So there was Speaker Newt Gingrich, talking about himself as a
“world historical figure,” yet petty enough to say that he was now
motivated to really stick it to President Bill Clinton because
Clinton made him exit from the back rather than the front of Air
Force One.
And there was Gingrich explaining that he had trouble
negotiating effectively with Clinton because Clinton made him
melt.
Then there was Gingrich strutting around like a puffed-up
popinjay, saying that he would “never again, as long as I am
speaker, make a speech without commenting on” the Lewinsky scandal,
and
ordering that TV ads be run about the matter, while having at
another time said he would not use it to try to score cheap
political points.
There was the Gingrich who led an “ethics
offensive” against Democratic Speaker Jim Wright but who then
himself was
rebuked by the whole House for serious ethical misconduct.
There was the Speaker Gingrich who established such a history
of double-dealing and backstabbing that he was the subject of an
unprecedented, mid-session coup
attempt. There was Gingrich blowing the 1998 elections by
overdoing his blood lust about the impeachment inquiry while
completely capitulating on spending. There was Gingrich
claiming that he was lured into an illicit affair because of
“how passionately I felt about this country,” which led him to have
“worked too hard.”
Gingrich is the kind of guy you can pick up at the airport
for a fundraising event who will spend the whole 25-minute car ride
talking about himself while failing even to ask for the name of one
of the people picking him up — or even pretending to listen when
the driver tries to introduce Gingrich to his passenger.
There was the Gingrich who wisely insisted that Medicare
revisions be kept separate from Appropriations negotiations that
eventually led to the famous “government shutdown,” and then there
was the speaker who acquiesced to Ways and Means Chairman Bill
Thomas’s insistence that a minor Medicare fix be included, thus
handing a huge
PR victory to Clinton and leaving the entire GOP House
communications apparatus on a limb, utterly unprepared. There was
Gingrich eight years later strongly supporting the prohibitively
expensive Medicare prescription drug entitlement.
While Gingrich was speaker, Republican congressmen and
their staffs never could be sure from day to day what whim would
send Gingrich running to the cameras with yet another
world-changing policy proposal, or whether the new proposal would
contradict what he had insisted what was near-holy writ just the
day before, or maybe the week before. Staffers also never knew
when, without ascertaining the facts, Gingrich would publicly throw
them under the bus.
Meetings of various groups of Republican staffers were
always quite a show when Gingrich was due to attend. There he would
sweep in like an emperor, surrounded by a fawning retinue at whom
he barked — no, make that yapped — orders as if they were
chattel. More lunging than striding toward the microphone, he would
launch into an over-decibeled lecture, absolutely full of (what he
considered) his own unmatched wisdom, explaining what he said were
frankly and fundamentally the essential insights
into how, frankly, the world really worked at a
fundamental level that despite its frank fundamentalness
could not be understood by the peons in the room unless he himself
laid it out for them in dialectic terms. Fifteen minutes later,
having sufficiently impressed his subjects with how ignorant they
would be if he weren’t there to enlighten them, he would lunge out
again, while renewing his yapping directives to his
retainers.
There was the Gingrich who was for cap-and-trade before he
was against it, but who now
denies that he ever was for it. He was for intervening in Libya
before he was against it. He was for Dede Scozzafava before he was
against her (and he was flat-out insulting conservatives for
opposing her before he sucked up to them for their insight in
opposing her). He
said his blast at Paul Ryan’s plan was “responding precisely to
how [David] Gregory asked the question,” even though Gregory’s
question was in no way, shape, or form as hostile or challenging as
Gingrich now claims, and even though not even Gregory came close to
attaching any derogatory label such as “radical… right-wing social
engineering.”
Gingrich is a man with all the self-discipline of golfer
John Daly, combined with the verbal incontinence of a Tourette’s
sufferer except without the actual medical malady as a valid
excuse. He’s a man who can’t keep his mouth shut, his pants zipped,
his ego in check, or his tempter restrained. He’s as steady as a
mechanical bull, as brilliant as a fallen star, as able to keep
perspective as Dadaist art.
When the former Speaker stuck both feet and several other
appendages into his mouth last Sunday on Meet the Press,
it was a perfect manifestation of the essential Gingrich. His
logorrhea is innate and apparently uncontrollable. Conservatives
should trust him the way the frog trusts the scorpion.
