Tell me again why this guy’s popularity rate is over 40%? The most chilling section of this column “Those of us who have lived in once-great decaying polities recognize the types. Jim Callaghan, prime minister at 10 Downing Street in the Seventies, told a friend of mine that he saw his job as managing Britain’s decline as gracefully as possible.”
by Mark Steyn
Had I been asked to deliver the State of the Union address, it would not have delayed your dinner plans:
“The State of our Union is broke, heading for bankrupt, and total collapse shortly thereafter. Thank you and goodnight! You’ve been a terrific crowd!”
I gather that Americans prefer something a little more upbeat, so one would not begrudge a speechwriter fluffing it up by holding out at least the possibility of some change of fortune, however remote. Instead, President Obama assured us at great length that nothing is going to change, not now, not never. Indeed the Union’s state — its unprecedented world-record brokeness — was not even mentioned. If, as I was, you happened to be stuck at Gate 27 at one of the many U.S. airports laboring under the misapprehension that pumping CNN at you all evening long somehow adds to the gaiety of flight delays, you would have watched an address that gave no indication its speaker was even aware that the parlous state of our finances is an existential threat not only to the nation but to global stability. The message was, oh, sure, unemployment’s still a little higher than it should be, and student loans are kind of expensive, and the housing market’s pretty flat, but it’s nothing that a little government “investment” in green jobs and rural broadband and retraining programs can’t fix. In other words, more of the unaffordable same.
The president certainly had facts and figures at his disposal. He boasted that his regulatory reforms “will save business and citizens more than $10 billion over the next five years.” Wow. Ten billion smackeroos! That’s some savings — and in a mere half a decade! Why, it’s equivalent to what the government of the United States borrows every 53 hours. So by midnight on Thursday Obama had already re-borrowed all those hard-fought savings from 2017. “In the last 22 months,” said the president, “businesses have created more than three million jobs.” Impressive. But 125,000 new foreign workers arrive every month (officially). So we would have to have created 2,750,000 jobs in that period just to stand still.
Fortunately, most of the items in Obama’s interminable speech will never happen, any more than the federally funded bicycling helmets or whatever fancies found their way onto Bill Clinton’s extravagant shopping lists in the Nineties. At the time, the excuse for Clinton’s mountain of legislative molehills was that all the great battles had been won, and, in the absence of a menacing Russian bear, what else did a president have to focus on except criminalizing toilet tanks over 1.6 gallons. President Obama does not enjoy the same dispensation, and any historians stumbling upon a surviving DVD while sifting through the ruins of our civilization will marvel at how his accumulation of delusional trivialities was apparently taken seriously by the assembled political class.
An honest leader would feel he owed it to the citizenry to impress upon them one central truth — that we can’t have any new programs because we’ve spent all the money. It’s gone. The cupboard is bare. What’s Obama’s plan to restock it? “Right now, Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary,” the president told us. “Asking a billionaire to pay at least as much as his secretary in taxes? Most Americans would call that common sense.”
But why stop there? Americans need affordable health care and affordable master’s degrees in Climate Change and Social Justice Studies, so why not take everything that Warren Buffett’s got? After all, if you confiscated the total wealth of the Forbes 400 richest Americans it would come to $1.5 trillion.
Which is just a wee bit less than the federal shortfall in just one year of Obama-sized budgets. 2011 deficit: $1.56 trillion. But maybe for 2012 a whole new Forbes 400 of Saudi princes and Russian oligarchs will emigrate to the Hamptons and Malibu and keep the whole class-warfare thing going for a couple more years.
[…..]
Newt, meanwhile, has committed himself to a lunar colony by the end of his second term, and, while pandering to an audience on Florida’s “Space Coast,” added that, as soon as there were 13,000 American settlers on the moon, they could apply for statehood. Ah, the old frontier spirit: I hear Laura Ingalls Wilder is already working on Little House in the Crater.
Maybe Newt’s on to something. Except for the statehood part. One day, when America gets the old foreclosure notice in the mail, wouldn’t it be nice to close up the entire joint, put the keys in an envelope, slide it under the door of the First National Bank of Shanghai, and jet off on Newt’s Starship Government-Sponsored Enterprise?
There are times for dreaming big dreams, and there are times to wake up. This country will not be going to the moon, any more than the British or French do. Because, in decline, the horizons shrivel. The only thing that’s going to be on the moon is the debt ceiling. Before we can make any more giant leaps for mankind, we have to make one small, dull, prosaic, earthbound step here at home — and stop. Stop the massive expansion of micro-regulatory government, and then reverse it. Obama has vowed to press on. If Romney and Gingrich can’t get serious about it, he’ll get his way.
