1) He was born Newton McPherson. After his parents divorced and his mother remarried, stepfather Bob Gingrich adopted him. “I had a period of thinking that I would have been called ‘Newt the McPherson,’ as in Robert the Bruce,” he told Gail Sheehy in 1995. “Robert the Bruce is the guy who would not, could not, avoid fighting. . . . He carried the burden of being Scotland.”
2) He has always been fascinated with animals. At the age of ten, he lobbied his then-hometown of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to start a zoo. When CSPAN profiled him in 1994, part of the program took place at Zoo Atlanta.
3) In 1971, he got his Ph.D. in contemporary European history at Tulane. His doctoral dissertation was titled “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo 1945-1960.”
4) In 1980, he wrote a memo to Reagan campaign advisers suggesting lines for a debate with President Carter: “If your life is better, you should vote for him; he is the President and he’s responsible. If your life is worse you should vote against him; he is the President and therefore he’s responsible.” The memo may have inspired Reagan’s famous “Are you better off” line.
5) Also in 1980, he organized “Governing Team Day,” an event where Republican House and Senate candidates met with Ronald Reagan on the Capitol steps. Largely forgotten today, it foreshadowed the Contract with America 14 years later.
6) In 1982, he criticized President Reagan for going soft on taxes. “The fact is, on this particular bill, the president is trying to score a touchdown for liberalism, for the liberal welfare state, for big government, for the Internal Revenue Service, for multinational corporations, and for the various forces that consistently voted against the president.”
7) In 1984, he had a confrontation on the House floor with Speaker Tip O’Neill. So bitter was O’Neill’s attack on Gingrich that the speaker pro tempore ruled him out of order — the first such rebuke for a House speaker in living memory. More than anything else in his early career, that moment made Gingrich a national figure.
8) In 1989, when Dick Cheney resigned as House Republican whip to become secretary of defense, Gingrich ran to succeed him. His opponent was Ed Madigan of Illinois. Madigan’s campaign manager was a congressman from Texas named Tom DeLay. Gingrich won by two votes. He and DeLay were never the best of friends after that.
9) He cheated on his first wife
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse10) He cheated on his second wife
11) He dumped his second wife when she had cancer
12) He collaborated with Nanci Pelosi on Climate Change Hoax.
That's all lovely. He's still a terrible candidate. He's gone soft, he's no longer a rigorous thinker (if he ever were one). He failed, in the aftermath of 1994, to contain the DeLay wing of the party (the side that wanted to turn the GOP into the same sort of party-in-power as the Democrats they had unseated). He did some good stuff with the budget, in the end, but lost the P.R. war he had with Bill Clinton in the process. And, from what I've been able to tell, he currently seems to support a lot of "privatization" of government services which actually masks crony capitalism behind a cloak of conservatism.
I appreciate the good things he's done for the country and the party in the past, but he's well past his use-by date and has nothing currently to offer. He needs to bow out now, not later.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI like Reagan's modified "are you better off?" line much better than Newt's alleged original, which seems rather un-conservative when you think about it.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThere are some guys you hang with during the day and there are some guys you marry and go home with at night.
Since Newt cannot even keep these two guys straight within himself:
Door number one.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse9) He stands a snowballs chance in hell of ever getting elected President.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse9)when he dumped his wife, he also cut off his children and stopped paying his daughter's college tuition. The daughter attending Presbyterian College in South Carolina had her costs picked up by the school to spare him any embarrassment.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI can think of three other random things:
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSick wife #1
Sick wife #2
Wife #3
At least he didn't invent the internet.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseTruth be told regarding the internet: He and Big Al did push personal computers (tax deduction pushed by Newt) and internet accessibility for all.
I have been told by those who knew him and wife #1 personally that he did short them financially after the divorce.
Wife #2 was on board when he divorced wife #1. I will never understand why people think a cheater will make a good mate. I don't know anything about wife #2 being ill. I do think she was surprised.
Wife #1 was his high school math teacher. That would not be acceptable now.
Somewhere - going forward - he has worked to be a good parent to his children from marriage #1.
There is no one else mentioned (other than Obama) that I would not prefer to Newt. I am a Republican but I worried about his being in line for president when he was Speaker.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHow do you say "passé" in American?
I guess a lot of people have a lot of money to waste on a megalomaniac's megalomaniacal campaign to replace the megalomaniac in the WH.
But the Megalomaniac-in-Chief has just killed the Megalomaniac-in-Cave with his bare hands.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse“Belgian Education Policy in the Congo 1945-1960.” Pretty much says it all.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI'm not worried about Gingrich winning the Republican nomination or beating Obama. Neither will ever happen because American voters aren't nearly as stupid as the pundit class thinks they are. Newt is a narcissistic womanizing scumbag, an absolute joke, and I wouldn't vote for him to run a school crosswalk, and I don't know anyone who thinks otherwise (which reveals that I don't live in DC).
What I am worried about is this string of idiotic Republican candidacies getting pimped by the media, including right-leaning media. Trump, Gingrich, Mitt freaking Romney, and soon we'll have the Palin freakshow(loved her in 2008, would never ever consider her now). Mitch Daniels is bizarrely getting a lot of love, despite the fact that he's behaving like the kid that wants to go swimming but won't jump in the pool because it's too cold. Now THAT'S leadership.
On the other hand, there is one real Republican candidate at the moment, and that's Herman Cain. You know him, the guy who won the first debate? Mr. Cain gets no love, and I think that is garbage. It makes me wonder if the right is as racist as the left claims it is, because if you're looking for an electable conservative, Mr. Cain is the man right now.
I like Herman Cain. LIKE HIM A LOT. I would vote for Herman Cain. I wouldn't vote for any of these other clowns.
So how about fewer articles on scumbags like Gingrich, and more on Herman Cain (orAllenWestorMarcoRubioorNikkiHaley orChrisChristieorPaulRyan?) How about it?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThank heaven that we finally have someone running who can counterbalance Ron Paul and Gary Johnson. After all, *someone* needs to represent the "mass executions for drug mules" wing of the GOP. (NY Times, 1995: External Link
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Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseCain will not get the media attention he deserves because the dems are probably afraid of him. You have to look at who the MSM is telling us would beat Obama and then do the opposite. How do you think we got McCain last election? The press pushed him until he had the best name recognition and no negatives. We fell for it. Shame on us.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSmart as a whip....Personality arrogant and obnoxious
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAnd don't forget he is also one of the borderless, transnational, free-trade-trumps-all, world-government big-wig "conservatives" busy at cozying up with China and selling out American wealth to the neo-imperialist and maliciously ambitious central kingdom. Bloody Shame!
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseA few more reasons:
His idea for orphanages for single teen mothers.Which means that Sarah Palin's grandson would be living in an Anchorage orphanage. Or maybe one on the Seward Peninsula, where he could wake up and see Russia.
When Clinton and Newt had a staring contest in the mid 90's, Newt blinked first.
His hair. Superficial yes, but he still looks like a local news anchor in a mid- level media market.
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