Gingrich Is Damned by His Own Words

Tired as I am of reading about the megalomaniacal excesses of Newt Gingrich, the 1,271-page report issued by the House Select Committee on Ethics is too revealing to pass up.

The report, far more devastating than expected, provides damning evidence contradicting Gingrich’s recent attempts to eschew full responsibility for his transgressions. His name is on hundreds of documents, many handwritten by him, that explicitly expose the chicanery involved. This explains the betrayal felt by House Republicans who were forced to vote on his reelection as speaker before the report was issued and who contributed to the unprecedented 395-28 vote to reprimand him and fine him $300,000.

But the full report also contains a bizarre scrapbook of scribblings, doodlings, memos, flow charts and other evidence collected by the committee and written by Gingrich that suggest the man suffers mightily from delusions of grandeur. Lest we miss the point, in his doodling Gingrich represents himself as a stick figure at the center of all action. Anyone who watches TV is acquainted with Gingrich’s enormous self-admiration, but in this collection of his more personal notes, including 30-year plans for taking and holding power, we discover a truly troubled person.

How else to interpret the easel sheet from a talk he delivered to a small group of disciples on Dec. 18, 1992, when he wrote of himself: “Gingrich--primary mission, Advocate of civilization, definer of civilization, Teacher of the rules of civilization, arouser of those who fan civilization, organizer of the pro-civilization activists, leader (possibly) of the civilizing forces.”

I don’t know about you, but the prospect of a leader charging in at the head of “civilizing forces” recalls some chilly historical analogies. In this case, the natives to be civilized are those of us who reject Gingrich’s leadership, and at last count that represented 85% of Americans.

Gingrich is aware that we might react negatively to his hubris and is constantly reminding himself to soften his image. For example, in a 1994 memo outlining his plan to take over the speakership, Gingrich wrote that he needed to “allow expression of warm/smiling/softer side,” and “avoid ‘generalissimo’ style.” That helps explain why he occasionally pops up on cable TV petting zoo animals. But there is no way to mask the arrogance of one who assumes that he alone has mastered the essence of America as a civilization and is the sole trusted agent of its renewal.

This insistence on the unique wisdom of his own insights leads him to denigrate others in ways that are patently absurd. In his notes for remarks responding to Clinton’s first inaugural speech, Gingrich wrote that “Clinton tried to describe change as our friend in his inaugural but he couldn’t use the word ‘progress’ because it is banished from the liberal lexicon.” Huh?

The demonization of liberals, Democrats and their “welfare state,” which are held responsible for all of our nation’s problems and none of its achievements, is the consistent theme of Gingrich’s notes and stratagems. Liberal speakers were not allowed in his course on renewing American civilization because they might effectively puncture this notion.

Gingrich, the idea chef, stated, “I’ll be perfectly happy to debate a liberal outside the course on the course ideas but not in the course; this is a cooking course, this is about a philosophy and a formula for making America healthy again.” Which once again proves the Ethics Committee’s point that the widely televised course was not an educational enterprise but rather a partisan propaganda effort.

As Gingrich wrote in his course mission statement: “Our emphasis is on the Republican Party as the primary vehicle for renewing American civilization.” By contrast, the Democratic Party is derided in the course outline as the agent of “the decay and destruction” of American civilization. The vision is messianic and Gingrich, of course, is our savior. As he wrote in his vision statement: “What is at stake is literally our country, our American civilization, and the future of the human race.”

Despite all his machinations, Gingrich is a failed leader because his limited--nay, mean-spirited--vision of the country betrayed his obsessive ambition to lead it. American civilization is nothing if not complex, and while demagogues from time to time have managed to successfully caricature its spirit to suit their petty purposes, in the end they have been left exposed. So, too, the report of the House Select Committee on Ethics, “In the Matter of Rep. Newt Gingrich,” could well serve as the speaker’s political obituary.