Truth be known, many in the liberal media are belittling the Republican candidates because they don’t want any of them to be taken as a serious challenger to their man, Obama.
Readers of the Union Leader and Sunday News know that we don’t back candidates based on popularity polls or big-shot backers. We look for conservatives of courage and conviction who are independent-minded, grounded in their core beliefs about this nation and its people, and best equipped for the job.
We don’t have to agree with them on every issue. We would rather back someone with whom we may sometimes disagree than one who tells us what he thinks we want to hear.
Newt Gingrich is by no means the perfect candidate. But Republican primary voters too often make the mistake of preferring an unattainable ideal to the best candidate who is actually running. In this incredibly important election, that candidate is Newt Gingrich. He has the experience, the leadership qualities and the vision to lead this country in these trying times. He is worthy of your support on January 10.
The Union Leader’s readers and New Hampshire voters can decide whether Gingrich is the sort of consistent conservative the newspaper’s editorial writers have portrayed him to be. Last week, he came out for amnesty for undocumented residents. He recently called the House budget bill written by GOP “big thimker” Rep. Paul Ryan that converts Social Security and Medicare into voucher programs, and which passed the House with near-unanimous support from Republicans, “right-wing social engineering” — only to flip-flop several days later by giving the plan his full support. In 2008, he appeared with then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., in an ad supporting efforts to address climate change.
But in endorsing Gingrich, the newspaper ignored the signature event in Gingrich’s career as an elected official. He is the only speaker ever to be reprimanded by the House for ethics violations. The reprimand came in a 395 to 28 vote, on January 21, 1997, a few weeks after Gingrich had been reelected as speaker for a second term — and one day after his nemesis, Bill Clinton, was sworn in as president for his second term:
The House voted overwhelmingly yesterday to reprimand House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) and order him to pay an unprecedented $300,000 penalty, the first time in the House’s 208-year history it has disciplined a speaker for ethical wrongdoing…
Exactly one month before yesterday’s vote, Gingrich admitted that he brought discredit to the House and broke its rules by failing to ensure that financing for two projects would not violate federal tax law and by giving the House ethics committee false information.
Clinton won reelection against the Republican nominee, former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, in part by tying Dole to his wildly unpopular counterpart in the House, Speaker Gingrich.
Gingrich gained a higher public profile than most speakers do, primarily because of his role in shutting down the federal government in late 1995. It was said that Gingrich had taken this draconian step in a fit of pique because the White House had relegated him to a seat in the back of Air Force One on flights to and from Egypt for the funeral of Anwar Sadat.
The investigation into the speaker’s commercial activities outside Congress arose as he led his party’s political campaign to destroy the Clinton presidency by lodging one investigation after another at the president, First Lady Hillary Clinton, their friends, staffers and associates during the president’s first term.
Republican investigations into the Clinton’s political, private and professional affairs included Travelgate, which was based on the firing of employees in the White House travel office in May 1993; the suicide of Vince Foster in July 1993; the 1994 query into the Whitewater land deal that had occurred 14 years before Clinton was elected president; a probe starting in May 1994 into Paula Jones’ sexual harassment charges against Clinton when he was governor of Arkansas; a 1995 investigation into the fan club of the Clinton’s cat, Socks; and Filegate in June 1996, which arose around allegedly improper access to FBI files by the White House in 1993 and 1994. None of these investigations resulted in a criminal conviction of the Clintons or anyone employed at the White House or in the Clinton administration.
One year after Gingrich was reprimanded, the groundwork was laid for his highest-profile self-immolation. In late 1997, Republican operatives who called themselves “elves” received secret recordings that proved that the president had engaged in an extramarital affair with a junior White House staffer, Monica Lewinsky. In January 1998, the elves — the most famous of whom was the widely despised right-wing bomb-thrower Ann Coulter — helped lay a perjury trap for Clinton by feeding the secret tapes to the Jones lawyers (whom the elves had arranged to represent Jones) so that the president was asked about the affair under oath in a deposition in the Jones civil lawsuit.
In one of the most grandiose displays of chutzpah in modern political history, Speaker Gingrich green-lighted the impeachment of Clinton over the lie about an affair with a staffer while the speaker himself was engaged in an extramarital affair with a congressional staffer, Callista Bisek, that had been underway for three years.
As impeachment hearings proceeded, knowledge of the speaker’s affair spread through the GOP leadership and down among the rank and file Republican members of the House. As these Republicans awoke to the realization that Gingrich had put the party’s political gambit of impeaching Clinton, as well as its future prospects for majority control of the House, at risk, the clamor for his resignation built.
After Republicans lost five seats in the 1998 midterm elections, in large part because the Gingrich GOP’s efforts to remove the president from office were deeply unpopular, Gingrich finally agreed to resign.
“I’m willing to lead,” Gingrich said, in a statement announcing his resignation, “but I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals. My only fear would be that if I tried to stay, it would just overshadow whoever my successor is.” (His would-be successor, Louisiana Rep. Bob Livingston, was unseated before he was officially named as speaker after Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt threatened to make public revelations about Livingston’s apparently quite kinky sexual escapades.)
The Clinton impeachment proceeded after Gingrich left office, only to fail in the Senate in February 1999. That same month, the IRS released its finding on the underlying matter in Gingrich’s ethics probe, clearing him of the alleged wrongdoing he’d lied about to the House Ethics Committee. That summer, Gingrich’s affair with Bisek was revealed during the discovery phase of his divorce from his second wife, Marianne.
The Gingrich campaign website has provided pundits and liberal media types with talking points to counter assertions that Gingrich was a hypocrite during the impeachment. The Gingrich camp claims that there is no parallel, because Gingrich never lied about his affair under oath:
Opponents often try to delegitimize Newt Gingrich by pointing out that he had admitted to having an extramarital affair during the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. What these accusers are ignoring is that the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton were due to the fact that the president committed perjury in front of a sitting federal judge, which is a felony. As the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Newt felt that he had a duty to uphold the rule of law by pursuing impeachment. He stands by that decision today.
In typical Gingrichian fashion, the statement fails to note that, as speaker, Gingrich admitted to, and was reprimanded for, an equally serious crime: lying to Congress by making false statements to the House Ethics Committee.
The editorial writers at the Union Leader — like Beltway pundits and even the “liberal media” — are rigorous about categorizing Gingrich’s decision to conduct an affair during the Clinton impeachment as a “personal matter,” and therefore off limits in evaluating his professional career.
The Union Leader endorsement may give the Gingrich campaign a boost that puts him in the first or second slot when New Hampshire voters go to the polls roughly six weeks from now. And the establishment’s hands-off approach to his “personal” issues — as well as the weakness of the putative frontrunner Mitt Romney — may help Gingrich squeak through the primaries and win the Republican nomination next August. But in the general election campaign, it’s unlikely that independent voters, and particularly women of all political stripes, will ignore Gingrich’s messy professional and personal record when it comes time to decide between him and Pres. Obama in November 2012.
