Video: Newt Gingrich bad-mouths Ronald Reagan in 1988
Newt Rewrites His Reagan Connection
In 1995, when Newt Gingrich first became speaker of the House, Bob Dole was already on the threshold of becoming the longest-serving Senate Republican leader in U.S. history. Relations between the two GOP leaders, which were never chummy, were not helped by Gingrich’s openly disparaging Bob Dole as “the tax collector for the welfare state.”
Former GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole recently said:
“Newt Gingrich was a one man band” who always wanted “his way or the highway.” Read full article HERE
Barely two years later, after having been chosen Time magazine’s Man of the Year, Gingrich had plummeted in public esteem to where, in a CBS-New York Times poll, just 14 percent of voters had favorable personal feelings toward the speaker.
This prompted an apocryphal Washington exchange between a perplexed Gingrich and Dole. “Why do people take such an instant dislike to me?” asked a perplexed Gingrich, to whom Dole bluntly explained: “Because it saves them time.”
Watching the last televised candidates debate before the Jan. 3 Iowa presidential caucuses, and hearing Newt Gingrich once again invoke the name and record of President Ronald Reagan as well as his own close relationship with Reagan, reminded me that Dole wasn’t the only one on the receiving end of Gingrich’s barbs.
At the Reagan presidential library this fall, Gingrich boasted of how “I helped Reagan create millions of jobs while he was president.” And after modestly acknowledging his own less significant role than Reagan’s, added, “We helped defeat the Soviet empire.”
Unmentioned by Gingrich then, or in any of the 2,414 debates during this campaign, was his 1985 criticism of President Reagan’s historic meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev as “the most dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met with (British Prime Minister) Chamberlain at Munich in 1938.”
In an interview on CNBC, Gingrich recently emphasized his close identification with the nation’s 40th president: “I’ve done a movie on Ronald Reagan called ‘Rendezvous With Destiny.’ Callista and I did.
We’ve done a book on Ronald Reagan. You know I campaigned with Reagan. I first met Reagan in ’74. I’m very happy to talk about Ronald Reagan.”
Just like when Newt went to the House floor during the Gipper’s second White House term and declared the president’s Soviet policy a “failure.” Here is what Gingrich said:
“Measured against the scale and momentum of the Soviet empire’s challenge, the Reagan administration has failed, is failing and without a dramatic, fundamental change in strategy will continue to fail. … The burden of the failure frankly must be placed first upon President Reagan.”
This was after Gingrich, as reported in the Congressional Record, had found Reagan responsible for our national “decay”: “Beyond the obvious indicators of decay, the fact is that President Reagan has lost control of the national agenda.” Students of Newt-speak will recognize that by “decay,” Gingrich was generally referring to factors such as crime, illegitimate births and illiteracy.
These blatant contradictions between what Congressman Gingrich actually said at the time about President Reagan and what Candidate Gingrich now offers as fictitious reminiscences of his unwavering allegiance to Reagan remind me of one of the former speaker’s own broadsides against Washington, D.C. “In this cold and ruthless city,” he once said, “the center of hypocrisy is Capitol Hill.” Newt Gingrich is quite obviously an expert on both subjects.
To find out more about Mark Shields and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at http://www.creators.com.
DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM BY MARK SHIELDS
In the Reagan Diaries, Ronnie mentions Gingrich only once and sparingly…
The one mention of Newt Gingrich in The Reagan Diaries (The Reagan Diaries Unabridged) is in Chapter 3, which covers 1983, on page 123 in the book:
“Newt Gingrich has a proposal for freezing the budget at the 1983 level. It’s a tempting idea except that it would cripple our defense programs. And if we make an exception on that every special interest group will be asking for the same.” (as seen below)
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Election 2012 is the most important election of our lifetime(s)… perhaps ever in the lifetime of the American republic. Any of the four remaining candidates in the GOP field would be better than what we now have in the White House the more Progressive President and Team America has ever had. But until the GOP nominee is chosen, everyone needs to do their own due diligence and choose the ‘best’ of the four in their mind. Then after the GOP Convention it is time for everyone to coalesce around that candidate to move forward and save our republic from becoming the next Europe and the United Socialist States of America.
askmarion 