(C) Common Dreams
This story was originally published by Common Dreams and is unaltered.
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Newt Gingrich on the Stump [1]
['Katharine Q. Seelye']
Date: 2012-01-03
Mr. Gingrich’s chief talent is the ability to frame an argument, or rather to reframe it. The centerpiece of his stump speech is his assertion that he balanced the federal budget four years in a row (he was in office for only two of those years), produced the biggest capital gains tax cut in history, overhauled the welfare system and created 11 million new jobs.
Mr. Gingrich’s tenure overlapped with that of President Bill Clinton and they needed each other — and the underlying robust economy — to bring about such sweeping accomplishments. But on the stump, Mr. Gingrich rarely shares the credit.
His recounting is a startling reintroduction of a man who last strutted on the public stage a dozen years ago, until he was deposed by his own party and driven from office. He neglects to mention that he spent the last several years atop a private empire of consultancies and think tanks, making speeches and writing books and earning millions of dollars. Nor does he address his years in the political wilderness. He more or less picks up where he left off, adding what seems by now an almost obsessive identification with Ronald Reagan, a paint-by-numbers prescription for the nation’s ills that ignores political realities, and dire warnings about the current occupant of the Oval Office.
He calls President Obama “a Saul Alinsky radical,” linking him with the founder of the modern community organizing movement and suggesting something vaguely anti-American about him. He hints at this in other ways too, often noting that like himself, Mr. Obama has studied history, “but unlike him, I’ve studied American history.”
Asked after a rally what he meant by that line, Mr. Gingrich shrugged it off. “It always gets a laugh,” he said. “People get it.”
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/us/politics/newt-gingrich-on-the-stump.html
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