Basking in his big victory in the South Carolina primary on Saturday, Newt Gingrich modestly acknowledged that he was not the main reason for his win: “People completely misunderstand what is going on. It’s not that I’m a good debater, it’s just that I articulate the deeply held values of the American people.” Gingrich is right, of course; he does do a superb job of talking about Americans’ most deeply held values. The problem is that Gingrich has not practiced them in his professional life. He exemplifies what is wrong with Washington in both parties — professional politicians say all the right things, but they keep doing the wrong things. Gingrich talks incessantly about being a “Reagan conservative” who supports “limited government.” That sounds good but the reality is that he cashed $1.6 million worth of checks from Freddie Mac over an eight-year period and gave the government-backed mortgage giant rhetorical fodder to fend off reformers in Congress. The reformers, including President George W. Bush, backed off, and Freddie and Fannie Mae plowed forward — buying, packaging and reselling hundreds of billions of dollars worth of bad mortgages until the housing bubble burst in 2007. The Great Recession of 2008 followed, and the cost to taxpayers so far is $153 billion and counting. And now Gingrich expects to be taken seriously as a radical reformer of the Washington Establishment?
Then there is the matter of Gingrich’s attacks on profits earned by private equity firms like Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital. Gingrich blasted Romney for supposedly destroying jobs by disassembling corporations and selling them off piece-by-piece, then pocketing the profits. The former House speaker thus joined two unlikely Democratic bedfellows, Bill Lerach and Eliot Spitzer, in making corporate profit a political punching bag. Lerach used class-action lawsuits, and Spitzer, then the New York attorney general, used criminal investigations to force corporations to cough up hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements to put an end to the legal harassment. For Lerach, this was simply acting on his maxim that union pension fund officials and trial lawyers should get together to “sue the bastards” making the profits. For the excessively ambitious Spitzer, profitable firms represented irresistible targets for politically useful official intimidation.
By all accounts, Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital was very successful. The fact that portions of the half dozen or so deteriorating companies taken on by Bain shed jobs or even failed during restructuring is an inescapable reality of the free enterprise system and the attendant risks of private investment. But by hanging the “job killer” noose around Romney’s neck, Gingrich thus joins the ranks of plaintiffs’ attorneys, union operatives and other Democratic officials in playing to the fears of American voters and further eroding their confidence in the most successful economic model in the world’s history. Gingrich cannot be taken seriously as a champion of free enterprise.
