How Can Newt Gingrich Possibly Live Down His Past?

It's hard to see how Newt Gingirch can remain a viable candidate given his past

The most improbable thing about the rise of Newt Gingrich has been the extent to which he has spent the last several months campaigning as a small-government, fiscally conservative candidate when his own record, both in office and since he was forced to leave the Speakership and Congress in 1998. Already his ties to Freddie Mac have become an issue on the campaign trail, and it seems blindingly obvious that the services he and his consulting firm provided had nothing to do with being a “historian,” as he claimed in last week’s CNBC debate. Now, The Washington Post is out with a story detailing Gingrich’s ties to some of America’s biggest health care and health insurance companies:

A think tank founded by GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich collected at least $37 million over the past eight years from major health-care companies and industry groups, offering special access to the former House speaker and other perks, according to records and interviews.

The Center for Health Transformation, which opened in 2003, brought in dues of as much as $200,000 per year from insurers and other health-care firms, offering some of them “access to Newt Gingrich” and “direct Newt interaction,” according to promotional materials. The biggest funders, including firms such as AstraZeneca, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Novo Nordisk, were also eligible to receive discounts on “products and workshops” from other Gingrich groups.

The health center advocated, among other things, requiring that “anyone who earns more than $50,000 a year must purchase health insurance or post a bond,” a type of insurance mandate that has since become anathema to conservatives.

The group also pushed proposals to build centralized electronic medical records and use such data to research treatment effectiveness, both central features of President Obama’s health-care reforms.

Gingrich, who has been under fire recently for his lucrative consulting business, left the health-care think tank earlier this year to run for president. But his time there exemplifies the former Georgia congressman’s post-legislative career as a well-paid consultant and policy guru, a role that earned him and his companies tens of millions of dollars over the past decade.

(…)

The center attracted a long list of global health-care firms and interest groups, which paid $5,000 to $200,000 a year, based on their size, to be members. Based on archived membership lists going back to 2003, that means the center brought in as much as $6.25 million per year from higher-level members giving $50,000 or more, totaling at least $37 million since 2003.

That does not include many other sources of revenue, such as dues from smaller members and fees for polling, research and other services the center offered.

The center has listed scores of firms and industry groups as members over the years, amounting to a Who’s Who of the medical field, from GE Healthcare to the American Hospital Association to Wellpoint, the nation’s largest health insurer. The think tank also drew funding from employers with sizable health-care costs, such as Detroit’s Big Three automakers, records show.

Several firms characterized their membership as a way to share information about potential health-care reforms.

Over at The New York Times, Jim Rutenberg details more of Gingrich’s ties to, and propaganda for, the health care industry:

In July 2009, before the health care debate became a topic of angry discussion around the country, Newt Gingrich weighed in on what would be one of its flashpoints — end-of-life care provisions to help families decide whether terminally ill patients should avoid aggressive, and costly, medical measures.

Writing on the Web site of The Washington Post, Mr. Gingrich praised Gundersen Lutheran Health System of LaCrosse, Wis., for its successful efforts to persuade most patients to have “advance directives,” saying that if Medicare had followed Gundersen’s lead on end-of-life care and other practices, it would “save more than $33 billion a year.”

But within weeks, Mr. Gingrich would find himself on the wrong end of what some Republicans labeled the “death panel” issue. Many conservatives had begun expressing anger at town hall meetings that summer because the proposed Democratic health-care law would have allowed Medicare to finance beneficiaries’ consultations with professionals on whether to authorize aggressive and potentially life-saving interventions later in life.

On Thursday, Mr. Gingrich’s spokesman confirmed that Gunderson was one of the paying clients of Mr. Gingrich’s Center for Health Transformation, a health consulting firm whose other clients have included WellPoint, the American Hospital Association, and various other major health care concerns. His spokesman, R. C. Hammond, said the center has revenues of about $5 million a year.

Additionally, yesterday The Washington Examiner’s Timothy Carney noted that Gingrich had been on the payroll of one of the pharmaceutic industry’s largest lobbying groups during the 2003 battle over whether to add a prescription drug benefit to Medicare:

A former employee of the nation’s biggest drug lobby told me Gingrich was being paid by the drug industry during the 2003 debate over the Medicare prescription drug benefit.

While the Bush White House and the Republican congressional leadership supported a bill creating a new entitlement for all seniors, Washington conservatives mostly opposed the bill. Gingrich went around Washington at the time plumping for the bill to free-market groups and activists.

