Newt Gingrich knows about political comebacks. After all, he played a role in crafting a GOP-leaning agenda that then-President Bill Clinton grasped to cement his title as the “comeback kid” by winning reelection in 1996.
So, who better to ask about a comeback for President Joe Biden than the former House speaker and proponent of the Republicans’ “Contract With America” than the influential Gingrich?
While it’s hard to predict, Gingrich said in a recent interview that the Left’s capture of the Democratic Party and Biden’s willingness to go along with liberals indicates he can’t pull off a Clintonesque triangulation of the party.
Biden, said Gingrich, “is not in the same league as Clinton.” What’s more, he added, “Clinton was younger, more energetic, and, frankly, smarter.”
In bowing to a balanced budget and welfare reform, Clinton pushed liberals out of the way to accept policies popular with the public, something Biden appears unable to do, said Gingrich.
Gingrich recalled the staff wars in the 1990s White House and a time when Clinton told his team, “Look, if I do what you want, the liberals will be happy and I’ll get defeated. And if I want to get reelected, I have to find a way to work with Gingrich and Republicans, period.”
But Biden seems a captive of his staff and the Democratic Party’s hardened leftists.
“The current Democratic Party is much more left-wing, the ecosystem of money and PR and what have you is much more powerful, and their instinct will be to fight to the bitter end, whether or not Biden, as weak as he is and as confused as he is, is capable. Because he’d have to have a new staff, and he’d have to impose his will. Whether he’s capable of doing that, I have no idea,” added Gingrich in an interview conducted before House and Senate Democrats rammed through a watered-down tax and spending bill this month.
While he was speaker, the politically agile Gingrich worked in private with Clinton to nail down welfare reform and a balanced budget. The pair even had their eyes on Social Security and Medicare reform.
In a 2008 book about the deal-makers, Clinton chief of staff Erskine Bowles said Clinton “knew to do this he needed to work with Gingrich.”
But in today’s world, there is no White House outreach to Republicans, which could thwart Biden’s comeback plans should the GOP take control of the House in this year’s midterm elections.
We also asked Indiana Sen. Mike Braun if he thought a Biden comeback was possible.
He was just as blunt. “No, no, I think he’s been caught in a whirlwind of his own decline along with a progressive agenda that’s going to be a double doom for him politically,” Braun told us.
Plus, he added, “Every time you see him, he looks more and more feeble. I almost feel sorry for a guy put into a spot like that. You know, the agenda obviously is being dictated by [White House chief of staff] Ron Klain and the progressives, and he’s kind of the stooge for it.”
