“Countdown” guest host David Shuster and Michael Musto, Village Voice columnist and author, last week poked fun at a recent study published in Psychological Science showing that participants who had lower IQs as children were more likely to develop prejudiced beliefs and be socially conservative. Musto’s take: “They’re dumb. Yeah, they’re narrow-minded. I mean, they think an innuendo is an Italian suppository.”
Michael Musto comments on a recent study showing that lower IQs lead to conservative views
——————————————————— In Other ‘Low IQ’ News
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“Countdown” guest host David Shuster tells of an unusual setting for a lesson in campaign finance — Nevada’s Moonlite Bunny Ranch. According to Shuster, “the working girls at the Moonlite Ranch, who reportedly love a good caucus, met and decided to endorse Paul’s candidacy.” Shuster further relates that the prostitutes attempted to make a direct campaign donation of nearly a thousand dollars to Ron Paul staffers, only to be directed to send the money to Paul’s super PAC.
‘Pimpin’ for Paul’: David Shuster reveals Nevada prostitutes who have the hots for Ron Paul
Hate-Talker Rush Limbaugh Falsely Claims That “There Is A Relationship Between Abortion And Breast Cancer“
[ By: Chauncey DeVega ] One cannot forget that the contemporary Republican Party was born with the Southern Strategy, winning over the former Jim Crow South to its side of the political aisle, and as a backlash against the civil rights movement. This is a formula for a politics of white grievance mongering and white victimology; a dreamworld where white conservatives are oppressed, their rights infringed upon by a tyrannical federal government and elite liberal media that are beholden to the interests of the “undeserving poor,” racial minorities, gays, and immigrants.
In keeping with this script in order to win over Red State America, the 2012 Republican presidential candidates have certainly not disappointed. Both overt racism and dog whistles are delectable temptations that the Republican presidential nominees cannot resist. With the election of the country’s first African-American president, and a United States that is less white and more diverse, the GOP is in peril. In uncertain times, you go with what you know. For the Republican Party, this means “dirty boxing,” digging deep into the old bucket of white racism, and using the politics of fear, hostility and anxiety to win over white voters by demagoguing Obama.
Scaring Up The ‘White Vote’: The G.O.P ‘Southern Strategy’ Lives at Fox News (PART 1)
Racism is an assault on the common good. Racism also does the work of dividing and conquering people with common interests. While the 2012 Republican candidates are stirring the pot of white racial anxiety, this is a means to a larger end?the destruction of the country’s social safety net, in support of vicious economic austerity policies, and protecting the kleptocrats and financiers at the expense of the working and middle classes.
Here are the top 10 racist moments by the Republican presidential candidates so far.
1. Newt Gingrich puts Juan Williams “in his place” for daring to ask an unpleasant question during the South Carolina debate. This was the most pernicious example of old-school white racism at work in the 2012 Republican primary campaign. Newt Gingrich, a son of the South who grew up in the shadow of legendary Jim Crow racist Lester Maddox, is an expert on the language and practice of white racism (in both its subtle and obvious forms). He has ridden high with Republican audiences by suggesting that black people are lazy, and their children should be given mops and brooms in order to learn the value of hard work. With condescending pride, Gingrich has also stated that he would lecture the NAACP–one of America’s most storied civil rights organizations–that they ought to demand jobs and not food stamps from Barack Obama.
‘Food-Stamp’ Racism: Obese Newt Gingrich Blows The Racist Dog Whistle
On Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, under the Confederate flag, in the state of South Carolina, Gingrich defended his racist contempt for African Americans by putting Juan Williams, “that boy,” in his place. During the debate, Juan Williams had gotten uppity and was insufficiently deferential to Newt.
This dynamic was not lost on the almost exclusively white audience in attendance (nor on the white woman who congratulated Gingrich the following day for his “brave” deed). They howled with glee at the sight of a black man, one who dared to sass, being reminded of his rightful place at Newt’s knee. In another time, not too long ago, Juan Williams would have been driven out of town for such an offense, if he was lucky — the lynching tree awaited many black folks who did not submit to white authority.
The symbolism of Newt Gingrich’s hostility to black folks, on King’s birthday, and the personal contempt he demonstrated for Juan Williams, was a classic moment in contemporary Republican politics. This was the “scene of instruction,” when a black man was a proxy for a whole community, a stand-in for the country’s first black president, as Newt Gingrich showed just what he thinks about Barack Obama, specifically and about people of color, in general. In that moment, white conservatism’s contempt was palatable, undeniable and unapologetic.