This is a very interesting article that explores and explains the dynamics of the fight between the professional Republican ‘establishment’ and the voters at large over the nomination process in general and Newt Gingrich in particular, it really gets to the basis of many of our discussions on the blog over this topic. Please click on their link to read it:
By Julie Hirschfeld Davis – Jan 26, 2012 12:00 AM ET
Two days after Newt Gingrich defeated Mitt Romney in the South Carolinapresidential primary one of Romney’s big-name backers offered a grim prediction for his fellow Republicans.
“The possibility of Newt Gingrich being our nominee against Barack Obama I think is essentially handing the election over to Obama,” former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty told reporters on a Jan. 23 conference call. “I think that’s shared by a lot of folks in the Republican Party.”
Pawlenty’s comments echoed those being uttered publicly and behind the scenes by elected Republicans, party activists, fundraisers and pundits, who represent a portion of the party establishment — a “stop-Newt” caucus — populated largely by people who have known the former U.S. House speaker for decades.
The question is: Can they?
For two decades, the Republican Party has seen an erosion of its traditional, top-down hierarchy, a decline aided by Gingrich himself in 1990 when he led a House revolt against a budget agreement negotiated by President George H.W. Bush that raised taxes. The rise of the anti-tax Tea Party wing in 2009 splintered the internal levers of power further, making it even harder to impose a choice on the rank-and file.
“There really is no Republican establishment left that can control anything,” said Matthew Dowd, a onetime aide to President George W. Bush and now a Bloomberg Television contributor. “Some try to act like they are in charge, but the fraternity is now running the campus.”
South Carolina Dynamics
Those dynamics were on display in South Carolina. Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, lost by 12 percentage points even after campaigning throughout the state with Governor Nikki Haley and just a day after receiving the endorsement of Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association. Haley, who rose to power with Tea Party backing, didn’t deliver either her state or its grassroots activists.
Meanwhile, Gingrich’s campaign gained momentum after Sarah Palin, the former Alaska governor who also has support from the Tea Party faction, said she’d vote for Gingrich in South Carolina if only to extend the length of the primary.
Similar signs of an insurgence came to light in the 2010 midterm elections, when Nevada voters tapped Sharron Angle — a Tea Party-endorsed politician opposed by many of the state’s prominent Republicans — to challenge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. And Delaware Republicans chose Christine O’Donnell over former governor and nine-term U.S. House Representative Mike Castle to seek an open Senate seat. Both Angle and O’Donnell lost.
‘Voters in Charge’
“The voters are now in charge, and Republican leaders need to come to terms with that,” Dowd said. “The media needs to drop the myth that there is a Republican establishment capable of orchestrating anything more than a one-float GOP parade.”
Romney’s campaign, backed by well-known party strategists and fundraisers, has kept up a steady rollout of endorsement announcements from Republican elected leaders that demonstrate his broad support among the insiders. As of Jan. 20, he had the nods of five governors, 14 senators and 59 U.S. House members. That compares with two governors and a dozen congressmen who have endorsed Gingrich, according to Democracy in Action, a political web site that tracks endorsements.
‘Terrified About Newt’
“There are a lot of major players in the Republican Party who are terrified about Newt,” said Gary Gerstle, a specialist on social and political movements a Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. “At a more conventional moment in American politics, the establishment would count for a lot more, but this is not a conventional moment. There are now big segments of the Republican Party that will not bow down to the establishment.”
Gingrich — who served 20 years in Congress, four of them as speaker, and then began a lucrative career in Washington consulting on federal policy — has been working to turn party leaders’ angst about his candidacy to his advantage, portraying himself as a candidate feared by the ruling class.
In a Jan. 24 message to supporters, he wrote, “The establishment is right to be worried about a Gingrich nomination because a Gingrich nomination means that we’re going to change things.”
The Romney-Gingrich face-off is bringing the simmering power struggle between the Republican grassroots and the party establishment to the fore, said Richard Viguerie, a veteran Republican direct-mail strategist and the chairman of ConservativeHQ.com.
Internal Power Struggle
“There is a war going on here between the grassroots and the establishment,” said Viguerie, who is backing former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. “People in the grassroots see the Republican establishment as part of the problem, not part of the solution, and Gingrich has the ability to go over the heads of the Republican leaders.”
