Friday, January 27, 2012
Politics Newt-bashing not limited to liberals
Posted by Scott Henry @ScottTheHenry on Fri, Jan 27, 2012 at 5:29 PM
- Joeff Davis
- Moi, an ass-munch?
This is the situation in which one Newton Gingrich finds himself. The irony is that it's not just liberals who find repugnant the idea of him as president, it's also Republicans who worked with him back in the day or those who simply have reasonably long memories. We already know that columnist George Will thinks Gingrich "would have made a marvelous Marxist." And that former GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough has been vocal in his belief that Newt is a "bad person" and "a danger to America."
Now comes Elliott Abrams, a former assistant secretary of state under Ronald Reagan, who seems to remind folks of the terrible things Gingrich once said as a young congressman about the GOP icon whose mantle he claims to be upholding. Abrams spins his tale in National Review Online, where conservatives are likely to see it:
Gingrich scorned Reagan’s speeches, which moved a party and then a nation, because “the president of the United States cannot discipline himself to use the correct language.” In Afghanistan, Reagan’s policy was marked by “impotence [and] incompetence.” Thus Gingrich concluded as he surveyed five years of Reagan in power that “we have been losing the struggle with the Soviet empire.” Reagan did not know what he was doing, and “it is precisely at the vision and strategy levels that the Soviet empire today is superior to the free world.”There are two things to be said about these remarks. The first is that as a visionary, Gingrich does not have a very impressive record. The Soviet Union was beginning to collapse, just as Reagan had believed it must. The expansion of its empire had been thwarted. The policies Gingrich thought so weak and indeed “pathetic” worked, and Ronald Reagan turned out to be a far better student of history and politics than Gingrich.
The second point to make is that Gingrich made these assaults on the Reagan administration just as Democratic attacks were heating up unmercifully. Far from becoming a reliable voice for Reagan policy and the struggle against the Soviets, Gingrich took on Reagan and his administration.
In other words, the Gingrich of then is much like the Gingrich of today: a dismissive know-it-all eager to explain how his understanding of domestic policy and international affairs is superior to his contemporaries — especially those he doesn't consider his intellectual equals. That might be effective in a debate against political rivals, but it's a practice that obviously burned some bridges for him along the way. Wonder who'll be next to trash the Newtster?
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