2. Herman Cain, in one of the most grotesque performances in post-civil rights-era politics to date, deftly plays his designated role as an African-American advocate for some of the Tea Party and New Right’s most racist policy positions. Most notably, in numerous interviews Cain alluded to the Democratic Party as keeping African Americans on a “plantation,” and that black conservatives were “runaway slaves” who were uniquely positioned to “free” the minds of their brothers and sisters. The implication of his ahistorical and bizarre allusion to the Democratic Party and chattel slavery was clear: black Americans are stupid, childlike and incapable of making their own political decisions, as Cain publicly observed that “only thirty percent of black people are thinking for themselves.”
Doubling down, as a black conservative mascot for the fantasies of the Tea Party faithful, Herman Cain also suggested that anyone who accuses them of “racism” (ignoring all available evidence in support of this claim) were in fact anti-white, and the real racists.
‘Pizza Candidate’ Herman Cain Claims Blacks Vote For Dems Because They are ‘Brainwashed‘
Herman Cain’s disdain was not limited to the black public. He also argued that undocumented immigrants should be electrocuted at the U.S. border by security fences, and that Muslim Americans are inherently treasonous and should be excluded from government. Perhaps most troubling, Herman Cain advocated for extreme forms of racial profiling in which Muslims would have to carry special identification cards.
Racism and anti-black sentiment know no boundaries. Herman Cain demonstrates that some of its most deft practioners are (ironically) people of color.
3. Ron Paul argues that the landmark federal legislation that dismantled Jim Crow segregation in the 1960s was a moral evil and a violation of white people’s liberty. Ron Paul’s claim that the rights of black Americans are secondary to the “freedom” of whites to discriminate, is an almost perfect mirror for the logic of apartheid. Ron Paul’s white supremacist ethic is more than a dismissal of one of the crowning legislative achievements of the 20th century: it is the endorsement of a principle that conveniently allows white people to hate and discriminate in the public sphere at will–and without consequence–against people of color. This “freedom” is the living and bleeding heart of white racism.
Ron Paul: Black Males Age 13 and Up are Big, Strong, Tough, Scary and Criminal!
4. Rick Santorum tells conservative voters that black people are parasites who live off hard-working white people. Santorum’s claim that “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money” is problematic in a number of ways. First, Santorum channels the white supremacist classic Birth of a Nation and its imagery of childlike free blacks who are a burden on white society. In addition, Santorum’s assumption that black people are a dependent class is skewed at its root. Why? Santorum presupposes that African Americans are uniquely pathological and lack self-sufficiency, ignores the black middle-class, and directly race-baits a white conservative audience by telling them that “the blacks” are coming for their money, jobs and resources. There is no mention of Red State America’s disproportionate dependence on public tax dollars, or how the (white) middle-class and the rich are subsidized by the federal government.
Hatemonger Rick Santorum Says Obama is Taking ‘White’ Money & Giving it To ‘Blacks’
5. In keeping with the class warfare narrative, and as a way of proving their conservative bona fides, Republican candidates have crafted a strategy in which they repeatedly refer to the unemployed as lazy, unproductive citizens who would “be rich if they just went out and got a job.” In fact, as suggested by Mitt Romney, any discussion of the wealth and income gap in the United States (and the destruction of the middle class), should be done in a “quiet room,” as such truth-telling stokes mean-spirited resentment against the rich. Conservatives have an almost Orwellian gift for manipulating language. The financier class is reframed as “job creators.” Programs that workers pay for such as Social Security are equated with “welfare.” Americans who are victims of robber baron capitalism and structural unemployment are painted as dregs who want nothing more than to “live off of the system.” Despite all evidence to the contrary, unions are painted as bastions for the weak, the greedy, and those who hate capitalism.
Race is central here: Conservatives seeded this ground with their assault on the black poor. The invention of the welfare queen by Ronald Reagan became code for lazy, fat, black women who game the system at the expense of hard-working whites. The Right uses the same framing in order to attack immigrants as people who want to destroy the country and steal the scarce resources of “productive” white Americans. [ READ: Welfare -- A White Secret ]
Efforts to shrink “big government” are closely related to the Right’s observation that the federal government employs “too many” blacks. The Republican Party refined its Ayn Rand-inspired shock doctrine and disaster capitalism through decades of practice on black and brown Americans. The racist tactics that were once used to justify the evisceration of programs aimed at helping the urban poor are now being applied to white folks on Main Street USA during the Great Recession.
