Matt Yglesias

Limbaugh v. Gingrich

One thing to note about the latest spat between Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh is that I’ll bet you Newt doesn’t apologize. His conservative credentials aren’t really in doubt, and I think he’s shrewd enough to see how absurd the apologies other conservative politicians have offered make them look. Consequently, Newt—whose ideas are every bit as stupid as Rush’s—will come out of this possessing an entirely undeserved veneer of reasonableness.

Newt’s Fake Presidential Run

Newt Gingrich has been in the news an awful lot recently for someone who’s essentially a washed-up has-been. And I think you have to understand him floating the idea of a 2012 presidential run in that context. The idea of a campaign keeps him in the news which helps him with his fundraising. And I’m sure he’s enjoying a very comfortable life raking in some special interest bucks to make occasional TV appearance and launch fake “ideas” that amount to “tax cuts and giveaways to fossil fuel companies.” But as Jason Zengerle says “the odds that Newt runs for president in 2012 are as low as they were in 2008. Still, you’ve got to love the way he carefully constructs excuses he can use for when he ultimately decides not to toss his hat in the ring.”

The latest twist on this is that his consultations about whether or not to run include the delicate sensibilities of his grandchildren. But the whole thing is preposterous. Even back when Gingrich was a powerful officeholder he was hideously unpopular! Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign strategy in 1996 largely revolved around painting Bob Dole as similar to Newt Gingrich. It’s very easy to paint Newt Gingrich as similar to Newt Gingrich. They even look the same. They’ve got the same name. The same voting record. The main’s a Gingrich clone. No, wait, it’s the same guy!

The strange thing, from where I sit, is how much difficulty the GOP seems to be having in finding a white Catholic guy from the Midwest and deciding that he’s the big rising star. It’s clear from the election results that a large number of white midwestern Catholics are Republicans, and that’s the winning identity for a GOP national figure. Instead you get Bobby Jindal, the bizarre Michael Steele, and a procession of warmed-over southern evangelicals.

The Revolution Devours Its Children

In my post on the right’s civil war, I saw Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh as in the same camp—a group of hyper-orthodox “ultras” so blind to reality that they not only saw Bobby Jindal as correct in his extreme opposition to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, but actually wanted to pretend that Jindal’s speech last week was effective. On the other side were governors like Jon Huntsman and Charlie Crist and columnist David Brooks, all hoping to move the right in a more constructive direction. But Ali Frick reports that during his hour-long address to the Conservative Political Action Committee, Limbaugh went beyond that to condemn Newt Gingrich as too soft and too substantive. He argued that the right has “got to stamp out” all efforts at criticism on the merits:

Everybody asks me — and I’m sure it’s been a focal point of your convention — well, what do we do, as conservatives? What do we do? How do we overcome this? … One thing we can all do is stop assuming that the way to beat them is with better policy ideas. […]

Our own movement has members trying to throw Reagan out while the Democrats know they can’t accomplish what they want unless they appeal to Reagan voters. We have got to stamp this out within this movement because it will tear us apart. It will guarantee we lose elections.

Gingrich has managed to get himself branded as an innovative policy thinker. In reality, the agenda he’s offering is mostly just a rehash of tax cuts and “drill baby drill” with little sign of innovative thinking.

Of course it’s not clear why you would expect innovative thinking from a man who first entered the House of Representative in 1978, who first entered the leadership in 1989 and who managed to have an entire dramatic narrative arc with a rise and fall from power all 10-15 years ago. But the fact that among people who congressional Republicans take seriously, the debate is between a “reformer” like Gingrich and an opponent like Limbaugh merely goes to show that on Capitol Hill there’s really no debate at all. You’ve got those who like the current gimmicks and those who want slightly different, slicker gimmicks. Only in the states where it’s difficult to avoid grappling with reality to some extent do you see Republicans actually stepping outside the Gingrich-Limbaugh box.

Still, the rise of personal antagonism between the two key unofficial leaders of the congressional Republicans is interesting, especially given their partnership during the 1993-94 heyday of conservative rejectionism. At his trial, during the French Revolution, the Jacobin (former) leader Danton remarked that “like Saturn, the revolution devours its children” and I suppose that’s what we’re seeing here.

