By Maggie Astor: Subscribe to Maggie's RSS feed
December 19, 2011 12:31 PM EST
Newt Gingrich has made a big deal in recent weeks about his commitment to running a "positive" campaign.
"We will not be running any negative advertising," he wrote in a letter to supporters last week. "We will ask our supporters not to contribute to any so-called super PAC that runs negative ads against any other Republican contender, and we will discourage ad hominem attacks on our fellow Republicans.
"Running a positive, solutions-based campaign," he continued, "is the only way to guarantee President Obama is not re-elected."
Indeed. But to hear those words coming out of Gingrich's mouth is more than a little incongruous.
This is a man who built his congressional career on ad hominem attacks. It is a man who has likened his opponents to Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini; who blamed the Columbine High School massacre on the Democrats; who once told a biographer that he planned to "define the opposition out of existence." It is he, more than anyone else, who is responsible for creating today's poisonously partisan atmosphere.
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Without negativity, ad hominem attacks and general political nastiness, Gingrich would not be a presidential candidate today. He would never have been speaker of the House. He might never have been elected to Congress at all.
If we wanted to split hairs, we could say that Gingrich's positivity pledge only specifically disavowed attacks on other Republicans, and that attacks on Democrats remain fair game. But that wouldn't square with his conclusion that the only way to defeat Barack Obama next November is by running "a positive, solutions-based campaign."
Gingrich may get through the primary season without attacking his Republican opponents. But if he gets the nomination, the idea that he would refrain from launching ad hominem attacks against Obama is laughable.
Looking for a Leader
Gingrich's viciousness is not just a matter of idle interest: it is very much indicative of his ability to be a good president.
His problem, which is abundantly clear from his record as speaker of the House but which many voters seem to have forgotten, is that his slash-and-burn style is much more suited for campaigning than for actually governing. He is an excellent rabble-rouser and idea generator, but a demonstrably poor leader.
"He's too erratic. He's too self-centered," U.S. Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., who worked under Gingrich in the House, told CNN. "The time that he was speaker, there was one crisis after another, and they were almost all self-inflicted."
It is amazing how readily Republicans forget the extent to which Gingrich discredited their party in the 1990s. He began on a brilliant note, ushering in the first Republican-controlled Congress in decades and promising sweeping reforms through the 1994 Contract with America, and it is a similar promise that he is running on now.
But why is it so difficult for Republicans to remember what happened next: the government shutdowns in 1995 and 1996 for which Gingrich was blamed infinitely more than President Bill Clinton, and the internal power struggle that led to his ouster as speaker in 1999?
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