By Mark Rhoads -
How does one explain the dueling commercials in Florida or the articles in elite conservative magazines that debate the question of the conservative bona fides of Newt Gingrich? Let me make a stab at it. Social psychologists use the term "congnitive dissonance" to describe the discomfort that people feel when they try to hold two competing or seemingly contradictory ideas in their brain at the same time. The idea that Newt Gingrich has been both a conservative and not a conservative at different times is something that causes congnitive dissonance for some people because there is strong anecdotal evidence on both sides of the debate, and it is hard to tell where the prepoonderance of evidence comes down.
For starters, what kind of conservative would have served as the southern regional director for the Nelson Rockefeller campaign in 1968? The answer is no kind at all and yet that was Newt's first foray into national politics when he was about age 25. Newt does not have the excuse that he was too young to know any better. I am only about four years younger than Newt and all of my conservative college pals knew how liberal Rocky was. So why didn't the supposed boy genius from Georgia know it? Because he was a liberal or never studied Rocky's record? Or was he just a political opportunist like Romney was in 1994?
In the last few days elite conservative writers such as Elliott Abrams in National Review and Bob Tyrrell in American Spetator have pointed out how many times Newt was erratic and attacked Reagan and his policies while Reagan was president. To reply, Newt has released a video of Nancy Reagan speaking to The Godlwater Institute in 1995 in which she says "Barry passed the torch to Ronnie and Ronnie passed the torch to Newt and his GOP colleagues in the House." Radio talk show host Mike Reagan, who is not Nancy's son but who was adopted by Reagan when he was married to his first wife Jane Wyman, has endorsed Newt. So what is going on here? Can everyone be right? In a way, yes and in other ways, no.
It is certainly the case that Newt longs to be seen as the principal heir to the legacy of Reagan for obvious reasons and he has been very showy about that in making grandiose claims as to the size of his role in helping Reagan at a time when Newt was not a leader but only a fairly noisy and relatively junior member of the House from 1981 to 1989. Then as now, Newt was similar to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in that he likes to show off sometimes in childish ways. It was House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Peoria) and other GOP leaders in the House that met on a freqnent basis with President Reagan during his time in office and not often junior members like Newt. But Newt likes to imply that his ideas for an "opportunity society" that Reagan talked about were taken from Newt's "Conservative Opportunity Caucus. In fact, Gov. Ronald Reagan of California first invented the term "The Creative Society" in 1967 has his answer to "The Great Society" of Lyndon Baines Johnson. The phrases "The Great Society" and "The New Frontier" were both coincidentally perhaps the titles of Fabian Socialist tracts in England mre than 100 years ago.
Even though Newt would love to be thought of as a spiritual heir to Reagan, Abrams and Tyrrell are correct that Newt was very careless in his anti-Reagan statements at a time when Reagan most needed solid support from Republicans in Congress. It is possible that Newt evolved in his political philsophy from liberal Republican in 1968 to much more conservative by the time of his election as Speaker in 1995. But I can personally bear witness to a time in late 2003 when Newt was shilling for the drug companies to create Medicare Part D. All I did was innocently ask him a question when he spoke to a conservative meeting about how much money the new program would add to the annaul deficit. He jumped all over me and gave me the same answer that Nancy Pelosi gave about Obamacare a few years later, we would just have to shut up and wait to see how much it would cost after George W. Bush was re-elected with the votes of senior citizens who wanted their drug prescriptions paid for by the government--he was no conservative on that day and no one put a gun to Newt's his head when he volunteered to make a national TV commercial with Nancy Pelosi to promote Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Change (Cick here to see video).
The conservative pro-Reagan Newt did show up long enough while he was in Congress but not yet Speaker to work to curb American trade with Communist nations. So some of Newt's conservative reputation is due to his efffort and record and much is due to his blowing his own horn as loudly as he can.
I mostly agree with the criticism of Abrams and Tyrrell about Newt's record as an erratic conservative and an erratic leader for the GOP. But I don't think any crtics from elite conservative magazines wil move any voters who like Newt. The reason is that the core Newt supporters closely resemble the core Ross Perot and George Wallace supporters. They hate elites so much that they even distrust conservative elite writers who might collaborate with the Establishment. They are more likely to be somewhat influenced by red-meat conservative pundits such as Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or Bill O'Reilly and so far those pundits are willing to go easy on Gingrich if he can slow down the pre-ordained Romney coronation.