Ruffini: The Right Must Abandon Gimmicks and Addiction to the Past, Embrace Newt Gingrich…

If you want an idea of how completely brain-dead the conservative movement is, you desperately need to read this post from Patrick Ruffini.

It starts strong:

If you want to get a sense of how unserious and ungrounded most Americans think the Republican Party is, look no further than how conservatives elevate Joe the Plumber as a spokesman. The movement has become so gimmick-driven that Wurzelbacher will be a conservative hero long after people have forgotten what his legitimate policy beef with Obama was. [...]In these serious times, conservatives need to get serious and ditch the gimmicks and the self-referential credentializing and talk to the entire country. If the average apolitical American walked into CPAC or any movement conservative gathering would they feel like they learned something new or that we presented a vision compelling to them in their daily lives? Or would it all be talk of a President from 25 years ago and Adam Smith lapel pins?

And then it ends . . . um . . . not so strong:

This is why I love Newt’s emphasis on finding 80/20 issues and defining them in completely non-ideological terms.

That’s right; the man to bring the right-wing out of its addiction to gimmicks and icons of the past is—Newt Gingrich! I could see someone arguing, perhaps, that these gimmicks are clever gimmicks but the idea that they’re an alternative to gimmick-based politics is insane.

See also what Chris Orr says here.

The Right’s Civil War

Predictions of a “conservative crack-up” tend to be a dime a dozen in American politics, and it rarely happens. But this month, I really do get the sense that we’re witnessing the opening rounds in a significant battle inside the conservative movement. The difference, it seems to me, is that you’re increasingly seeing actual politicians and people who are very close to the political arena getting into the fray. That’s difference from a question of a handful of disaffected conservative intellectuals or an intramural squabble between pundits. Here, for example, Utah Governor Jon Huntsman basically calls the congressional GOP a “very narrow party of angry people”:

Q: In December you talked about people 40 and under having a very different view on the environment. Is there a similar generational gap on gay rights?

A: You hit on the two issues that I think carry more of a generational component than anything else. And I would liken it a bit to the transformation of the Tory Party in the UK…They went two or three election cycles without recognizing the issues that the younger citizens in the UK really felt strongly about. They were a very narrow party of angry people. And they started branching out through, maybe, taking a second look at the issues of the day, much like we’re going to have to do for the Republican Party, to reconnect with the youth, to reconnect with people of color, to reconnect with different geographies that we have lost.

On Huntsman’s side, roughly speaking, I think you can also see Governor Charlie Crist of Florida and New York Times columnist David Brooks along with his merry band of reformist conservative pundits. Anchoring the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got Bobby Jindal of Louisiana leading a weird band of stimulus rejectionists. He’s being backed up by the House GOP’s quasi-official leaders Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich both of whom have taken the reality-defying view that Jindal’s speech yesterday was secretly brilliant. Guys like Eric Cantor and Mike Pence in the House and Jim DeMint and Mitch McConnell in the Senate have, likewise, really been digging in their heels on the idea that blanket oppositionism is the way to go. Thus far, though, you haven’t seen anyone on the Hill really take up the reformist banner. There’s the Senate’s troika of northeastern moderates, of course, but I think everyone agrees that they’re not the future of the American right. For the infighting to really become significant in a policy sense, you’d need some members of the House and Senate to try to put what Crist and Huntsman are talking about into practice.

Newt: Clap Louder

I think the conservative political establishment’s embrace of Twitter is going to lead to a lot of great blog fodder. For example, Newt Gingrich ten minutes ago:

Bobby jindal got a good national launch out of last night. His story is compelling.his values appeal to most americans

Wonder what a bad launch would have looked like.

Newt Gingrich Leading Insane Conservative Effort to Close Deficit By Reducing Revenues

If this Washington Post article is to be believed, I think some prominent Washington figures may need a course in remedial math:

And Republicans have made it clear that they intend to try to shift the economic debate toward concern about the federal deficit.

They are also preparing to use the ballooning deficit to renew their push for additional tax cuts. Groups including the Club for Growth and GOP leaders such as former House speaker Gingrich say such cuts would do more to improve the economy than the spending plan would.

