AMERICA:Newt Gingrich hopes his provocative Republican policies will triumph in the mid-term elections and win him the White House, writes LARA MARLOWE
THESE DAYS, the contest for leadership of the American right feels like a provocation sweepstakes. Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House, outdoes his rivals at stirring the pot of Islamophobia.
At the “Values Voter Summit” on September 18th, Gingrich received a standing ovation when he proposed “a federal law that says sharia law cannot be recognised by any court in the US”. US Muslims have not been clamouring for sharia, but Gingrich raises the spectre of “stealth jihadis” who “use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools” to convert America to Islam.
Gingrich grotesquely compares adversaries to Nazis. He describes Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, a mild- mannered consultant to the US government who wants to build an Islamic community centre in lower Manhattan, as a “radical Islamist” and says construction of the centre two blocks from Ground Zero is comparable to Nazis “putting up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington”.
Hypocrisy and glaring contradictions are hallmarks of Republican discourse. They constantly harp on deficit spending, after cheerleading for the $3 trillion war in Iraq. Gingrich claims Democrats are corrupt, but he resigned after the House ethics committee fined him $300,000 for laundering donations through charities.
Gingrich professes to defend “family values”. As recounted in Esquire magazine, he dumped his first wife, who had been his high school geometry teacher, when she was in hospital with uterine cancer. His second wife had just been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when Gingrich left her for his third wife, 23 years his junior. He then converted to Catholicism and tried to have the previous marriage annulled.
Remember: this man is a Republican hopeful for the 2012 presidential nomination. According to Esquire, the “philosopher king of the conservative movement” has this year collected more donations than Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin combined.
Gingrich calls President Barack Obama “the most radical president in history”. In his latest book, To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine, Gingrich says the Obama administration “represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did”.
In an interview with the National Review Online, Gingrich calls the conservative ideologue Dinesh D’Souza’s psycho-babble profile of Obama in Forbes magazine “a stunning insight” into Obama.
D’Souza claims Obama’s character was formed by his Kenyan father, who left the future president and his mother when Obama was two, and visited him only once, when Obama was 10.
According to D’Souza, the president “adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder . . . He must work to wring the neocolonialism out of America and the West . . .”
The Columbia Journalism Review called D’Souza’s article “a fact-twisting, error-laden piece of paranoia” and “the worst kind of smear journalism – a singularly disgusting work”.
This week, the GOP paid Gingrich the compliment of modelling its “Pledge to America”, a sort of party platform for the November midterm elections, on his 1994 “Contract With America”.
Gingrich is one of the few politicians who, like Palin, tries to bridge the gap between the traditional GOP and the populist Tea Party Movement. He praised “reform Republicans” for their promise to shrink government, balance the budget and “strengthen the family”.
To signal their disgust with Washington, the Republicans announced their “pledge” at a hardware store in Virginia, 10 miles outside the District of Columbia.
Lest his endorsement alienate his admirers in the Tea Party, Gingrich coupled his praise for the “pledge” with a positive review of the Tea Party’s earlier “Contract FROM America”, a play on the title of the document that made Gingrich famous.
Sixteen years have passed since that autumn morning when Gingrich gathered 300 Republicans on the Capitol steps to announce his “contract”. They won a landslide victory and seized the House from the Democrats for the first time in 40 years.
Gingrich calculated that obstructionism was the best policy – after all, if Republicans co-operated for the good of the country, then President Bill Clinton stood to gain most.
Under Gingrich’s leadership, Republicans refused to vote the budget and the government shut down twice in late 1995 and early 1996 – a premonition of what could happen if Republicans again take the House and refuse to fund President Barack Obama’s programmes.
On September 20th, Clinton warned that if the Tea Party triumphed in November, it would be “Newt Gingrich all over again”. But, he admitted, Gingrich’s 1994 “contract” was a “political science gift” which proved “that you could nationalise midterm elections”.
Clinton urged Democrats to come up with their own simple list of priorities “no more than five and no fewer than three” to counter Republican propaganda.