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A couple of days ago, Newt Gingrich said something that got Mitt Romney mad...something about Mitt's failure while in office to create jobs, and he touted himself as having created millions of them when he was speaker of the house and during the Reagan years when he was an up and coming congressman from Georgia. Romney responded with indignation, not just attributing the job creation during Gingrich's tenure to Reaganomics, or the supply-side economics doctrine to which he himself ascribes, but also declaiming righteously that government doesn't create jobs anyway. Business does. I guess he forgot that he has been touting his business credentials as the basis on which he should become the job creator in chief, because he knows how to create jobs and he will do so as president if he is elected. Apparently he failed to see that if Gingrich couldn't create jobs while a member of the government because government doesn't create jobs, the same will go for Romney if he gets to be in government again. Mind you, in Romney's case, he is probably correct as his record as governor of Massachusetts demonstrates. Romney probably can't create jobs from within government--he never has--and frankly, his record indicates that he probably can't do so even if he goes back to Bain Capital; there is debate as to whether he created any significant number of jobs in the balance over and above the ones he destroyedafter he and his fellow equity holders took their profits. It's too bad we have given up the medieval practice of naming people for their cardinal traits. We could call Gingrich Newt the grandiose, and Romney could be Mitt the apostate.
Then there was the announcement that Newt Gingrich's second wife is going to be interviewed on television about her life with The Speaker. In previews, she is heard to say that when Newt confessed that he had taken up with his present wife, Callista, he proposed that they stay married, but that he be permitted to keep Callista as his mistress: a sort of open marriage. Newt's response when he heard about the interview was to have his daughters write to ABC to protest the interview on the ground that it was a family matter and is not appropriate for public airing, and ordinarily I would agree. When a person falters in his commitment to his values, it is personal...the first time. But with the 84 charges against him when he was before the House Ethics Committee-- he only avoided being publicly tried for them by pleading guilty to only one that he now claims was minor while he never mentions what the other 83 were about-- and the fact that he did the same thing to his first wife that he did to his second, these moral lapses, which he chooses to characterize as "mistakes," are more like a modus operandi than peccadillos, and on that basis, I think his Republican supporters should know the truth. Notably, his two daughters seem headed for political careers as they not only wrote the letter, they got on television and earnestly informed America that there was never any such proposal of an open marriage, as if they could possibly know what their father said to their mother at what I must assume he would have wanted to be a private moment. As willing as they are to follow in their father's footsteps...in every respect...they will go far when they run for office, at least until their apparent moral flexibility catches up with them.
And then there's the way in which Newt couched his condemnation of the whole interview thing. He said "we" knew that they would make false charges against "us." "We" knew that they would engage in negative campaigning and unscrupulous tactics, but "we" felt that the country was worth it. That's the same country that he said at the beginning of his campaign he loved so much and was so devoted to that he forgot himself and made these mistakes that are now catching up with him. It was overwork on all our behalves that made amoral ...that and patriotism...not his lack of character, all of which left me wondering.Who are the other members of this "we" he keeps talking about? I hope he's not including me when he says that.
Your friend,
Mike
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