The reporters on the piece, Michael D. Shear and Paul Kane, might have observed that a deficit is, by definition, a shortfall between revenue and spending. Thus, it’s extremely difficult to envision circumstances under which “additional tax cuts” would prevent the deficit from ballooning. As this handy chart indicates, ballooning deficits are strongly correlated with either fighting World War II or else governance dominated by a desire for “additional tax cuts”:

Unfortunately, Bush-era macroeconomic management has managed to produce much worse outcomes than we saw during the Reagan years so in the extremely short-term it’s not possible to turn this trend around. In the medium-term, however, the administration is proposing to tackle ballooning deficits by making the deficit smaller—higher revenues and lower expenditures. One possible conservative approach to this would be to argue for more aggressive deficit targets, achieved by more stringent spending restraint. Another would be to argue for higher deficits, achieved by more tax cuts. The idea encapsulated in the Post article, that Gingrich and the Club for Growth have a plan for smaller deficits achieved by more tax cuts is ridiculous. Fortunately, neither Gingrich nor the Club have any formal legislative authority and there’s nothing stopping those Republicans who, unlike Gingrich, weren’t hounded out of office a decade ago, from governing with common sense.

The Gingrich Doctrine and the 21st Century

My colleague Satyam Khanna notes some of the broader context for the revelation that Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) is explicitly modeling his tactics on Newt Gingrich’s obstructionism in 1993-94.

In Washington, coverage of politics is dominated by politics rather than the policy consequences of politics. Thus, because of the outcome of the 1994 elections, Gingrich’s 93-94 tactics are held to have been a great success. But it’s important to be clear—those tactics included lockstep opposition to a Clinton economic program whose opponents set it would wreck the economy, but in fact laid the groundwork for years of prosperity. Gingrich’s success in blocking health care reform has been a small but persistent drag on the economy whose negative impact has compounded each and every year for the past fifteen years and has led to the preventable deaths of thousands and thousands of people at a minimum. Politics is politics and I understand that, but anyone who looks to that era as something to be emulated is dangerously indifferent to the real-world implications of congressional behavior.

Meanwhile, the political contexts of the two eras strike me as different in a number of ways. Bill Clinton’s 43 percent share of the popular vote in the 1992 election made it plausible to believe that the center of public opinion was amenable to the idea that the President’s agenda needed curtailing. What’s more, the Democrats gained zero Senate seats and actually lost nine House seats. Under the circumstances, you can see why conservative felt emboldened. And their political strategy had a clear logic to it—a large number of Democrats in congress were representing constituencies that had pretty consistently been trending to the right in presidential politics since the 1960s. With a Democrat in the White House, the chance existed for a spirit of feisty opposition to force the voters in such constituencies to align their congressional preferences with their presidential ones.

That’s simply not the case this year. Not only did Obama have a more decisive win (obviously the absence of a third-party candidate is important here) but the Democratic caucus is more compact and includes many fewer outlier members whose constituencies are dramatically more conservative than the national electorate that backed Obama in November.

Of course, nobody can know what the results of all this will be, and objective occurrences in the world will have a large impact completely independently of the quality of Rep. Cantor’s tactical decisionmaking. But it does seem worth noting that the Virginia Republican Party, of which Cantor is a part, has not been a huge font of electoral success in recent years. Instead, the right-wing of the VA party has, with incredible speed and efficiency, turned one of the most solidly Republican states in the country into one with a decidedly blueish hue. When Mark Warner was elected governor in 2001, it was seen as a stroke of political genius to be able to carry the state. Then came Tim Kaine in 2005 and Jim Webb in 2006. In 2008, Democrats went from a 3-8 split of the state’s House seats to a 6-5 split. Warner became the state’s second Democratic Senator in a race that nobody paid any attention to because the state party had essentially thrown the election months earlier by driving their potentially electable candidate out of the race and throwing the nomination to a guy everyone knew would get his ass kicked.

In other words, though Gingrichism was politically successful in the mid-1990s, the record of Cantorism in the 21st century has been much weaker.