Of course, that statement may come back to haunt this blog a year from now, but I doubt it. Could a man of such compromised integrity (even excluding his treatment of women) be elected?
Newt Gingrich is adamant that he is not a lobbyist, but rather a visionary who traffics in ideas, not influence. But in the eight years since he started his health care consultancy, he has made millions of dollars while helping companies promote their services and gain access to state and federal officials. ...NYT
And that's a polite way of saying Newt is a bought man. Smart and funny, but bought. And very deft at skirting the law.
In a variety of instances, documents and interviews show, Mr. Gingrich arranged meetings between executives and officials, and salted his presentations to lawmakers with pitches for his clients, who pay as much as $200,000 a year to belong to his Center for Health Transformation. ...NYT
But Newt is not a "lobbyist."
Gerard White, president of Clearwave, which paid about $50,000 to become a center member, used the occasion to pitch his company’s system for managing patient medical data. “It was a way for companies who were part of Newt’s group to say to health officials in Florida, ‘Hey, here are some exciting things we’re doing,’ ” Mr. White said. ...NYT
No, really: Newt is not a lobbyist. Believe that unless, like the Times, you get access to information showing that he is a lobbyist.
Yet if Mr. Gingrich has managed to steer clear of legal tripwires, a review of his activities shows how he put his influence to work on behalf of clients with a considerable stake in government policy. Even if he does not appear to have been negotiating legislative language, he and his staff did many of the same things that registered lobbyists do. ...
The center’s own records — kept in a restricted section of its Web site, but found by The New York Times in an unsecured archived version of the site — contain several previously unreported examples. ...NYT
He has access to people in power. He, well, lobbies.
He also pressed for passage of a federal bill to increase the use of electronic health records, collaborating with one of its co-sponsors, Representative Patrick J. Kennedy of Rhode Island, and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, both Democrats. After appearing at a press briefing on the issue with Mrs. Clinton in 2005, he stated flatly on Fox News: “We’re launching a bill.” ...NYT
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Gingrich and his aides insist that he never engaged in any actual lobbying, and that may be technically true. In fact, he appears to have gone to great lengths to ensure that he stayed on the right side of the regulations and laws governing the work of a professional registered lobbyist. Being seen officially labeled as a corporate shill, would obvious not help the prospects of anyone hoping to be president someday.
However, even if he never stumped for specific legislation or contracts — another claim that may be open to interpretation — it's clear that Gingrich's clients received unparalleled access to state and federal legislators and that Gingrich's presentations to those groups often featured favorable recommendations of the services his "members" could provide. For example, during a speech he gave to lawmakers in Georgia, Gingrich pointed out the money the state could save by hiring a company that happened to be a member of his group. It also appears that he didn't make it clear to those legislators that companies he mentioned were paying him. ...Dashiell Bennett, Atlantic
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Maureen Dowd looks at Gingrich and pronounces him a phony.
Mitt Romney is a phony with gobs of hair gel. Newt Gingrich is a phony with gobs of historical grandiosity. ...NYT
Newt, not a modest man, proclaims himself to be "a World Historical Transformational Figure." And as for the presidency, look at how he emerges from a pack of really embarrassing candidates.
... Next to Romney, Gingrich seems authentic. Next to Herman Cain, Gingrich seems faithful. Next to Jon Huntsman, Gingrich seems conservative. Next to Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, Gingrich actually does look like an intellectual. Unlike the governor of Texas, he surely knows the voting age. To paraphrase Raymond Chandler, if brains were elastic, Perry wouldn’t have enough to make suspenders for a parakeet. ...NYT
And the man is a bitchin' hypocrite. Yes, Newt is yet another "leader" of the Republican war party-- another puffer in a party full of men who deliberately avoided military service in Vietnam. He went on to blame others for his own sins.
Gingrich led the putsch against Democratic Speaker Jim Wright in 1988, bludgeoning him for an ethically sketchy book deal. The following year, as he moved into the House Republican leadership, he himself got in trouble for an ethically sketchy book deal.
Gingrich was part of the House Republican mob trying to impeach Bill Clinton for hiding his affair with a young government staffer, even as Newt himself was hiding his affair with a young government staffer.
Gingrich has excoriated Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae for dragging the country into a financial spiral and now demands that Freddie Mac be broken up. But it turns out that he was on contract with Freddie for six years and paid $1.6 million to $1.8 million (yacht trips and Tiffany’s bling for everyone!) to help the company strategize about how to soften up critical conservatives and stay alive.
At a Republican debate in New Hampshire last month before this lucrative deal became public, Gingrich suggested that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd should be put in jail. “All I’m saying is, everybody in the media who wants to go after the business community ought to start by going after the politicians who were at the heart of the sickness that is weakening this country,” he said. ...NYT
Dowd suggests that Newt Gingrich should indeed be elected -- to clean up the mess he made.
Maybe the ideal man to fix Washington’s dysfunction is the one who made it dysfunctional. He broke it so he should own it. ...NYT
