Rilaly's Blog
Simple Truths

Amid the kerfuffle of primary politics it seems most of the conservative intelligentsia can agree on one thing, they don’t like former speaker Newt Gingrich. George Will has basically called him a communist; Ann Coulter says he has so many ideas from so many different sides of the aisle that conservatives would do well to read the history of Newt Gingrich better; and Charles Krauthammer has said: “(Gingrich is) too erratic or mercurial… a victim of his own creative intelligence. People wonder if he’ll wake up one morning the way he did in the past with a mandate or global warming… and surprise people by being unconservative.” Even Brit Hume joined the fray calling Gingrich “Undisciplined. You never know what he’s going to say next. He’s a provocative thinker, but a promiscuous talker.” The latter two have also gone on record to say that Gingrich’s May 2011 characterization of Paul Ryan’s plan, as regards Health care, as “Right-wing social engineering” was political suicide on the right.

Enter Thomas Sowell. Sowell differs from Ann Coulter on the credit Gingrich is due for welfare reform, balancing the budget, the 90’s surplus, and the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress. Coulter believes Gingrich is given too much credit. She says Gingrich did not single-handedly engineer the takeover. Coulter believes that the liberalism of Clinton’s first two years as president is more responsiblefor the takeover than anything Gingrich ever did. (Coulter does not mention the Contract with America that Gingrich engineered.) Coulter does not mention that the 1994 takeover was the first time in forty years that Republicans controlled the house. Instead, Coulter mentions that Boehner’s takeover of Congress, (again, she writes, all glory to Obama for that one) was a greater takeover in pure numbers than Gingrich’s was. Sowell says that Gingrich presided over the party that won Congress for the first time in forty years, and he presided over the Congress that produced the first balanced budget in forty years. “The media called it “the Clinton surplus” but all spending bills start in the House of Representatives, and Gingrich was Speaker of the House,” Sowell furthered. In other words, Gingrich’s seat of power while all this occurred is, at least, more than anything Romney accomplished as governor of Massachusetts.