Venal, Vile, Vulnerable Newt Gingrich Presses On

These are good times for Gingrich who is in demand as a speaker, recently produced an anti-Islam film with his third wife, has taken to religion and is palling around with some of the more extremist Christian conservatives in the country, and is raking in the dough through his American Solutions for Winning the Future.

He’s everything you might think he is and more; venal, vile and occasionally vulnerable. He has voracious appetite for political power, rhetorical flourishes and for wanting to be thought of as the smartest guy in the room. He’s become more “religious” as time passes, embracing, and in turn being embraced by, some of the more hard-line Christian conservatives in the country. He’s got a lot of money at his beck and call. And, he’s running for president of the United States in 2012; maybe!

Ultimately, "That's up to God and the American people," he recently told Esquire magazine’s John H. Richardson.

He’s Newt Gingrich and despite the ever-apparent smugness that has made him one of the most unpopular politicians in the American public’s minds eye, never-the-less he is ever in demand.

In the wide-ranging Esquire profile titled “Newt Gingrich: The Indispensable Republican," Gingrich, the disgraced former Speaker of the House, author, lecturer, filmmaker, Fox News Channel political commentator, is captured traipsing around the country gathering chits for 2012; speaking wherever (meetings, rallies) and to whomever (GOP/Tea Party supporters). In part what makes Gingrich a potentially viable presidential candidate is that he has become the master of his own domain; garnering big money in support of a series of Gingrich-inspired initiatives and websites.

One of the most formidable of these fund-raising jackpots is called American Solutions for Winning the Future, or American Solutions for short. On its website, the organization describes itself as “a tri-partisan citizen action network of over 1.5 Million members. Our goal is to create the next generation of solutions that will ensure that the United States remains the safest, freest, and most prosperous country in the world.”

Then, there’s Gingrich Productions, which recently released a new film called “America at Risk,” which is hosted by Gingrich and Calista Gingrich, the young congressional aide who became his third wife. A two-minute promo for the film is available at You Tube, where nearly 28, 000 views have been recorded. While that number doesn’t indicate a Gingrich Productions’ blockbuster, another Gingrich You Tube video, titled“Gingrich: I’m Deeply Worried” – an excerpt from a Gingrich appearance at the National Press Club -- has been viewed nearly 1.8 million times.

(Fans of ABC’s “The View” can also catch Gingrich’s April 29, 2008 appearance at the table with Whoopi Goldberg, Joy Behar and friends, where he discussed the impact Rev. Jeremiah Wright might have on the unfolding presidential campaign.)

These days, Gingrich appears to owe a great debt to the Tea Party Movement. Not because Tea Partiers are necessarily big Gingrich fans – some are and some aren’t – but rather because the success of Tea Party-backed candidates during the long drawn out primary season has made Gingrich look more and more like a reasonable alternative to Kentucky’s Rand Paul or Nevada’s Sharron Angle. And that, my friends, is no easy task.

The victories in Republican Party primaries in Delaware, where the Sarah Palin and Tea Party- backed Christine O’Donnell defeated longtime Delaware congressman and former governor Michael Castle, and in New York where real-estate magnate and ersatz pornographic and racist e-mailer Carl Paladino overwhelmingly defeated former Congressman Rick Lazio on Tuesday, September 14, provides an interesting counterpoint to the political experience and supposed media savvy of Newt Gingrich.

However, instead of carving his own more judicious path to power – which admittedly may not be possible in today’s Republican Party/Tea Party nexus -- Gingrich is embracing the partisan braying of Tea Party partisans. Gingrich apparently is taking the path of least resistance, at least as it is represented in Tea Party land. He refuses to move away from the strange, often perplexing comments, and the political positions embraced by some Tea Party-back candidates.

On September 11, the National Review Online’s Robert Costa reported that “Citing a recent Forbes Dinesh D’Souza, former House speaker Newt Gingrich tells National Review Online that President Obama may follow a ‘Kenyan, anti-colonial’ worldview. Gingrich says that 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.”

Gingrich told Costa that Obama “is a person who is fundamentally out of touch with how the world works, who happened to have played a wonderful con, as a result of which he is now president. I think he worked very hard at being a person who is normal, reasonable, moderate, bipartisan, transparent, accommodating — none of which was true,” Gingrich added.

