The World According to Oatney

Why we do not need President Gingrich

R. Emmett Tyrrell, who I greatly respect for his years of dynamite work at The American Spectator has written a piece explaining exactly why Newt Gingrich is unfit to be President. As Tyrell points out, Newt quite clearly confuses being a policy wonk with being learned or intellectual. I'm not questioning Newt's intellectual abilities here, but I do not find many of his ideas to be original.

Much of what he spearheaded in the 1994 Contract With America were actually ideas that conservatives at the grassroots had been championing for years. Congressional conservatives, such as former California Congressman Bob Dornan, had long championed the kind of spending moratoriums and welfare reforms that Newt championed in the Contract. Prior to the Revolution of '94, the people who advocated these things were called "extremists." As Tyrrell says:


When all the brag and bounce of Gingrich's intellectual pretense is anesthetized, and the corpus of his intellectual work is subjected to scholarly analysis, what do we see? An eternal graduate student at a mediocre state university has been playing with bits and pieces of the large ideas of Milton Friedman and like-minded political scientists, for instance Edward Banfield. Down the hall is Bill Clinton. The bits and pieces that he plays with are those of Ira Magaziner or Robert B. Reich. Gingrich is a more adventuresome graduate student.

Just as Bill Clinton did his best to convince all of us that character did not matter when he perjured himself before a Grand Jury, Gingrich attempts to make us believe that being twice-divorced and divorcing your wife on her deathbed for a younger staffer is something to be ignored. I know quite a few good conservatives that are ready to simply ignore these things-matters that should be important to any conservative.

I may be the only conservative that thinks this is a big deal, but this does matter. If a man can't keep his own house in order, he hardly qualifies to keep the federal house in check. If he leaves his wife on her deathbed, how do we know he will not leave America for dead also?

posted by Deacon David Oatney @ 7:40 AM