 1992 he said Woody Allen’s affair with Mia Farrow’s daughter “fits the Democratic Party platform perfectly.” The Democratic Party has never recommended screwing your lover’s adopted daughter.
When Susan Smith drowned her two sons in South Carolina in 1994, Gingrich said it “vividly reminds every American how sick society is getting and how much we have to change. I think people want to change, and the only way you get change is to vote Republican.”
Actually, the Democrats have never recommended drowning your children either. But in reference to the above item, Susan Smith was in fact screwed by her stepfather from the age of fifteen on. He was a member of the state Republican executive committee and the Christian Coalition.
In September 1995 a three-year-old girl was accidentally killed during a gang-related shooting in Los Angeles. One of the suspects was out on parole, a circumstance in which Gingrich saw an opportunity. He called it “a glaring example of a liberal, New Deal approach that put up with violence, accepted brutality.” The New Deal is not generally remembered either for putting up with violence or for accepting brutality.
In November 1995 a hideous crime caught the nation’s attention: A welfare mother named Debra Evans, nine months pregnant, was killed along with two of her children. The killer cut the unborn child from her womb. Gingrich quickly tried to exploit the murders for political gain. “Let’s talk about what the welfare state has created. Let’s talk about the moral decay of the world the left is defending. It happened in America because for two generations we haven’t had the guts to talk about right and wrong,” he said. Evans, the victim, was, in fact, on welfare. She was also a regular churchgoer, known for opening her home and sharing what little food she had with others. She and her two children were each buried with Bibles on their chests. The left, no matter how loosely it is defined, has yet to encourage murdering pregnant women and cutting their babies out of the womb.
The latest round of journalistic efforts to take this unpromising specimen of political guttersnipe seriously includes de rigueur reflections on what The Washington Post calls “Gingrich’s intellectual force.” In Time magazine’s hilarious Man of the Year profile, Lance Morrow hails his “first-class intelligence.” According to Bruck’s New Yorker profile, Sho¯gun is Gingrich’s Bible. God save us, it isn’t even a good book. On the other hand, it is a lot better than his own novel, 1945, which is so appalling that anyone who admires Gingrich should be forced to read it.
It is now conventional wisdom that Gingrich’s “ideas” dominate the Washington agenda, that he was somehow preternaturally in touch with the deepest yearnings of the American people. Actually, much of what Gingrich propounds stems from poll-driven politics and pollster packaging.
Conservatives, being conservative, object to Gingrich’s ideological un-steadiness: He cannot be classified as a libertarian, an economic conservative, or a social conservative. From a thinking person’s point of view, this is encouraging news: Surely only a dittohead could be so neatly pigeonholed. But the conservative critique of Gingrich is not that he is a synthesizer so much as he is a here-and-thereian. He frequently launches bozo ideas—orphanages, laptop computers for all, recognizing Taiwan, and Handicapped in Space are among the more memorable. (His Handicapped in Space program, described in his book Window of Opportunity, is based on the fetching notion that the handicapped will find it easier to work in a zero-gravity environment.)
Politics is normally considered hardball (“It ain’t just beanbag,” we all say cheerfully), but still a sport, and one with rules. For most of us. Tom Foley, by general consensus, will go down as one of the worst Speakers and one of the most decent human beings ever to serve in Congress. In 1989 a fe
w Republicans were peddling the unsubstantiated rumor that Foley, married for years, was gay. An aide to Gingrich spoke to Lars-Erik Nelson of the New York Daily News and added, “We hear it’s little boys.” She also warned him that other newspapers were pursuing the story.
Nelson printed her words verbatim. Gingrich was furious and wrote a letter to Nelson’s editors saying it never happened, that it was irresponsible reporting. He demanded that Nelson be fired. Then he apologized to Speaker Foley and said his aide’s actions were “unforgivable and destructive.” But he did not fire her.