Off to the moon with randy
Newt
By Wesley Pruden
PrudenPolitics.com
The great entertainers of our time turn out to be
presidents and the men who would be president, and
this week most of them are in Florida. This is as
good as vaudeville ever was.
Newt Gingrich, under siege by ex-wives and trying
hard to keep track of the various versions of an
autobiography-in-progress, nevertheless soldiers on
in his mission to restore family values and
“morality” to the nation.
Ever the deep thinker of big thoughts, Newt may be
looking for a getaway as critics retrieve highlights
of his checkered past. He recalled this week in
Cocoa Beach how he had once introduced something
called the Northwest Ordinance for Space, the
“weirdest thing” he had ever done. But he stands by
what it called for, though accounts of his remarks
sound like satire. With Newt, you never know.
“I think the number is 13,000—when we have 13,000
Americans living on the moon, they can petition to
become a state. ... By the end of my second term we
will have the first permanent base on the moon and
it will be American. We will have commercial
near-Earth activities that include science, tourism
and manufacturing.
“I accept the charge that I am an American and
Americans are instinctively grandiose because we
believe in a bigger future. ... I want you to help
me both in Florida and across the country so that
you can someday say you were here the day it was
announced that of course we’d have commercial space
and near space. Of course we’d have a manned colony
on the moon that flew an American flag.”
Back on the ground in Florida, Newt continues to try
to put to bed his reputation with his wives, if not
the wives themselves. Just when he thought he was in
a friendly forum in Miami, another pesky television
correspondent asked him why he led the Republican
campaign to impeach Bill Clinton for zipper disease
when he was losing a struggle with his own zipper.
Soon he and the interviewer, Jorge Ramos of
Univision, were sparring over something that sounded
a lot like what the meaning of ‘is’ is.
“No, I criticized President Clinton for lying under
oath in front of a federal judge,” Newt said, “[for]
committing perjury, which is a felony for which
normal people go to jail.”
The interviewer cut him off, never easy for someone
talking to Newt: “However, at the same time you were
doing the same thing.”
“No, I wasn’t. You didn’t hear my answer. Look, I
have been through two divorces—“
“I understand,” the interviewer said. “But people
think that’s hypocritical to criticize President
Clinton for doing the same thing that you were doing
at the same time.”
That was then, and Newt had rather talk about how he
and Ronald Reagan worked miracles of statecraft.
Reprising in Florida his earlier remarks at the
Reagan library in California—in a digression from a
boast that he had helped the Gipper “create millions
of jobs while he was president”—he bragged that he
also “helped defeat the Soviet empire.
“I’ve done a movie on Ronald Reagan . ... Callista
and I did. We’ve done a book on Ronald Reagan. You
know I campaigned with Reagan. I first met Reagan in
‘74. I’ve very happy to talk about Ronald Reagan.”
But Newt’s war stories about soldiering with the
Gipper are more romantic fiction than remembered
actual fact. On the eve of the Gipper’s summit with
Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, Newt called it “the most
dangerous summit for the West since Adolf Hitler met
with [Neville] Chamberlain at Munich in 1938,” and
he later said the Reagan administration had failed
to meet the Soviet challenge and “the burden of
failure frankly must be place first upon President
Reagan.” Newt was not, as the record demonstrates,
someone a president could “go to the wall with.”
Newt, like Ron Paul, is most popular with young
voters. They have no personal remembrance of his
history, of his performance in the events that
shaped his reputation. He has a sharp tongue that
delivers clever one-liners, a talent never prized in
presidents. Newt does not wear well. Two years after
he was Time magazine’s Man of the Year one
public-opinion poll found that only 14 percent of
the voters still liked him. Columnist Mark Shields
tells of an exchange—perhaps apocryphal, like so
much of Newt—between Newt and Bob Dole, who had the
sharpest tongue in town. “Why do people take such an
instant dislike to me?” Newt asked. The senator
replied: “It saves them time.”
Wesley Pruden is the editor emeritus of The
Washington Times.