Gabriel Winant just couldn’t resist. The Salon writer wants to ignore Newt Gingrich and his “regrettable career” since leaving the House. He knows Newt craves attention, and he doesn’t want to give it to him. As Winant writes, “Gingrich has always thought of himself as a world-historical figure and leading intellectual light of his age,” and he doesn’t want to take him seriously. But with gems like these, he can’t help himself:
After all this incoherent bile, Gingrich tries to end on an upbeat note. “If you’re serious about meeting the challenges America faces in the next quarter century,” he says, “you had better be for very, very bold change, and for, therefore, shaking up the existing institutional structure and the existing power structure, very dramatically. Because you can never get them to agree voluntarily to the change you need.”
I’m as sure as can be that if Obama had said something like that, Gingrich would cite it as proof-positive that he’s building a Chavista-Alinskyite-socialist-revolutionary machine.
Of course, Obama did say similar things when he argued for the healthcare reform bill that most of the country opposed. He said he was passing something politically unpopular for the good of the people who didn’t want it. “I will not accept the status quo as a solution. Not this time. Not now,” he declared.
I know that many in this country are deeply skeptical that government is looking out for them. I understand that the politically safe move would be to kick the can further down the road – to defer reform one more year, or one more election, or one more term.
But that’s not what the moment calls for. That’s not what we came here to do. We did not come to fear the future. We came here to shape it.
Sounds an awful lot like Newt, doesn’t he? But Republicans criticized Obama for using just such a tone. (Obama, incidentally, approvingly quoted Newt in another speech on health care reform.)
For more on Newt, see TAC‘s satire columnist Chase Madar imagine the former House Speaker’s latest work of historical fiction in the February issue.
R J Stove 
The first thing is to get rid of the GOP Gingrich Gang, AKA Conservative Inc, and it’s subsidiary, TeaParty Inc. Gingrich is part of the very institutional and power structure that needs not to be shaken up but destroyed.
He had his opportunity when the Government shut down during the Clinton administration – he correctly said “it was their government’. But when Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, and Dan Rather said nasty things about it, he caved and funded “their government” and got along with Clinton for the rest of his term (at least on the agenda – the Impeachment was just, excuse the pun, posturing).
His idea of a “contract” is a bunch of bullet items they will bring to the house floor for exactly one vote, allow to be gutted in the senate, and vetoed by the president.
For me, it doesn’t matter if it has 3 provisions or 3 dozen, if the preamble doesn’t state “I promise to always vote for these, attach this to every relevant bill and continuing resolution, push it in conference, vote against their opposite throughout every term I am in office”, it doesn’t matter what the provisions are. Ron Paul ALWAYS votes for or against something on principle. Gingrich ALWAYS checks the opinion polls and the cable shows first.
Your own Patrick Buchanan writes a more original article monthly than the sum of Gingrich’s output over the last decade.
When his strategy of “We’re not Clinton” but no issues lost the house he had the decency to resign. Now he has neither the decency nor the wisdom to refrain from speaking.