On NBC's "Meet The Press" this Sunday, Newt Gingrich called Paul Ryan's budget proposal "right wing social engineering." He also said he supported the individual mandate that exists in the health care bills of both Mitt Romney and President Obama.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...
So the question is, is Newt Gingrich completely out of touch with where his party actually stands on these issues or does he believe that he can reign in the ever rightward charging republicans and pull them back in towards the center?
The answer seems to have come within 24 hours, when early Monday morning, a spokesman for the Gingrich campaign sought to mitigate the damage these comments caused.
"There is little daylight between Ryan and Gingrich" reports the Weekly Standard from their source, Rick Tyler, a spokesman for Newt Gingrich. The difference between Gingrich's approach and Ryan's, Tyler says, is one of "design but not substance."
http://www.weeklystandard.com/...
Gingrich was Speaker of the House when the democrats first began their move to the right with a centrist challenge in the 1990's but he was long gone by the time the republicans, led by Karl Rove, abandoned the Battle for the Center for good. The far right wing voters first courted in 2000 by Rove would probably have been considered too far outside of the mainstream when Gingrich was in office. But now they are calling the shots within the GOP.
As the 2012 election campaign begins to heat up we have heard from several republicans, including Gingrich, that the importance of this particular election cannot be over stated. There has not been a more important election for the republicans, says Gingrich, since the election that made the republicans a major party to begin with, the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Other republicans have sounded the alarm as well.
While it is understandable for any party that wants to win to strike an urgent tone, it is hard to believe that republicans are truly concerned that President Obama is going to drive the country off a left wing cliff. Even the GOP must have noticed that this president is no where near the far left side of anything these days.
Perhaps there is another reason why this election is considered so dire, a fate worse than losing to be concerned about. Robert Reich's Huffington Post article, "The Battle for the Soul of the GOP" describes a "civil war" taking place inside the republican party right now, specifically regarding the issue of raising the debt ceiling. Taking democrats out of the picture for the moment, there are, Reich describes, very powerful contingencies on both sides of this debt ceiling issue within the republican party. This places the highest point of conflict on this extremely important issue squarely within their own party.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
It is not just the debt ceiling, there are other issues created by the GOP's rapid advance to the right over the last decade creating tension within the party, hardly a desirable situation politically. And new land mines are being discovered every day.
Twenty years a rightward charge by the democrats, the republicans have been pushed further right than many of them really wanted to go, further right than many of their constituents may continue to want to go. And there appears to be no way to stop the train.
Had Newt Gingrich held firm to the strong words about the Ryan budget that he expressed yesterday, he would have indicated a willingness to stand up to the Tea Party and possibly lead the GOP back to a more politically mainstream ideology. It would have demonstrated a commitment to the big idea and probably would have helped the Republican Party in the long run. By back pedaling so quickly he reminds us that the right wing social engineers he called out so bravely yesterday, are still stronger than him today.
Without getting into the merits of their positions this party needs to prove it can still contain itself when necessary. If it is a far right party, it needs to show that it is so by choice and not because it has lost control. The job of the eventual Republican nominee for 2012 will be in no small part to demonstrate that it can still govern the party itself let alone the most powerful nation in the world. The republican brand is in deep trouble. And to that end, Gingrich was right that this is a very important election for the republicans.
Updated by ColleenQ at Mon May 16, 2011 at 10:27 AM PDT
I felt compelled to go back into this diary and edit it after learning that this morning that a spokesperson for Gingrich dialed back the comments he made on Meet the Press. To have come out strongly against the Ryan proposal just days after announcing his candidacy said something very interesting about Newt Gingrich that I thought needed to be examined. To waffle and back track says something very different and reinforces the power that the Tea Party holds over this party. I continue to wonder what will become of this party and if it can survive the turmoil within. Also I am now officially hooked and will be watching this election very closely! Thanks--CQ