At the root of the concern about Gingrich is whether he will be able to appeal to the broader U.S. electorate. Polls indicate that he has high unfavorability ratings and wouldn’t fare well in a head-to-head matchup against Obama. A January Gallup study found that all national political figures are viewed negatively. Still, “Americans have become more intensely negative in their evaluations of Newt Gingrich — who now has the lowest score overall,” the study concluded.
Independent Voter Turn-off
Gingrich’s branding of Obama as a “food stamp president,” for example, may not play well with independent voters, whom a Republican nominee would have to win over to have a chance of ousting the president.
Some prominent Republicans say there’s not yet enough of a consensus that Gingrich is unelectable to give rise to a concerted effort among party operatives to thwart his ascent.
“I haven’t seen that there’s an all-hands-on-deck movement to try to block any candidate — Newt or anyone else,” said Frank Donatelli, the chairman of GOPAC, a training organization for state and local Republican candidates once headed by Gingrich, and a former top party official.
The last time there was such an effort was in 1996, he added, after Pat Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary and prominent Republicans quickly coalesced around Bob Dole, who ultimately claimed the nomination.
“I haven’t heard that kind of alarm emanating about Newt,” Donatelli said.
Former Pennsylvania Congressman Bob Walker, a senior adviser to Gingrich’s campaign, said each time Romney rolls out a new endorsement or dispatches a one-time colleague to criticize Gingrich’s record, it bolsters the former speaker’s argument to voters that he’s their ally against a party machine that doesn’t care about them.
“It took them a little bit of time to realize that Newt Gingrich is capable of beating Obama, but now, I don’t think that they’re going to listen to party bosses anymore,” Walker said. “Newt is basically channeling the people’s anger.”
Ronald Reagan’s eldest son Mike Reagan has issued a statement lambasting Mitt Romney and his supporters for claims that Romney’s Republican presidential rival Newt Gingrich was a strong critic of President Reagan. Reagan says such claims are false. Even Rush Limbaugh, shocked by the Romney claims, chimed on his Thursday radio broadcast to say “This is obviously a coordinated attack to take Newt out here in Florida.” Rush slammed the Romney-backed smear campaign against Newt. “That kind of stuff is why people hate Romney so much,” Limbaugh said. Limbaugh added that Newt has always been a conservative from his early days in national talk radio in the 1980s. “He was perhaps the premier defender of Ronald Reagan,” Limbaugh said.
“I am deeply disturbed that supporters of Mitt Romney are claiming that Newt Gingrich is not a true Reaganite and are even claiming that Newt was a strong critic of my father.“Recently I endorsed Newt Gingrich for president because I believe that Newt is the only Republican candidate who has both consistently backed the conservative policies that my father championed and the only Republican that will continue to implement his vision.“It surprises me that Mitt Romney and his supporters would raise this issue — when Mitt by his own admission voted for Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale who opposed my father, and later supported liberal Democrat Paul Tsongas for president.“As governor of Massachusetts, Romney’s achievement was the most socialistic healthcare plan in the nation up until that time.“Say what you want about Newt Gingrich but when he was Speaker of the House he surrounded himself with Reagan conservatives and implemented a Ronald Reagan program of low taxes and restrained federal spending.“Newt’s conservative program created a huge economic boom and balanced the budget for the first time in more than a generation.”Mike Reagan concluded: “I would take Newt Gingrich’s record any day over Mitt Romney’s.”And Nancy Reagan, Reagan’s wife, has stressed Gingrich’s close relationship with her late husband.In a 1995 speech at a dinner honoring Ronald Reagan, Nancy said: “The dramatic movement of 1995 is an outgrowth of a much earlier crusade that goes back half a century. Barry Goldwater handed the torch to Ronnie, and in turn Ronnie turned that torch over to Newt and the Republican members of Congress to keep that dream alive.”
Tonight’s debate is sponsored by CNN, CNN en Español, The Hispanic Leadership Network and The Republican Party of Florida. It will be held at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.
Participating: Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich Rick Santorum, Ron Paul
We’ve heard it over and over during every primary debate since Iowa, and we were also treated to a very nebulous sounding warning from Nancy Pelosi of all people, about how everyone is prepared to spoil the Gingrich Candidacy if he doesn’t stop winning. Newt Gingrich resigned in disgrace seems to be the only words Mitt Romney is capable of saying with clarity. Just for the purposes of putting things in their proper perspective, I’m going to give you the spoiler first here. Following is the video of CNN’s final report on the Gingrich ethics investigation, so pay close attention.
