Lipsticks, pigs, etc.

This weekend, Ry sent me this very interesting story about Newt Gingrich. It's a little-known fact that Newt was a boyhood idol of mine - after all, he's an "idea guy," with boundless energy and a never-ending supply of grand plans to strengthen America. Which, after all, is what I'd like to be (in my wildest dreams).

Needless to say, I've wised up a bit in the last 14 years. I've begun to realize that truly good political idea don't spring out of a vaccum, like scientific theories; they are simply the best and most efficient as of balancing the desires of the masses and the necessities of the times.

In 1994, Newt appeared to have a ton of "new" ideas - the Contract with America. But most of the items on the Contract weren't new things at all, but things the GOP had been trying to do for at least two solid decades. Newt simply poured old wine into a new glass, got everybody riled up and excited in an otherwise boring midterm election, and realized that the Democratic majority in Congress had gotten sleepy and flat-footed. The center-right American electorate of the 1990s did the rest.

Which is why Newt is not going to ride to the Republicans' rescue this time. He may have "10 new ideas an hour," as his aide alleges, but a thousand of those ideas won't add up to one new direction for the GOP.

Consider the following excerpt from the article

Gingrich pointedly declines to do what Roosevelt and La Follette did, which is to directly confront the Republican orthodoxies of their day. Those reformers demanded their fellow Republicans make a choice between ideas and ignorance. By contrast, Gingrich doesn’t really challenge any core ideological precept of the Bush era — only the strategy of “base mobilization” that underlay it. Nor do the last several months of economic calamity seem to have ignited in him any of the populist fervor that energized an earlier generation of progressives. His main remedy for the financial crisis has been to repeal the Sarbanes-Oxley law that Congress passed to step up regulation after the Enron scandal; Gingrich claims such accounting rules as “mark to market” are needlessly crippling banks and small businesses. In other words, his prescription for the runaway financial industry is to regulate it less — a position that hardly sounds like a departure from Bush, let alone progressive or insurrectionary. At a moment when the role of religious fundamentalism in the party is a central question for reformers, Gingrich, rather than making any kind of case for a new enlightenment, has in fact gone to great lengths to placate Christian conservatives...[H]e went on radio with the evangelical minister James Dobson to apologize for having been unfaithful to his second wife. (emphasis mine)

Newt is basically trying to do what he did in 1994 - pour old wine into a new glass. Put old bone into new flesh. And other such metaphors.

Only now, the old wine isn't what America wants. In 1994, Americans wanted to try welfare reform and spending restraint (the Republicans only ended up giving them the former), because the Democratic Congressional majority ha blocked those things during the Reagan years. But as of 2009, Americans have no desire to try an economic approach based on infinite tax cuts and infinite deregulation, because we tried that during the Bush years and it failed pretty spectacularly.

Newt is committing the same basic error Bush did throughout his presidency - believing that the GOP's ideas are all correct, and that the only thing that's lacking is the salesmanship. "If we could just explain our ideas better," Gingrich thinks, "voters would see that the same exact stuff we always come up with is actually right."

But that is silly. It assumes the voters are either stupid or expertly misled by the opposition. I strongly believe that the American public is too smart for either of those things to be true for long. Newt's "ideas" are just new ways of putting lipstick on the pig that is Republican ideological orthodoxy. No true visionary, he.

Update: More specifics on how Newt ain't new.

Update 2: Apparently Newt's microwaved-mealoaf "new ideas" are too new for Rush.