The Romney campaign often enlists old House colleagues of Newt Gingrich to tell reporters that the former speaker is unqualified to be president. In recent weeks, Team Romney has hosted conference calls featuring Jim Talent, Peter King, Susan Molinari, and others to criticize Gingrich’s record and personality.
In Nevada, the Romney campaign held one such call featuring former Rep. Barbara Vucanovich, a Republican who served with Gingrich in the House from 1983 to 1987. “I did serve with the Speaker and he really used to be erratic and I think he probably still is,” Vucanovich said in a January 31 conference call. “One of my feelings with him is he was always so full of himself. I mean, humility was not in his makeup. And he was cocky and arrogant and of course didn’t listen to anybody.”
Later, other Romney supporters repeated Vucanovich’s assessment in their own critiques of Gingrich. Vucanovich “remains a very respected conservative leader in Nevada,” current Nevada Rep. Joe Heck said Friday. “And Congresswoman Vucanovich described the speaker as too arrogant and cocky to be our nominee. And to me that says a lot.” Heck is now calling for Gingrich to withdraw from the race.
What no one mentioned in the conference calls was that in 2005 Vucanovich, the first woman ever elected to Congress from Nevada, published a memoir, Barbara F. Vucanovich: From Nevada to Congress, and Back Again. She discussed Gingrich at several places in the book, and said a number of complimentary things about him.
“Newt Gingrich was the brightest of all the speakers with whom I served, and I knew him well,” Vucanovich wrote. “In my mind, he changed the direction of American politics and was instrumental in shaping American political thought for many years.”
Recalling standing with Gingrich on the Capitol steps to introduce the Contract with America, Vucanovich wrote, “My role that day was as a ‘spear carrier,’ one of the dozens of members who stood on the steps behind Newt Gingrich…I was privileged to have had a front-row seat at that revolution and to have been an active participant in that watershed moment in American political history.”
“Certainly the Contract with America agenda continues to resonate today [2005], attracting voters to the Republican Party and to conservatives issues throughout the American heartland,” Vucanovich continued. “Similarly, the Gingrich legacy of reform in the way the House did business continues to have a lasting influence on the institution. I am proud to have been part of it.”
In the memoir, Vucanovich also declined to criticize Gingrich on the ethics charges that have been a key element of Romney’s attacks. Vucanovich’s discussion of the ethics case is somewhat confused (she appears to think the case was about a book advance Gingrich accepted, and then rejected, after becoming speaker), but she still clearly thought Gingrich got a raw deal. “At the end of the investigation, the committee fined him an unbelievable $300,000,” Vucanovich wrote. “Newt’s fine made the Republican uncomfortable and the Democrats ecstatic. Despite what seemed like a hefty fine, Democrats argued that [then-Ethics Committee chairman Nancy Johnson] had not done enough to punish Gingrich. I thought the whole thing was an effort by the Democrats to bring Newt down.”
Even when Vucanovich criticized Gingrich in the book, her criticism contradicts her position today. In the conference call, Vucanovich said Gingrich was “cocky and arrogant and of course didn’t listen to anybody.” In the book, she said he listened to people and was unable to say no. “While he had a reputation in the press and outside of Congress as an inflexible ideologue, he was in reality easily pushed to compromise and unable to tell people no,” Vucanovich wrote. Many GOP lawmakers “learned that they could push Gingrich to get what they wanted, even when it was not in the best interests of the Republican Party, the House, or the nation.”
The bottom line on Gingrich, according to Vucanovich, is that whatever his missteps, “I gave a lot of the credit for the Republican successes to his leadership.”
Needless to say, the Romney team did not include Vucanovich’s praise of Gingrich on a conference call intended to criticize him. But the key part of all this is that Team Gingrich did not push back. You can rest assured that if the Gingrich campaign enlisted a surrogate to attack Romney, and that surrogate had in the past praised Romney, the Romney campaign, run by some of the country’s best opposition researchers, would have made sure reporters knew that, effectively neutralizing the attack. But Gingrich just doesn’t have the resources, or the money, or the inclination to fight that battle. At this point in the race, the Romney campaign knows its charges will go unanswered in any systematic way, even if there are good answers to be given.