As it turns out, this entire episode may have done something positive for American Politics after all. It has highlighted what is wrong with American main stream media, it has highlighted what is wrong with the Republican Party, and what is wrong with the Democrat Party. It has served as a character builder for the man that I hope will be the next President of the United States. It has shown us, who live here in the reality of the political right, the true cost of not fighting back.
From the beginning of the assault upon Speaker Gingrich, it was painfully evident that the facts, or actual evidence were of no importance to anybody. Even when those of us on the right asked for some supporting evidence of actual wrong doing, we were told that Speaker Gingrich had to go because, “the seriousness of the charges were too ominous by themselves to ignore, even if untrue.” The entire concept of innocent until proven guilty was thrown out the window in favor of the more expedient ends justifies the means for the purposes of reclaiming political power for the Democrat Party.
At the center of the controversy was a course Gingrich taught from 1993 to 1995 at two small Georgia colleges. The wide-ranging class, called “Renewing American Civilization,” was conceived by Gingrich and financed by a tax-exempt organization called the Progress and Freedom Foundation. Gingrich maintained that the course was a legitimate educational enterprise; his critics contended that it had little to do with learning and was in fact a political exercise in which Gingrich abused a tax-exempt foundation to spread his own partisan message.
The Gingrich case was driven in significant part by a man named Ben Jones. An actor and recovered alcoholic who became famous for playing the dim-witted Cooter in the popular 1980s TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, Jones ran for Congress as a Democrat from Georgia in 1988. He won and served two terms. He lost his bid for re-election after re-districting in 1992, and tried again with a run against Gingrich in 1994. Jones lost decisively, and after that, it is fair to say he became obsessed with bringing Gingrich down.
Two days before Election Day 1994, with defeat in sight, Jones hand-delivered a complaint to the House ethics committee (the complaint was printed on “Ben Jones for Congress” stationery). Jones asked the committee to investigate the college course, alleging that Gingrich “fabricated a ‘college course’ intended, in fact, to meet certain political, not educational, objectives.” Three weeks later, Jones sent the committee 450 pages of supporting documents obtained through the Georgia Open Records Act.
Emphasis mine.
So, what we had, in actuality, was a complaint entirely fabricated by a person who had been ousted from congress by redistricting and denied his return through electoral defeat at the hands of the subject of his complaint. Is it just me, or is there some ulterior motive which seems possible here? The complaint was taken up by one of the most partisan hacks to ever embarrass our House simply by his presence there, David Bonior (D) Michigan. Nancy Pelosi, the new minority leader of the Democrats in the House, who by the way had noticed that she stood to be Speaker should the Republicans lose control of the House was also on the ethics committee at the time. I’m sure that there was no conflict of interest there.
It didn’t take long for the media to jump at the chance to take down a leader of the Republican Party. Undaunted by their complete lack of factual detail about the story on which they were reporting, they simply fabricated their own material to fit the template that they wished to report. Remember that Speaker Gingrich copped to having failed to seek adequate tax advice before teaching his college course, and for not providing adequate detail about the subject matter of that course. (The fact is that Speaker Gingrich had in fact hired two tax attorneys and provided the ethics committee with a complete video recording of each class session spanning the entire time period of the courses taught plus all appropriate course text and outlines.) His guilt plea was simply a man tired of the nonsense wishing to get back to the job his Congressional District had hired him to do.
Back in January 1997, the day after Cole presented his damning report to the Ethics Committee, the Washington Post’s front-page banner headline was “Gingrich Actions ‘Intentional’ or ‘Reckless’; Counsel Concludes That Speaker’s Course Funding Was ‘Clear Violation’ of Tax Laws.” That same day, the New York Times ran eleven stories on the Gingrich matter, four of them on the front page (one inside story was headlined, “Report Describes How Gingrich Used Taxpayers’ Money for Partisan Politics”). On television, Dan Rather began the CBS Evening News by telling viewers that “only now is the evidence of Newt Gingrich’s ethics violations and tax problems being disclosed in detail.”
Contrast that treatment in the press with the reports that followed the Speaker’s exoneration.
The story was much different when Gingrich was exonerated. The Washington Post ran a brief story on page five. The Times ran an equally brief story on page 23. And the evening newscasts of CBS, NBC, and ABC — which together had devoted hours of coverage to the question of Gingrich’s ethics — did not report the story at all. Not a word.