“In the Alinksy tradition, he was being the person he needed to be in order to achieve the position he needed to achieve . . . He was authentically dishonest,” Gingrich maintained. “[Obama] is in the great tradition of Edison, Ford, the Wright Brothers, Bill Gates — he saw his opportunity and he took it.”

When asked by Costa if he was going to take back the White House in 2012, Gingrich said that “The American people may take it back, in which case I may or may not be the recipient of that, but I have zero doubt that the American people will take it back. Unlike Ford, the Wright Brothers, et cetera, this guy’s invention did not work.”

Gingrich added that he “think[s] Obama gets up every morning with a worldview that is fundamentally wrong about reality. If you look at the continuous denial of reality, there has got to be a point where someone stands up and says that this is just factually insane.”

According to Media Matters, “Gingrich has a history of making bigoted and offensive statements” :

“Gingrich compares Islamic center to Nazis erecting a sign near Holocaust Museum and to a Japanese site near Pearl Harbor. On the August 16 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, Newt Gingrich said, ‘Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a site next to Pearl Harbor. There's no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center.’"

“Gingrich smears Sotomayor as a ‘racist.’ ABC's Jake Tapper and Huma Khan reported on May 27, 2009, that Gingrich had written on Twitter: ‘Imagine a judicial nominee said 'my experience as a white man makes me better than a Latina woman' new racism is no better than old racism’ and ‘White man racist nominee would be forced to withdraw. Latina woman racist should also withdraw.’ Gingrich later said that he didn't know whether Sotomayor herself was a racist, but her quote about a wise Latina was ‘clearly racist.’"

“Gingrich: Bilingual education teaches ‘the language of living in a ghetto.’ An April 1, 2007, Associated Press article reported that Gingrich described bilingual education as teaching ‘the language of living in a ghetto’ and mocked requirements that ballots be printed in multiple languages.”

In John Richardson’s August profile of Gingrich for Esquire, Richardson spent a significant amount of time talking with Marianne Gingrich, who was married to Newt for eighteen years. According to Richardson, Gingrich’s former wife “still believes in his politics…. supports the Tea Parties…. [and] still uses the name Marianne Gingrich instead of going back to Ginther, her maiden name.”

Marianne Gingrich told Richardson that Gingrich “was impressed easily by position, status, money. He grew up poor and always wanted to be somebody, to make a difference, to prove himself, you know. He has to be historic to justify his life."

Her take on Gingrich as president: "There's no way." According to Richardson, “She thinks he made a choice long ago between doing the right thing and getting rich, and when you make those choices, you foreclose other ones. ‘He could have been president. But when you try and change your history too much, and try and recolor it because you don't like the way it was or you want it to be different to prove something new ... you lose touch with who you really are. You lose your way.’"

However “lost” his “way” might be, there is one thing for certain: Gingrich’s enterprises are raking in the dough. Esquire’s Richardson reported that “One of Gingrich's former advisors told The Washington Post that he's ‘making more money than he ever thought possible, and doesn't have to tell everybody where it's coming from.’"

Last month, Salon’s Justin Elliott reported that American Solutions, a 527 group, gets “a significant chunk of its funding … from oil and gas and coal companies and wealthy real estate developers, with the rest raised in $100 and $200 increments from conservatives around the country, according to the group's IRS filings." While Gingrich doesn’t receive a salary from American Solutions, the organization “has spent millions on private jets to ferry him and his staff around the country and generally allow him to promote his books and movies.”

American Solutions’ funders include: Michael Morris, the CEO of this Ohio-based power giant, American Electric Power, who gave $100,000 last year; the Houston, Texas-based Plains Exploration and Production Co. gave $100,000; the Workforce Fairness Institute, described by Elliott as “A Washington, D.C.-based anti-union pressure group,” gave $150,000 to Gingrich's organization this cycle; Hubbard Broadcasting’s Stanley Hubbard, “a billionaire GOP donor from Minnesota,” gave Gingrich's group $100,000; Devon Energy, an Oklahoma-based oil and gas production company, gave $250,000; the St. Louis, Missouri based Arch Coal gave $100,000; and, Crow Holdings. “A privately held Dallas real estate investment firm,” now run by Harlan Crow, son of the late real estate investor Trammell Crow, gave $350,000.

ENDS

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