“In the height of the debate,” one conservative opponent of the bill told me, “Newt was calling around” selling the bill as a great conservative measure even though it was a new federal entitlement.

Bob Moffitt of the Heritage Foundation, another veteran of the Medicare drug battle, tells me that early in the debate Gingrich favored a Medicare drug benefit only for the poor. The drug lobby, however, had settled on backing a drug benefit for everyone on Medicare. Gingrich soon changed his tune, and began pushing the universal benefit.

The Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America is one of the largest lobbying organizations in the country, and it was a leading advocate of Bush’s Medicare drug bill, which provides billions of dollars in subsidies for seniors to buy drugs, while prohibiting Medicare from negotiating for lower drug prices.

PhRMA support for the bill was key to winning over many Republicans, and right after the bill passed, PhRMA hired one of the bill’s authors, House Commerce Committee Chairman Billy Tauzin, to be the group’s president.

A source who worked for PhRMA at the time told me that Gingrich was being paid by “someone in the drug industry” — either PhRMA, some other industry group, or a specific drug company — as a consultant during the debate over the drug benefit. My source double-checked this with a former PhRMA colleague, who had the same recollection.

All of this leads Carney to note in a subsequent article the odd defenses that were coming his way to the fact that he was shining light on Gingirch’s past as a shill for industries seeking to influence government and Gingirch’s fellow conservatives on matters which clearly benefited them. The responses boiled down to either “stop attacking conservatives” or ” what Gingrich was doing is just free enterprise.” The first response is utter nonsense, of course, but sadly an exemplar of something we see quite a lot in partisan politics. Attacks on fellow Republicans or Democrats, even if they happen to be true, are considered to be verboten and those who engage in them are quickly shunted off the reservation.

The second response – that Gingrich was just being a “businessman” selling his services in a free market economy is one that I’ve heard myself from several Gingrich supporters and it is similarly nonsensical. The reason that these companies were giving money to Gingrich and his various business isn’t because they valued his ideas, such as they are, but because they placed value on his ability to give them access, if not to lobby Congress then to lobby his fellow conservatives to convince them that a program like Medicare Part D was a good idea. In the case of that program in particular, many on the right point to the GOP’s decision to cave on this issue as the beginning of the end of any hope that the Bush Era would engage in anything resembling fiscal conservatism. Given that, the fact that many of them seem so willing to march behind a many who was helping to make the case for that program strikes me as a fairly solid indictment of their own commitment to their supposed principles. If you think it’s wrong for the government to take taxpayer dollars and given them to preferred industries, then why would you even think about supporting a man who spent the better part of his post-political career advocating those precise policies? It boggles the mind.

It makes one wonder just how long this Gingrich Boomlet can last. If the history of  this campaign to date is any guide, then the former Speaker is just another in a long line of not-Romney’s who have risen in the polls only to fall once their flaws have been revealed. It’s happened to Trump, Bachmann, Perry, and Cain and given the boatload of material on Gingrich over the past 20 years, not to mention the political enemies he’s made during that time, one would think it will happen to him to. It’s worth nothing that, so far, none of Gingrich’s rivals have really gone after him on his record either on the stump or in the debates:

A Smart Politics content analysis of the last seven nationally televised debates since Rick Perry entered the race finds that Newt Gingrich is the only candidate yet to be on the receiving end of the more than 150 verbal attacks that have been levied by the Republican field.

Smart Politics first pointed out the lack of criticism Gingrich was receiving from the other candidates in a report published a month ago after the first four debates with Perry.

Now – three debates later – the numbers are even more stark.

After more than 11 hours of debate time and 158 barbs traded back and forth across the stage, not one (politically) poisoned dart has been thrown in Gingrich’s direction.

Mitt Romney has now overtaken the fading Rick Perry as the most common target of criticism during the debates, receiving 59 verbal jabs, or 37.3 percent.

Romney is followed by Perry with 55 (34.8 percent), Herman Cain with 22 (13.9 percent), Ron Paul with 10 (6.3 percent), Jon Huntsman with five (3.2 percent), Rick Santorum with four (2.5 percent), and Michele Bachmann with three (1.9 percent).

And then there is Gingrich with zero.

