Newt Gingrich needs a reality check and a history lesson.
Last week, the former Speaker of the House announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination. Days later he addressed the Georgia Republican Party’s convention in his home state, claiming that the election in November 2012 will be the most important since the 1860 election in which Abraham Lincoln became president, after which the Civil War ensued.
How he arrived at that conclusion isn’t entirely clear, and frankly, more than a little puzzling.
But the racial undertones in his dialogue went further with the attack line that President Obama was “the most successful food stamp president in modern American history.”
WATCH NEWT GINGRICH ON ‘MEET THE PRESS’ HERE:
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This is only another in a long list of gaffes by Gingrich, who in an interview last September with the National Review Online, claimed that President Obama harbored “Kenyan, anti-colonialist behavior” that put him “outside our comprehension” as Americans. “This is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works,” Gingrich said, and Obama “happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president.”
Yesterday, in a Meet the Press interview with NBC’s David Gregory, Gingrich demonstrated willful ignorance, when he declared “I have never said anything racist about President Obama.”
Gregory provided proof, with video and direct quotes, while Gingrich attempted to hide behind the work of writer Dinesh D’Souza, whose recent Forbes article (“How Obama Thinks”) Gingrich found to be an “interesting” way to “understand” President Obama. D’Souza, a first-generation Indian-American, is an academic whose past work has been notoriously controversial — going so far as to make unfathomable statements like black slaves were treated “pretty well”. Naturally, Gingrich believed that D’Souza’s Indian heritage provided him a pass for bigotry.
This quackery in the American political discourse has been so prevalent and vocal the past two years, that Gingrich is more a symptom, rather than an agent. The election and presidency of Barack Obama seems to have hit a nerve among the likes of Gingrich and company, who can’t quite seem to embrace the colorblind ideals they espouse to be at the heart of American exceptionalism.
Why, in the age of Obama, have balanced criticisms been replaced by unbridled accusations of anti-Americanism? When did Hawaii cease to be a U.S. state? Don’t food stamps assist families in need, in the same way the federal government responds to Texans hit by wild fires, Mississippi residents drowning in floods, and an Alabama devastated by tornadoes? Are we not all Americans?
And why do we tolerate the racial gaffes and incessant innuendo?
Take for example, the recent attacks from surprise Republican hopeful Donald Trump, who said that President Obama plays too much basketball and instead of focusing on oil prices, or former Senator Rick Santorum, who claimed in a Fox News interview that Obama, as a “black man”, should be more sensitive to the life of a fetus, since blacks were once counted as three-fifths of a person, or Sarah Palin, who facetiously said the president and first lady spent time in Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church “listening to his rants against America and white people.” And last year Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, who has since announced he won’t run in 2012, defended The White Citizens Council — as a force for good in the Civil Rights Era. The truth? The Council was an institution akin to the Ku Klux Klan — but with boardroom suits, instead of white sheets.The pattern is clear. Has the field of Republican presidential hopefuls entered a Twilight Zone of dead ideas? It seems that as a last ditch effort to appeal to the worst elements of the Tea Party movement, many have abandoned their integrity.
On Meet the Press, New York Times political writer Matt Bai observed that Obama’s personal likability ratings have been steady and remain high — making these misguided attempts to appeal to the fringe, far-right base both tiresome and ineffective.
Pundits have lauded Gingrich’s past record for his ability to compromise with the Clinton White House. He helped to balance the federal budget in the late 1990s and led the charge for historic entitlement reforms. All the more reason his recent behavior is akin to a Jekyll and Hyde tale of two Newts. Gingrich is perhaps the worst offender of these racially imbued missteps, mostly because he is a seasoned statesmen, and should know better.
The Gingrich that today attacks Obama’s health care reform bill, was the same Newt who declared total support of a similar, federally mandated health care program in 1993. The Gingrich who vehemently pursued Bill Clinton’s impeachment on the charges that he lied to cover up an affair with Monica Lewinsky, is the same Newt that was himself having an affair with the woman who became his third wife. The Gingrich who refers to our president as a “Kenyan, anti-colonialist” leading us to “Detroit and destruction” is the same Newt who believes he has never said anything racist.
But not all Republicans are suffering historical amnesia. Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma stated that Gingrich is “the last person I’d vote for for president of the United States. His life indicates he does not have a commitment to the character traits necessary to be a great president.”
When asked on Sunday about his infidelities and three marriages, Gingrich said he had asked God for forgiveness and had “matured”. David Gregory respectfully challenged him; “You say you have matured…but you were 55 years old when some of this was happening….hardly a young man.”
Herein lays the incredible hypocrisy and delusions of grandeur evident in the likes of Gingrich, Trump, Santorum and Palin. They seem to have embraced polarizing tactics and divisive rhetoric aimed at President Obama, in an effort to deflect from their own, obvious shortcomings.
The American people are struggling with crippling unemployment and high gas prices, while Newt Gingrich remains boldly inflammatory, wildly uninformed, and completely unapologetic. With former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee now out of the race, and Mitt Romney struggling to gain traction, perhaps Gingrich actually has a chance at the nomination. The best hope is that the American people will read between the lines and see that Newt and his rhetoric are relics of the past. A past he finds uniquely nostalgic. A past we should all learn from: never to repeat.