GINGRICH SEES THE PROBLEMS BUT WHERE ARE THE SOLUTIONS?
I have written extensively on a man I consider one of the most brilliant conceptualists in the conservative movement, Newt Gingrich. There is little doubt that Newt drives both friends and enemies batty at times and, like all conceptualists is given to vagueness and a maddening circular logic when it comes to describing problems.
But those lefties unable to see any human being in more than one dimension fail to understand Gingrich, seeing him as some kind of partisan ogre rather than the political theorist and historian he can be when the mood strikes him. No doubt that when the partisan juices flow, Gingrich can and has been a lightening rod for liberal hate of conservatives. This was probably most true when Newt was a GOP backbencher in the early and mid 1980’s and Republicans in the House were nearly somnolent, allowing Democrats to run roughshod over them. Virtually accusing Speaker Tip O’Neil of being complicit in communist atrocities in Nicaragua did not endear him to the left and his subsequent role in Clinton’s impeachment while Speaker himself no doubt made him an inviting conservative punching bag for liberals.
That being said, there is no one who has a better grasp of “The Big Picture” among politicians right or left. But listening to Gingrich is dangerous because the threads of his logic are so clear and riff so easily from one to the next that he can hypnotize the listener with the power of his presentation. His grasp of history, his ability to weave a narrative that traverses the past, present, and future can leave one breathless - until you realize that his conceptualizations, while impeccably logical, don’t go anywhere. Ideas and observations have no purpose, no destination. He rarely offers solutions and when he does, they are high concept dissertations that are long on rhetoric but short on practical, real world applications.
One of his oldest friends, ex-Congressman Vin Weber:
“I never saw a lot of crackpot ideas. I saw a lot of good ideas. But there was difficulty in assessing a cost-benefit ratio. Even if every idea is good, resources are limited. With Newt, it didn’t matter if we were overreaching, we had to do everything.”
A staffer noted that “He would always get people started on a project or a vision, and we’re all slugging up the mountain to accomplish it. Newt’s nowhere to be found…He’s gone on to the next mountaintop.”
Gingrich is afflicted with the same disease that brought down another brilliant conceptualizer in politics Adlai Stevenson. Stevenson set liberals on fire with the suppleness and power of his intellect but his problems in taking the next step and putting those concepts into a framework that was politically actionable had the Kennedy’s dismissing Adlai as a lightweight. That feeling of disdain persisted right on up to the Cuban Missile Crisis when, after proposing the solution that inevitably became the basis of agreement between the Soviets and the US - removal of the Jupiter Missiles from Turkey and a “no-invasion” pledge for Cuba - Stevenson was lambasted by Bobby Kennedy as “an appeaser” and there was serious thought given to replacing him at the UN (Bobby calling anyone an appeaser was a joke dripping with irony considering his father was the world’s #1 appeaser of Hitler.).
In the end, Stevenson performed more than adequately at the UN and history has judged him correct with regard to the eventual concession on the Turkish missiles - a fact not revealed about the crisis until fairly recently due to the Kennedy’s fears that the luster would be lost on JFK’s “victory” over Khrushchev in the crisis if it became known we gave up the strategically relevant Jupiters for missiles in Cuba. There was also the immediate matter of the 1962 mid term elections where Kennedy did not wish it known he had folded on the Jupiters thus giving the Republicans a club to beat him with.
Gingrich and Stevenson are similar in that they could mesmerize an audience with their brilliance but when it came to offering solutions to the problems they so exquisitely described, they were already on to talking about the next problem that needed addressing. Such men do not make good executives which is why any talk of Newt in 2012 scares me. Still, this piece in The Hill today gives us some vintage Newt in a real tour d’horizon performance:
“The world is much more difficult than any American realizes, and it’s likely to get worse before it gets better,” Gingrich said at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor.
From an economic system in tatters to dangerous enemies abroad and a culture of corruption among politicians from coast to coast, Gingrich said President Obama faces truly mountainous tasks. The country, he said, will require “changes on a scale that is going to drive the establishment crazy.”
Gingrich voiced disappointment with the economic stimulus package moving through the Senate this week, saying any package should focus on boosting small businesses rather than on bailing out big corporations and banks.
“What they’re trying to do now is bail out the guys who failed, and I think that’s very dangerous,” Gingrich said, comparing the latest stimulus plan with bailout legislation signed by former President Bush. “That’s not change you can believe in. That’s more of the same.”
Facing increasingly well-educated generations of Indian and Chinese citizens, Gingrich also called for an overhaul in the nation’s education system. While high schoolers in India get four years of physics training, “this country is aggressively preparing for the 1956 Olympics,” Gingrich said.
Warning that foreign challenges are mounting just as quickly as domestic concerns, Gingrich pointed to Mexico, where violence fueled largely by drug cartels has exploded, and Pakistan, where terrorists roam freely in some parts of the country, as two of the nation’s top concerns.
“We are piling up risks, and one morning one of those risks is going to break loose,” he said.
Gingrich never concerns himself with solutions, believing that identifying the problems clearly and concisely is enough - at least for him. But if he wants to be a force in presidential politics, he is going to have to get used to the idea that most people prefer a candidate who can both articulate what’s wrong and propose common sense solutions to fix it. To date, Newt is more enamored with that “next mountaintop” rather than slogging along, doing the grunt work of pushing solutions forward.
It is perhaps less glamorous to labor to bring about change rather than simply announce that change is necessary as Obama is finding out. In the case of both men, their success or failure will depend on how each of them perceives the enormous challenges we are facing and goes beyond the atmospherics of electoral politics to enter the world of policy making where the power of one’s ideas count only as much as the viability of solutions those ideas bring forth.
So far, neither Obama or Gingrich has set forth any convincing solutions to the problems they both have so brilliantly defined.