Largely, one would think, this is because nobody considered Gingrich much of a threat or a contender until now. One would also suspect that this is going to change very soon, as soon as the next debate on November 22nd most likely. Of course, whatever else his flaws might be, Gingrich is a far better debater and rhetorician than Bachmann, Perry, or Cain could ever hope to be so it’s possible that he’d be able to parry those attacks quite well. Nonetheless, the point remains that Gingrich is just now getting the vetting that other candidates have already gone through, and the voting public is about to be reminded of all the flaws of the old Newt Gingirch. That was the Newt Gingrich of the 1995-96 shutdown, the Newt Gingrich who threw a fit over seating on Air Force One during a trip to Israel, the Gingrich who pursed a President over a sex scandal while having an affair, and, as we’ve learned, the Newt Gingrich who was selling himself to big business and advocating policies as far away from limited government as Earth is from the Sun.

Is this the person Republicans would really nominate to represent them go up against Barack Obama? The polls right now indicate it would go pretty well for the incumbent President, which suggests that it would be nuts for Republicans to nominate someone as tainted as Gingrich. At the same time, the Republicans who respond to the polls don’t seem to be paying much attention to reality right now.

FILED UNDER: 2012 Election, US Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Doug Mataconis
About Doug Mataconis
Doug Mataconis held a B.A. in Political Science from Rutgers University and J.D. from George Mason University School of Law. He joined the staff of OTB in May 2010 and contributed a staggering 16,483 posts before his retirement in January 2020. He passed far too young in July 2021.

Comments

  1. ponce says:

    Gingrich is an exemplar of how silly, stupid and corrupt the American right has become.

    It’s really just one big used car lot of yelling and hucksterism.

  2. MBunge says:

    Am I missing something, or is Gingrich accused of doing anything that isn’t standard operating procedure for the denizens of the Beltway? What kind of a society are we when working as a lobbyist is considering disqualifying, but possibly executing an innocent man is treated as either a non issue or a political advantage?

    Mike

  3. Hey Norm says:

    “…the Republicans who respond to the polls don’t seem to be paying much attention to reality right now….”

    There…fixed that for you.
    Barney Frank on the Gingrich Group, Newt’s consulting firm:

    “…I thought that was his wives…”

    Seriously though…Newt’s position on health care reform is just more reinforcment to the fact that the ACA is a moderate, centrist, free-market solution to a large problem. Mandates are about the only way to make near-universal coverage work in the private sector…and end-of-life counseling and advance directives are simply the smart course of action. The savings in the latter alone are humungous. Unfortunately, instead of having intelligent debate about these things, the extremists-that-used-to-be-conservatives chose instead to demonize anything Obama suggested. We ended up with a weaker product as a result. The fact is that Romney and Gingrich were right…and now, in pandering to a wingnut base…they are wrong.

  4. Drew says:

    I understand your point, Doug. But why does it seem only politicians on the right have to answer for their actions? Bill Clinton is the great admired grandfather of his party, but was having an intern loobering his unit. Bald faced lied to the nation. Tried to smear anyone around him. No mind. Nancy Pelosi almost certainly engaged in insider trading. Never mind? It took FOREVER for people to bring John Edwards transgressions to the fore. Barney Frank and his boyfriend’s male whorehouse? Never mind. Sanduskey and Penn State – horrified!! The Obama administration playing pure filthy politics in trying to hide Solyndra’s impending layoffs….a minor story. The Dem response; “this is just Big Oil and their cronies” gets big press. Fast and Furious, a project that can only be described as bizarre, and with deadly consequences………Holder says “well, you know, I didn’t really read stuff……..” Are you kidding me? This woud never fly if it was the other way around. GM gets the benefit of the biggest crony capitalism gift in history form Obama. Shrug. Obama’s biggest campaign contributors are the so called Wall Street fat cats who fleeced Main Street. Shrug.

    What the hell is going on here?

  5. Hey Norm says:

    “…why does it seem only politicians on the right have to answer for their actions? Bill Clinton is the great admired grandfather of his party, but was having an intern loobering his unit…”

    Hey Donald Trump…er…I mean Drew…I only read part of your drivel…but what’s with the selective memory…Clinton was impeached, impeachment proceedings held, and he was acquited. He was subjected to due process but that’s not enough for you? Why do you hate America so much?

  6. Hey Norm says:

    @ Drew…
    And the day that George Bush and Dick Cheney go to the Hague to stand for their war crimes we can talk about all this other penny-ante crap that has your thong in a twist.

  7. Hey Norm says:

    “… It took FOREVER for people to bring John Edwards transgressions to the fore…”

    “…A federal judge has set the trial of former presidential candidate John Edwards to begin Jan. 30…”

    I don’t think that word…FOREVER…means what you think it means.