This is another point, the bias of the Press, it has reached the point of being sickening. I hear from my liberal friends, “you need to stop listening to Faux News,” as if that mantra makes their idiotic claim true, that only liberal sources of news coverage will espouse the truth. It’s not just the tone of coverage that is maddening, nor is it that plus the selective amplification of certain facts to create the story to fit a predetermined template, but it also includes the despicable practice of choosing sides and actively using their cloak of being objective to aid one side of our political discourse over the other.
Examples you ask? Here is one. Cast your memory back to the ancient date of 2008. John Edwards was one of the contenders for the Democrat Nomination for his Party’s Presidential bid. As it turns out, he was not the faithful husband which every news report had been portraying him to be. He had a mistress tagging along with him, who was dubiously employed by his campaign. Not only was the media wrong about Edwards, as it turns out, members of that media were actively aiding in his covering up the affair. When the story did break, well after he had been shown the door electorally speaking, we were assured that such revelations were in fact salacious in nature, and had no business in Presidential Politics. Comparisons to the coverage of Newt Gingrich’s second former wife’s revelations would be too cheap and easy. Instead, remember the meme attempted during the 2008 General Election. The major news media began reporting on a story that someone thought it was possible that Senator McCain had at one time had an affair with a female aid, because their smiles to each other in crowded rooms appeared too affectionate for people who were just coworkers. Those stories appeared on all of the Sunday talk shows, (except of course for Fox,) and were blasted on the front pages of the NYT, Time, Newsweek, etc.
People are shocked that Speaker Gingrich would have the temerity to blast the media in the manner that he does. My question is this. After experiencing first hand the full brunt of the dishonest way in which news reporters go about their business, how could any conservative politician roll over and play dead for them? Newt Gingrich’s approach is the absolute correct course of action to take. He is not going out of his way to be overtly mean, but he is not simply accepting their biased starting points either. He is fighting back, and is doing so in a manner that is at the same time both respectful, and sets the record straight.
Which of course brings us to this second point, and perhaps the most damning of all. The complete lack of fight in the establishment of the Republican Party. I have read pundits both endorse and blast Newt Gingrich. I have seen a lot of folks on both sides completely miss the true points of their arguments with maddening imprecision. My support for Newt Gingrich is due entirely to the fact that I agree with most of his positions. The entire argument of electability may be one of the silliest arguments made in the history of discourse. Even with that though, I have to say that anyone who states the principles of conservatism, and does so with passion and without apology is electable. When Republicans feel the need to stop fighting back and start pandering and capitulating on their ideals, that is when they suffer electoral defeat. If you don’t believe me, just ask John McCain. You know, the Maverick, who lost that title for 3 months in 2008, and was suddenly treated in the press which had adored him for so long as just another Republican, in other words brutally. He refused to take Barack Obama on, and he refused to call out the media for its baloney. The result of course was this, John McCain remains today, Senator McCain. If we are going to lose fine, let’s at least have our say and have this fight which we have been avoiding for so long.
With the charges against Gingrich megaphoned in the press, Gingrich and Republicans were under intense pressure to end the ordeal. In January, 1997, Gingrich agreed to make a limited confession of wrongdoing in which he pleaded guilty to the previously unknown offense of failing to seek sufficiently detailed advice from a tax lawyer before proceeding with the course. (Gingrich had in fact sought advice from two such lawyers in relation to the course.) Gingrich also admitted that he had provided “inaccurate, incomplete, and unreliable” information to Ethics Committee investigators. That “inaccurate” information was Gingrich’s contention that the course was not political — a claim Cole and the committee did not accept, but the IRS later would.
In return for those admissions, the House reprimanded Gingrich and levied an unprecedented $300,000 fine. The size of the penalty was not so much about the misdeed itself but the fact that the Speaker was involved in it.
Why did Gingrich admit wrongdoing? “The atmosphere at the time was so rancorous, partisan, and personal that everyone, including Newt, was desperately seeking a way to end the whole thing,” Gingrich attorney Jan Baran told me in 1999. “He was admitting to whatever he could to get the case over with.”
What this highlights is the willingness to cave in order to avoid confrontation. Backing down is not a sign of strong leadership. Sarah Palin also backed down from trumped up ethics charges to avoid a prolonged and expensive fight for the benefit of her state. While I applaud the sentiment that it was better for the citizens of Alaska, it also puts an unjust cloud over the head of someone from our side. It has reached the point that we must start fighting these battles, and every last one of them where ever they pop up. That is a lesson that Speaker Gingrich learned the hard way, but he at least learned it.
