Newt Gingrich tries to be more rightwing than Sarah Palin
I’ve played with this philosophical conundrum for years: Who is worse, the bigot who actually believes the nonsense he spouts, or the opportunist who doesn’t believe it but repeats it to win the loyalty of his target audience? I still don’t know which is worse, but I know which one Newt Gingrich belongs to — the latter. He’s an opportunist who is known for over-the-top-rhetoric, much of which he knows isn’t true.
Gingrich’s most recent spasm of outrageousness concerns a Forbes magazine article that manages to mash together heaping doses of nativism and sheer nuttiness to suggest that President Obama’s political views come from his Kenyan father — a man, by the way, the president barely knew. After reading the piece, Gingrich endorsed it as “stunning insight.”(h/t Dave Weigel)
Gingrich says that [Dinesh] D’Souza has made a “stunning insight” into Obama’s behavior — the “most profound insight I have read in the last six years about Barack Obama.”
“What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension, that only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together [his actions]?” Gingrich asks. “That is the most accurate, predictive model for his behavior.
This is unadorned, over-the-cuckcoo’s nest craziness, and Newt knows it. So what is he up to? Conservative David Frum, a former Bush speechwriter, says there is a method to Newt’s madness:
Obviously I don’t know, but I’d venture that Gingrich’s words were not a one-drink-too-many rhetorical excess. Through his career, Gingrich has emphasized the use of harsh and stereotyping language to draw political contrasts, as in the famous 1996 GOPAC memo.
Earlier this year, Gingrich deployed the phrase “secular socialist machine.” Adopting as his own D’Souza’s new epithet about “the ideology of the Luo tribesman” revs Gingrich’s attack into a higher gear. It would be very characteristic of Gingrich to road-test the new concept with friendly journalists and audiences. If they applaud, we’ll hear more of it.
Happily, the first responses are negative. Byron York sarcastically tweeted today: “Say you’re a GOP leader. With elections approaching, the public prefers your position on major issues of the day.” “Your Democratic opponents are suffering massive self-inflicted wounds. So what do you as a GOP leader do?” “Attack Obama’s ‘Kenyan, anti-colonial’ worldview, of course.”
But remember: Newt Gingrich no longer leads the congressional Republicans. Of course he wants to see Republicans elected (and to receive credit for helping to elect them). But as he prepares to run for president, he has other priorities – and other problems. Gingrich endorsed TARP. He has acknowledged that human activity is warming the globe. He attempted to work with Hillary Clinton on healthcare reform and with Al Sharpton (!) on education. He endorsed Dede Scozzafava in the NY-23 special election. As Speaker, he joined Bill Clinton to pass the S-Chip program, a big expansion of the healthcare entitlement. And then there is the tangled complexity of his personal life. Gingrich must feel very vulnerable to the kind of attack from the right that has slammed so many Republicans this year.
So it’s his mission now to present himself as the most ferocious right-winger in the race. Confident (over-confident) that he can best Sarah Palin among business-minded and ideas-minded Republicans, he wants to deny her or some other Tea Party style challenger any footing to attack him as a compromise-minded moderate. Calling President Obama a Kenyan fits into that strategy.
BTW, as my colleague Jay Bookman has noted, Frum also called about Dinesh D’Souza and Gingrich for the racism inherent in that nonsense:
Here’s the question, though, for the rest of us: Why do Forbes (which presumably has many choices of cover material) and Gingrich imagine that such a message will resonate with their conservative audience? Nothing more offends conservatives than liberal accusations of racial animus. Yet here is racial animus, unconcealed and unapologetic, and it is seized by savvy editors and an ambitious politician as just the material to please a conservative audience. That’s an insult to every conservative in America.
Conservatives object to the Obama administration as too expensive, too regulatory, too intrusive, too beholden to Democratic special interest groups, and too apologetic about America’s role in the world. It’s a libel to claim that we object to the administration as too black or too alien. Bad enough when the libel is issued by liberals. Much worse when it is heard from our own writers, from magazines that speak to us, from political leaders who would speak for us.
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