  8. mannning says:

    @Hey Norm:

    Being acquitted of lying did not absolve Clinton from his illicit sex acts while in the White House. Disgusting man.

    Dems throwing stones show how foolish they really are.
    .

  9. mannning says:

    @Hey Norm:

    Being acquitted of lying did not absolve Clinton from his illicit sex acts while in the White House. Disgusting man.

    Dems throwing stones shows how foolish they really are.
    .

  10. Moosebreath says:

    Another question for the Republican voters — How can Mitt Romney live down his past? The past where he supported abortion rights, equal treatment for gays, and enacted into law something essentially the same as Obamacare? Somehow, I suspect Republican primary voters care far more about these issues than who Gingrich was in bed with (in either sense of the term).

  11. Hey Norm says:

    @ manning…

    Definition of ILLICIT
    : not permitted : unlawful

    The facts do not match your ideology. There was absolutely nothing illicit about what Clinton did in the Oval office. Immoral perhaps…but that is between him and his wife…and frankly none of my, or your, business. I am fully aware that so-called-republicans wish to make any sexual act illicit. Thankfully the wingnuts are not running the asylum yet.

  12. Are people really still talking about the Lewinsky thing?

  13. David Valcich says:

    You guys can hate all you want… it’s a shame that none of the Newt bashers have anything to say about the solutions he’s proposing to the nations problems. The people are sick of the media and folks like you trying to assassinate Newt’s character and undermine his recent surge in the polls. We want a leader with ideas who can articulate those solutions well and who knows how to get things done while implementing those ideas in a bipartisan way.

  14. Hey Norm says:

    @ David V…
    Actually I did say Newt had a good proposal…right up until he flip-flopped in an effort to pander to the wingnuts…er…I mean base.

  15. WR says:

    @David Valcich: What ideas are those? Putting Democratic politicians in jail based on accusations of doing what he’s been proven to have done?

  16. ponce says:

    Being acquitted of lying did not absolve Clinton from his illicit sex acts while in the White House. Disgusting man.

    Manning,

    I get the feeling that all sex acts disgust you.

  17. MBunge says:

    @WR: “Putting Democratic politicians in jail based on accusations of doing what he’s been proven to have done?”

    Newt committed perjury?

    Mike

  18. WR says:

    @MBunge: Newt said that Barney Frank should be in jail for taking money from Fannie and Freddie and working to advance their interests. Which is exactly what Gingrich did.

  19. Dazedandconfused says:
  20. An Interested Party says:

    …it’s a shame that none of the Newt bashers have anything to say about the solutions he’s proposing to the nations problems.

    You mean like the individual mandate? Oh wait, he’s no longer for that solution because the fella with the Kenyan, anticolonial behavior is for it…

    The people are sick of the media and folks like you trying to assassinate Newt’s character and undermine his recent surge in the polls.

    The Democrats are sick of that too, as they would love Gingrich to get the GOP nomination…

    Are people really still talking about the Lewinsky thing?

    Don’t you get it? According to some whiners, it is unfair to filth like Gingrich to not talk about Lewinsky…

  21. MM says:

    When your base is essentially forcing you to run on a platform with no purpose other than “I bet this angers some liberal somewhere”, this is what you get.

  22. Rob in CT says:

    MM nails it. The key thing any GOPer must do in this day and age is “piss off the liberals.”

    It’s sad. It’s pathetic. It’s disgusting. And it will still get 48-52% of the vote come 11/2012.

  23. PogueMahone says:

    “…folks like you trying to assassinate Newt’s character…”

    How can you assassinate something that is already dead?

  24. Eric Florack says:

    How Can Newt Gingrich Possibly Live Down His Past?

    By showing clearly that he has the ability to learn

  25. Eric Florack says:

    And the day that George Bush and Dick Cheney go to the Hague to stand for their war crimes we can talk about all this other penny-ante crap that has your thong in a twist.

    You forgot your meds again, didn’t you?

  26. Eric Florack says:

    MM nails it. The key thing any GOPer must do in this day and age is “piss off the liberals.”

    No argument, that the truth has a tendency to do that. But there’s nobody on the planet that should be surprised that a republican who is a proud competent and confident articulator of conservative principles is going to be at the top or near the top in the polling for the nomination.

    Perhaps your objection is they’re doing precisely that?