I have been thinking about this for some time regarding a Meet the Press appearance by Newt Gingrich from December 17, 2006. At the time, I was paying only mild attention, as I was busy grading final exams. However, you know how it is when you hear something that just catches you and won't let go. So, this morning I pulled down the transcript, and what I was hearing indeed did happen. Fortunately, it appears on a single page.
The Newt & Whomever Show
The first thing that hit me was that it seemed like Newt took over the place. If there was an interviewer in charge, it sure did not seem that way to me.
Anyway, here's the specific part that got to me.
MR. RUSSERT: What about Al Gore?
FMR. REP. GINGRICH: I—look, I’ve known Al Gore for many, many years. If he runs, he’ll be a serious contender, but I think he would be fourth on that list of plausible people. I actually think Barack Obama’s having as good as run as anyone could hope for, and he’s doing it by being positive, by being engaging, and by being above all the negative Washington-based, you know, this morning’s hotline nasty attack, you know, e-mail kind of stuff. And I think if he can sustain that, despite the best efforts of many of my good friends in the media to drag him down to mere issues, he could become very formidable.
MR. RUSSERT: Does he have enough experience to be president of the United States?
FMR. REP. GINGRICH: Well, Abraham Lincoln served two years in the U.S.
House, and seemed to do all right.
MR. RUSSERT: Will Hillary be a formidable candidate?
FMR. REP. GINGRICH: Hillary Clinton is one of the hardest working professionals I know. I mean, she is serious, she is married to the smartest politician in the country, they have an enormous network of fund-raising. No one has made any money betting against the Clintons since 1980.
MR. RUSSERT: So she could win?
FMR. REP. GINGRICH: Oh, of course she could win. And anybody who thinks she can’t win must have been living on a different planet, I mean this—I, I watch Bill and Hillary with deep professional admiration. It’s like, like watching a formidable opposition football team. You coming from Buffalo will appreciate this. You know, there are years when it’s good, and there are years when it’s bad, and they are formidable.
MR. RUSSERT: Let me show you the latest NBC poll about the Republicans. Rudy Giuliani leads the pack, 34 percent; John McCain, 29; Newt Gingrich at 10; the governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, at 8. And yet, when asked about favorable/unfavorable attitudes among all voters: favorable, Newt Gingrich, 28; unfavorable, 44. High negatives.
FMR. REP. GINGRICH: Absolutely. And look, I, I was a very aggressive Speaker of the House, I was very controversial. I had 121,000 negative ads run against me nationally. That’s—but I’m not running for president right now. I mean, what I’m doing is talking about ideas, and even, I think, most people agree that we could use a new generation of solutions—solutions on energy, solutions on education, solutions on national security, solutions on health. I founded the Center for Health Transformation as a non-partisan program that reaches out. American Solutions, the, the organization we’re creating, is going to reach out to every candidate in both parties. And I’m, I’m pretty happy to try to develop a very positive, very solution-oriented future for the country. And then we’ll see what happens over time.
MR. RUSSERT: But that’s a change in your demeanor. When you ran for speaker, you did call Democrats grotesque, dishonest, you said Jim Wright, the former speaker, was a crook. I mean, there’s a long history of very aggressive partisan rhetoric from Newt Gingrich. Do you regret that now?
FMR. REP. GINGRICH: No. Look, first of all, it was a different time. I mean, you had a 40-year monopoly of power in the House by the Democrats. You, you were in very different kind of environment. You didn’t have a war that, that should focus every American on our own survival, which we—we have a big war, of which Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan are sub-sets. But we have a much bigger threat to our very survival. We didn’t have the rise of China and India. I mean, I think we’re entering a period where, as Americans, we have to pull together in what I think will be the largest complex challenges since the Civil War. And I don’t think there’s any period since 1861 in which the nation has been—will be as tested as it’s going to be in the next 15 or 20 years.
And part of it, I think I’ve, I’ve reacted—again, we’re all creatures of, of the world we’ve lived in. I’m now a grandfather, I have two grandchildren who are five and seven, and I think you, you think differently about time when you think about your grandchildren’s future, and you think about, "What kind of country am I going to leave them?" And I also think the country’s at a point where it—where, where the negativity has gotten to the point, whether it was right or wrong in ‘94, it has now gotten to the point where it’s pathological. I mean, where you have consultants who, who don’t know how to write a positive commercial. That’s bad for the country. Maybe good for their candidate, it’s bad for the country.
MR. RUSSERT: You said you’re not running for president yet. In every article that assesses your presidential prospects, starting with today’s New York Times, your home state paper, the Atlanta Constitution, it always talks about your liabilities. I want to talk about that and give you a chance to respond.
O.K., so you see where I'm going here? There was no follow-up to the original question, which was whether Newt had any regrets about his use of aggessive partisan rhetoric, to which Newt responded "no."
Further, and this is what caught my attention, in the space of maybe a minute and a half, Newt draws upon an example from 160 years ago to support his point about Barak Obama's experience, but then, when his own conduct comes into question, things that happened about 15 years ago were "a different time."
That turnaround has bugged me for a year and a half. Why would a supposedly "hard-hitting" interviewer let such an answer go so easily. Newt just told him that he had no regrets about being a partisan hack, and left open the likelihood that he would continue to be a partisan hack. He justifies that response with a long-winded "everybody was doing it" excuse.
Let me be clear that I am NOT trying to rag on Tim Russert here. I rather think that Tim did a better than average job with Newt, because other interviewers wouldn't have even asked the question in the first place.
I don't spend a lot of time at Media Matters, but I did look for something about this at the time. I didn't find anything there about this incident. I'm thinking that it may not really be news that Newt manipulates another interview and gets away with it.
To me, it's especially important now, since Newt is out there stumping for more police state powers in the wake of the Supreme Court's decision on Habeas Corpus. He shouldn't get away with this stuff, and he shouldn't be allowed an interview turn into the "Newt and Whomever is given the task of Pitching the Softball" show. If he were seriously challenged on some of the crap he spews, he might just be exposed as the empty shirt propagandist that he really is.
I am sure that there will be people who think this is a lot of noise about nothing, and maybe it is. I posted recently about the use of the term "Democrat" rather than "Democratic" in my local TV news data during the primary election, and while I would say half the commenters got it, there was another group who didn't, and used what I consider to be a GOP talking point to justify it. To me, it is the steady drip of small incidents like this that immunize us to each succesive thing that should make us furious, but doesn't.
Anyway, that's all for today - and it isn't really that much to talk about, I guess. Nothing to see here, move along.
Now, stay tuned for the American Idol finalists.