Czars of the substanceless talking point. (Phelan Ebenhack & Chris Keane/Reuters)
There are several lessons that can be taken from
this Politico article on Newt Gingrich's "evolving" health care stances. You could use it as example of just how far right the Republican party has gone, when compared to their own stances in the Reagan and Clinton eras. You could use it to demonstrate, then, that any Republican of those past eras, no matter how batshit right they positioned themselves during the time, would stand no chance against the cultists of the party today. You could also use it as case study in how rhetoric and substance have little to do with each other, and how politicians can quite readily say one thing and do another, over and over, all the time, and to little ill effect.
The lesson that stands out most to me, however, is something that I've said repeatedly before: Newt Gingrich is a politician absolutely devoid of any true substance or ideals. His sole position is that he is smarter than you; his core convictions, on the other hand, can be flipped on and off in accordance to who is paying him, who he is trying to get to pay him, or who he needs votes from. To wit:
[While Romney signed a state mandate into law, Gingrich once went a step further and advocated a federal one.
Gingrich backed a federal mandate in the early 1990s as an alternative to the health care proposal Hillary Clinton pushed. Today, he describes himself as “completely opposed” to the federal mandate in the health reform law President Barack Obama signed last year. [...]
In 2000, he praised Don Berwick, whose recess appointment to head the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is expiring amid opposition from Senate Republicans.
As founder of the Center for Health Transformation, Gingrich also has supported using electronic health records in evidence-based medicine, a concept that some backers of the health law liken to “comparative effectiveness research.”
And he once wrote an op-ed praising a Wisconsin health system’s approach to end-of-life care — which later got embroiled in the charges that the Democrats’ health reform law would include “death panels.”
There's quite a bit more there, but the gist of it is that yes, the "conservative" position on healthcare was to mandate citizens buy private insurance, and Newt was one of the advocates of the idea right up until the point Republicans decided they didn't like that anymore, at which point he switched. His argument about his past support for the mandate now is that he simply didn't mean it: "At the time, it was designed to block Hillarycare," he says, which is a good reminder both that conservatives have been demonizing attempts to reform healthcare for 20 years, and that they never really wanted to solve the problem, period, only block others from solving it. That is his explanation, mind you. That's his go-to answer for why he supported a proposal to mandate every American give a pile of money to the private insurance company each year then, but not now.
Other shifting stances are less egregious, primarily because nobody really cares. Gingrich's support for electronic medical records was rather bland and uncontroversial up until the conservative talking point became how government would then comb those records in an attempt to Soylent Green people who had outlived their usefulness. But where Mitt Romney has a problem retaining, shall we say, clarity on his positions, it is Gingrich who has built up a lovely history of having whatever positions his clients or the politics of a situation required them to have, only to ditch them later.
Is Freddie Mac bad? Yes, except for the time they were paying him. Is end-of-life care a good thing? As the founder of the dubiously-named "Center for Health Transformation," yes. As politician seeking a return to the spotlight in a time constipated conservative conspiracies, no.
Watching Mitt and Newt battle it out? Now that will be an entertaining spectacle. The Republican field started out with a lovely dose of ideological craziness, but now it looks like it will end with a battle of the political pros, adopting and discarding new positions in a flurry to outdo each other. The good news is that the true ideologues (Bachmann, Santorum, Paul) are falling flat; the bad news, at least for Republicans, is that they are being replaced by the caucus of the professionally vapid.
And in any race to become leader and king of the professionally vapid, do not be quick to dismiss Newt Gingrich. Romney may have made a name for himself by stating that he believes whatever the current polls say is the best thing to believe, but Gingrich is more skilled at it. Romney gets tripped up by his past stances: Newt, on the other hand, simply attacks the questioner as a tool of the malevolent media, re-asserts his own genius, and moves on. He has been the same way for 20 years, and even if he does not win the eventual nomination, it will at least bring in the funding dollars when Newt returns to his professional historian roots.