Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich yesterday compared the candidacy of former Gov. Mitt Romney, R-Mass., to that of the moderate (or liberal) Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, R-NY, who ran for president during every presidential cycle of the 1960s.
“Romney has a huge problem,” Gingrich said on CNN’s State of the Union, in that “he is a Massachusetts moderate Republican.” Gingrich defined it as “the Nelson Rockefeller problem” of there being “a natural ceiling” for such moderates in a Republican primary. “And if you go back and look at the race last time [Rockefeller ran], he ran into a natural ceiling.”
Gingrich should have the perspective to make Romney-Rockefeller comparisons. He reportedly worked on that last Rockefeller presidential campaign in 1968 as “southern regional director.” The late Robert Novak memorialized Gingrich as a “Rockefeller Republican” in his memoir, The Prince of Darkness.
Novak apparently knew Gingrich during that campaign, but after serving eight years in the House during the 1980s, “Gingrich was not the Rockefeller Republican I had met in the late sixties.” Novak added that Gingrich “had adopted . . . the maxim that the business of the opposition was to oppose,” a plan Gingrich pursued with ethics charges against the incumbent Democratic Speaker of the House. When that congressman had to resign, the success propelled Gingrich up the Republican leadership ranks.
Gingrich’s conversion away from Rockefeller moderation, Novak recalls in his book, did not last long into his term as Speaker of the House after the Republican wave election of 1994.
“Gingrich never seemed that comfortable as a right-wing radical,” Novak wrote – an odd line to read, given Gingrich’s recent book about President Obama’s “secular-socialist machine” – adding that Gingrich “was regressing to his Rockefeller Republican roots after less than seven months as Speaker” and “abandoning the Republican base.”
The result, Novak wrote, was “a do-nothing Republican congress, as far as landmark conservative legislation was concerned.”