Last night, Mitch Daniels gave the Republican Response to the President’s State of the Union Address. it appears as though the leaders of the Republican Party are finally beginning to get this. Last night we got the first message from the Republican leadership that was not a watered down version of the message delivered by the Democrats only moments earlier. We want the march towards Socialism not merely slowed down, but stopped and reversed. Speaker Gingrich gets this, and that is why he has gained in momentum. At the very least, Newt Gingrich has served to change the discourse within the Republican Party to begin reflecting the views held by the Republican voters. Free markets, freedom to determine our own destinies, constitutional principles, these are values worth having a battle over.
Here lies a great illustration of what is wrong with the Democrat Party, besides of course their insane agenda.
Cole developed a theory of the case in which Gingrich, looking for a way to spread his political views, came up with the idea of creating a college course and then devised a way to use a tax-exempt foundation to pay the bills. “The idea to develop the message and disseminate it for partisan political use came first,” Cole told the Ethics Committee. “The use of the [the Progress and Freedom Foundation] came second as a source of funding.” Thus, Cole concluded, the course was “motivated, at least in part, by political goals.” Cole argued that even a hint of a political motive, was enough to taint the tax-exempt project, “regardless of the number or importance of truly exempt purposes that are present.”
Cole did not argue that the case was not educational. It plainly was. But Cole suggested that the standard for determining wrongdoing was whether any unclean intent lurked in the heart of the creator of the course, even if it was unquestionably educational.
In his paper bringing charges against Newt Gingrich, Cole had admitted that the facts did not support any violations of ethics. In his own words, it was not whether or not Newt Gingrich was actually guilty that mattered, but whether or not it would help the cause of switching power back to the Democrats that mattered.
The Democrats can not win an open debate, they must cheat and lie in order to get their agenda pushed forward. Of the two sides, my anger is mostly with ours. We allow them to get away with it, believing that we are better off not risking a voter backlash by defending ourselves. I am tired of it, and thank goodness Newt Gingrich is also.
The conclusion of the ethics complaints? Well I tipped them earlier, but here they are anyhow.
It was a huge victory for Democrats. They had deeply wounded the Speaker. But they hadn’t brought him down. So, as Bonior suggested, they sought to push law enforcement to begin a criminal investigation of Gingrich.
Nothing happened with the Justice Department and the FBI, but the IRS began an investigation that would stretch over three years. Unlike many in Congress — and journalists, too — IRS investigators obtained tapes and transcripts of each session during the two years the course was taught at Kennesaw State College in Georgia, as well as videotapes of the third year of the course, taught at nearby Reinhardt College. IRS officials examined every word Gingrich spoke in every class; before investigating the financing and administration of the course, they first sought to determine whether it was in fact educational and whether it served to the political benefit of Gingrich, his political organization, GOPAC, or the Republican Party as a whole. They then carefully examined the role of the Progress and Freedom Foundation and how it related to Gingrich’s political network.
In the end, in 1999, the IRS released a densely written, highly detailed 74-page report. The course was, in fact, educational, the IRS said. “The overwhelming number of positions advocated in the course were very broad in nature and often more applicable to individual behavior or behavioral changes in society as a whole than to any ‘political’ action,” investigators wrote. “For example, the lecture on quality was much more directly applicable to individual behavior than political action and would be difficult to attempt to categorize in political terms. Another example is the lecture on personal strength where again the focus was on individual behavior. In fact, this lecture placed some focus on the personal strength of individual Democrats who likely would not agree with Mr. Gingrich on his political views expressed in forums outside his Renewing American Civilization course teaching. Even in the lectures that had a partial focus on broadly defined changes in political activity, such as less government and government regulation, there was also a strong emphasis on changes in personal behavior and non-political changes in society as a whole.”
The IRS also checked out the evaluations written by students who completed the course. The overwhelming majority of students, according to the report, believed that Gingrich knew his material, was an interesting speaker, and was open to alternate points of view. None seemed to perceive a particular political message. “Most students,” the IRS noted, “said that they would apply the course material to improve their own lives in such areas as family, friendships, career, and citizenship.”
The IRS concluded the course simply was not political. “The central problem in arguing that the Progress and Freedom Foundation provided more than incidental private benefit to Mr. Gingrich, GOPAC, and other Republican entities,” the IRS wrote, “was that the content of the ‘Renewing American Civilization’ course was educational…and not biased toward any of those who were supposed to be benefited.”
The bottom line: Gingrich acted properly and violated no laws. There was no tax fraud scheme. Of course, by that time, Gingrich was out of office, widely presumed to be guilty of something, and his career in politics was (seemingly) over.
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