GOP Presidential candidate Ron Paul published bigoted newsletters in the 1980s. Now a much more recent, and not nearly as morally offensive, newsletter by Newt Gingrich will cause him problems with some conservative primary voters.
An April 2006 newsletter published by Mr. Gingrich’s former consulting company, the Center for Health Transformation, and discovered by the Wall Street Journal, included a two-page analysis, “Newt Notes,” which begins this way: “The most exciting development of the past few weeks is what has been happening up in Massachusetts. The health bill that Governor Romney signed into law this month has tremendous potential to effect major change in the American health system. We agree entirely with Governor Romney and Massachusetts legislators that our goal should be 100% insurance coverage for all Americans.”
Mr. Gingrich had some criticisms of the Massachusetts plan, including what he referred to as the state’s over-regulation of health insurers, and his full analysis is worth reading. But there’s no question that Gingrich was a strong supporter of RomneyCare. ”Massachusetts leaders are to be commended for this bipartisan proposal to tackle the enormous challenge of finding real solutions for creating a sustainable health system,” Gingrich wrote. The Journal reports that a follow-up newsletter in August 2006 called Mr. Romney’s plan “the most interesting effort to solve the uninsured problem in America today.”
The effect of this revelation is that it will undermine Gingrich with primary voters who want a candidate who provides a sharp conservative contrast with both Romney in the primaries and Barack Obama in the general election. Mr. Gingrich has already acknowledged supporting an individual mandate; the release of this memo substantially weakens his attacks on what Gingrich now calls Romney’s “big-government, bureaucratic, high-cost system.”
Until now, it’s been Mitt Romney who has had to justify to Republicans (not always persuasively) his support for RomneyCare. Now it’s Mr. Gingrich’s turn to justify his. Pretending he didn’t say what he said and invoking the Charles Barkley defense (Barkley once claimed he was misquoted in his autobiography) won’t do the trick.
Nobody said running for president is easy.
"it will undermine Gingrich with primary voters". That may be, but it will enhance his position among moderates. That is what is needed for the GOP nominee to win in November. It appears that many primary voters forget that essential. And Gingrich has been persuasive among the Jewish voters, which Romney has not. Being an Ultra Conservative is not the brand that either Romney or Gingrich need for the general election. As for Paul, that disaster on legs, his very existence in the primaries bode poorly for the GOP whether he wins, G-d forbid, or loses.
But, hey, to Commentary, weighing Paul's American crackpot Hitler-Osama-and Jefferson Davis were all right guys provoked by the Lincoln-Wilson-FDR-Bush-Bilsberger-Trilateral Commision cabal rationalizations (and for what? down the road) against Newt's gasp! support for Romney's Massachusetts mandate, it's a on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand thumbsucking occasion. n nCommentary better get its collective sechel unstuck from the trees and take a good long look at the forest.
As with you know who, when you take a look at the hard-core ideologues behind Paul, full spectrum, from Rockwell to Rothbard's Ludwig van Mises Institute–there is a lot of spooky black mojo lubricant behind the free-market Austrian economic technocratic facade. This is a guy who deliberately sought to found an enduring coalition between Reason libertarian political devotes, paleocon Southern agrarian nativist nostalgics, and the burgeoning crop of post Klan David Duke neo-Nazi, white militia outriders. And Commentary's reaction is hobbled by a fear of offending some idealized portrait of a Reaganite conservative in Middle America.