DES MOINES — The ongoing fight between Republican presidential frontrunners Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney has turned to a long-festering dispute among Republicans: President George H.W. Bush’s 1990 decision to break his “read my lips” pledge not to raise taxes. (For more background, see my post Read-my-lips feud returns in Romney-Gingrich fight.)
Former Bush White House chief of staff John Sununu, who engineered the 1990 budget deal in which Bush bowed to Democratic pressure and broke the tax promise, is a supporter of Mitt Romney. Sununu has been criticizing Gingrich for not supporting the 1990 deal, which is remembered by many Republicans as a disaster and a major reason Bush did not win re-election in 1992.
I asked Gingrich about Sununu’s charges during an event here in Des Moines on Saturday. Gingrich recalled that he warned the Bush White House not to make the deal. “I kept telling them, this is a trap, you should not raise taxes,” Gingrich told me. “And they were clever.”
I said it seemed that Sununu is still mad at Gingrich. “Oh, I think he is,” Gingrich responded. “Because it all blew up. It turns out they shouldn’t have broken their word and raised taxes. I think if you’re the engineer of a policy that blows up, you have to blame somebody other than yourself.”
“I just think to pick a fight over tax increases and breaking your word and flip-flopping, and to have [Sununu] as a spokesman for that particular campaign is an unusual choice,” Gingrich said. “But it’s their choice.”
Gingrich also referred me to former George H.W. Bush White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater’s memoir, Call the Briefing. In it, Fitzwater recalls the president’s fateful decision to break his word:
As it turned out, one of the few people on the Republican team who understood this trap was Congressman Newt Gingrich. After the deal was reached, and the congressional leadership gathered in the Cabinet Room before going to the Rose Garden for the formal announcement, the president asked if everyone in the room was going to support the agreement. There were no voices of dissent. But when the group got up to leave for the Rose Garden, Congressman Gingrich went another direction and did not stay for the ceremony. Newt had earlier recommended a different course of action: Abandon the budget negotiations, keep the tax pledge, insist that Congress cut spending, and make a political fight out of it. It’s clear now that we should have followed his advice.
Now, Team Romney is using the mastermind of what Fitzwater and others remember as a giant mistake to criticize Gingrich for having opposed that giant mistake. How far will Romney push the point?
