And speaking of Jackson, Gingrich didn’t help himself with Republicans by his comment to the Los Angeles Times. Defending his invitation to Jackson to sit in his box during the State of the Union address, the speaker said: ” I’m courting every American of any background.” Implicit was the notion that Gingrich’s critics objected to Jackson only because he’s black, rather than because he is a left-wing demagogue and sworn political foe of long standing.
The invitation seems to have been part of a courtship ritual on Gingrich’s part, a reciprocation for Jackson’s having hosted Gingrich on his television talk show, the only such venue Gingrich has appeared on since the election. And like the elaborate mating dances of certain spider families, this one, we think, has a foreordained outcome.
Jesse Jackson, you see, rejects Newt Gingrich and all his works. Just after the ’94 election, he said that Gingrich had “declared war on the poor.” But not to worry, Jackson added: “We survived George Wallace. We survived [segregationist senator] Bilbo. We’ll survive Newt Gingrich.” And at a Jackson-organized march in May 1995 dubbed “From Newt’s Nightmare to Dr. King’s Dream,” Jackson urged his followers to oppose the speaker’s “hateful, hurtful rhetoric” and then, with no hint of irony, warned the speaker that ” the hostility, the hurt, the scapegoating, the name-calling has to stop.” At last year’s Democratic convention, Jackson praised President Clinton as “our first line of defense against Newt Gingrich’s Contract on America, a right- wing assault on our elderly, our students, and our civil rights.”
What’s more, when Jackson called it “an insult” that Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich did not attend the funeral of commerce secretary Ron Brown, who do you suppose returned fire? Freshman Republican J. C. Watts, who decried “the politicization of this tragedy . . . by Mr. Jackson or anyone else.”
