When Newt Gingrich comes to New Hampshire and makes a statement
like, “We as a country are where Abraham Lincoln was in 1861,” it’s
not quite clear where he sees himself in that new/old paradigm.
What was apparent at an Anthem Blue Cross forum on “consumer-driven
health care” in Bedford last week, however, was that he is
exceedingly keen on proving he has a role.
During his keynote address, Gingrich reeled off a list of a few
of the challenges he’s working on finding “21st century,
intelligent, limited government” solutions for, including but not
limited to: Dealing with “the irreconcilable wing of Islam”;
Buffing up U.S. math and science education so the nation can
compete with China and India; Preventing Iran from getting nuclear
weapons; Avian flu preparedness; Baby Boomer retirement and all its
implications; Coping with millions of illegal immigrants “at a time
when our borders are out of control”; as well as nurturing
scientific and technological progress which he believes will revolutionize American life over the next
25 years.
For an hour Gingrich reeled off on all this and more with humor,
warmth, and an encyclopedic brilliance that was at times humbling
to mere mortals. Afterwards, a few fans come sheepishly seeking to
have their picture taken with the mastermind of the now
all-but-defunct 1994 Republican Revolution. Gingrich happily
obliges, and as the flashes go off, one man asks the former House
speaker if he aspires to ascend to the same office Lincoln once
held.
“I don’t know yet,” Gingrich replied before belying his
reticence by encouraging the man to visit his website and sign the
mailing list. “If enough people sign up, I’ll probably run.”
Now, one needn’t be a K Street political consultant to divine
that Gingrich has a lot of political and cultural baggage. Back in
1999, whilst Gingrich was in the midst of a nasty divorce battle
after admitting to years of infidelity with a paid staffer, David
Corn of the Nation wrote, “Newt-haters theoretically could have
feared a Nixon-like return from the near-dead — but given how Newt
is handling this case, they need not fret any longer.”
Nevertheless, during the 2004 campaign, Gingrich’s name was still
being regularly invoked as a catchall term for Republican
perfidy.
Perhaps Newt-haters had reason to fear him after all. Less than
a decade after resigning his seat, Gingrich has become an
increasingly high-profile voice in national policy debates. He
remains towering enough a figure to be referred to simply as
“Newt,” which, as the man who introduced him at the Anthem event
gleefully noted, “puts him in the same category as Madonna and
Hillary.” The latter junior senator from New York has herself
praised Gingrich (and he her), going so far as
to collaborate with the liberal boogeyman himself on a health care
bill. This weekend he was depicted on Saturday Night Live
as a voice of reason opposing an oafishly ignorant Bill
O’Reilly.
And now people are actually asking if Newt wants to be president
of the United States of America. Who said there are no second acts
in American life?
FOR HIS PART, GINGRICH SEEMS to be enjoying himself. Running just
far enough below the radar to avoid the attack dogs and dredging up
of past embarrassments, Gingrich is well received by most crowds.
To be sure, the political climate and widespread discontent with
government serves his rhetorical strengths.
The former speaker still suffers no fools, especially those with
dot-gov email addresses. During the course of his speech he called
the Congressional Budget Office “stunningly reactionary and
uneducated.” He told a room full of health professionals, “When a
UPS delivery person walks into a doctor’s office they double the
computing power of the office.” Noting that the same people in the
federal government who failed to respond effectively to Hurricane
Katrina were now in charge of the avian flu preparations, Gingrich
sarcastically suggested a motto: “Your city, too, can look like New
Orleans.”
Not done yet: The current model of governance in the United
States, Gingrich said, is “not functional,” likening it to a “clerk
sitting on a high stool using a quill pen dipped into an open ink
well…modernized by a 1935 New Deal bureaucracy in which a manual
typewriter types on carbon paper.” And what of the current
administration, accused almost daily of trying to roll back the New
Deal? “When smart people get to be in charge — and Dick Cheney,
Condi Rice and Donald Rumsfeld are all smart — they realize it’s
not working,” Gingrich continued. “Surrounded by the system, they
offer reforms within the system. They come in and say, ‘Plastic
quill pens!’ Big winner. Or they show up and say ‘Brand new carbon
tape!’…It’s hopeless.”
THE LYNCHPIN OF GINGRICH’S new contract with America seems to be a
call for detente with irrationality. “You don’t want to spend your
time trying to organize people,” Gingrich said. “It’s too
complicated.” To illustrate, Gingrich painted a portrait of
American society as a bee swarm en route to a new hive
location.
“If you notice in a swarm, almost half the bees at any given
moment are flying the wrong way,” Gingrich said. “But the
collective effect is they are moving the entire swarm to the new
site. So we want to try to get people in a lot of different areas
doing a lot of different things all moving in a mutually supportive
way.”
The current system “denies the way people operate.” An
established “cultural pattern” may sometimes seem an insurmountable
obstacle, “but that doesn’t mean we have to manage it as if we’re
as stupid as the culture that has grown up around it,” Gingrich
said. He would rather adapt limited government principles to
reality, even if only incrementally.
“More choices of higher quality at lower cost — any strategy
that isn’t trying to get to that is profoundly wrong,” Gingrich
told the Anthem crowd. To free-market types such a statement might
seem self-evident. During the Q&A segment, however, someone
challenged this, asking if there were possibly too many choices in
the prescription drug bill, Newt couldn’t help but be Newt. “The
average senior citizen — we’re not talking frail elderly, we’re
not talking Alzheimer’s — walks into a Wal-Mart superstore with
258,000 items and doesn’t seem intimidated,” he said.
Standing in stark relief against the typical pandering and
cradle-to-grave welfare state promises of a presidential campaign,
it’s not clear whether such sentiments would actually garner votes
or overcome the drawbacks of Gingrich’s past enough to accentuate
his former strengths even in an increasingly anti-government
political atmosphere.
Whatever the final outcome, we can all probably agree it would
be a whole lot of fun to watch go down. Flawed though he may be in
some respects, his ability to elucidate the core of any number of
issues is all but unparalleled. It is a quality that, in fact,
makes those flaws all the more tragic.