6. Mitt Romney wants to “keep America America.” The dropping of one letter from the Ku Klux Klan’s slogan, “Keep America American,” does not remove the intent behind Romney’s repeated use of such a virulently bigoted phrase. While Mitt Romney can claim ignorance of the slogan’s origins, he is intentionally channeling its energy. In the Age of Obama, the Republican Party is drunk on the tonic of nativism. From remarks about “the real America,” to supporting the mass deportation of Latinos and Hispanics, a hostility to any designated Other is central to the 21st-century know-nothing politics of the Tea Party-driven GOP. Romney’s slogan, “Keep America America” begs the obvious question: just who is American? Who gets to decide? And should there be moats and electric fences to keep the undesirables out of the country?
7. Rick Perry’s nostalgic memories of his family’s ranch, “Niggerhead.” You cannot choose your parents (or decide what your ancestors will christen the family retreat before your birth). You can, however, choose to rename the family ranch something other than the ugliest word in the English language.
Rick Perry’s ‘Niggerhead’: Racism is Still The Dirty Little Secret of The Republican Party (P 1/2)
The world that spawned and nurtured Rick Perry’s Niggerhead was none too kind to black people. Jim and Jane Crow were the rule of the land; it was enforced through violence, threats and intimidation. Moreover, Rick Perry grew up in a “sundown town.” These were communities from which blacks were banished by violence, and where white authorities made sure that African Americans would never again be allowed in the area. The whiteness of memory and nostalgia is blinding. While he has finally dropped out of the race, the Niggerhead episode is emblematic of Rick Perry’s obsession with states’ rights, and a broader fondness for the Confederacy and secession. These are traits he shares in abundance with the remaining Republican presidential candidates.
8. Former candidate Michele Bachmann suggests that the black family was stronger during slavery than in freedom. Her claim is not just a simple misunderstanding of history and the importance of family in the Black Experience. No, she is signaling to a tired, white supremacist, slavery-apologist narrative which opines that African Americans were/are not yet ready for freedom, and could only “flourish” under the benign guidance of the Southern Slaveocracy.
The GOP’s Iowa Vow: African American Children Were Better off During 1860′s Slavery Than Today
In a moment when states such as Arizona and Texas are outlawing ethnic studies programs, and when the Tea Party and its allies are leading an assault on educational programs that are not sufficiently “pro-American,” Bachmann’s claims are part of a broader effort to literally whitewash U.S. history.
When married to her belief in a willful lie that the framers of the United States Constitution were abolitionists who fought tirelessly to eliminate slavery (in reality, both Jefferson and Washington were slaveowners), and a defense of slaveholding Christian whites who “loved their slaves,” Bachmann’s ignorance of the facts transcends mere stupidity and slips over to enabling white supremacy.
9. The Republican Party’s 2012 presidential candidates’ near-silence about how the Great Recession has destroyed the African American and Latino middle-class. This speaks volumes about just how selectively inclusive the Republican Party?which markets itself as the defender of the “American Dream” and of an “opportunity society“?really is. During the Ronald Reagan-Politico debate, the Republican candidates were asked what they would do to address the gross and disparate impact of the Great Recession on black and brown communities. While whites are suffering with an official unemployment rate of almost 10 percent, African Americans have struggled with a rate that is almost two to three times as high. In addition, the black and brown middle-class has seen its income, assets and wealth gutted by the Great Recession, where in 2011, whites have almost 20 times the average net worth of African Americans. As always, when White America gets a cold, Black America gets the flu…or worse.
In that awkward moment, only Rick Perry chimed in and proceeded to recycle the same tired rhetoric about “growing the economy” as a vague cure for all ills. One must ask: how would the Republican candidates have responded if the white middle-class had been devastated in the same manner, and to the same degree, as the black and brown middle-class? I would suggest that for the former, it would be treated as a crisis of epic proportions; for the latter, it is a mere curiosity and inconvenient fact.
Politics is about a sense of imagined community. The Ronald Reagan-Politico debate made clear that while the African American and Latino middle-class is being destroyed, the Republican Party has little concern or interest in remedying such a tragic event. It would seem that the Republican Party’s “big tent” has no room for “those people.”
10. The echo chamber that is Fox News, right-wing talk radio, the conservative blogosphere, and Republican elected officials daily stoke the politics of white racial resentment, bigotry and fear. Ultimately, the Republican candidates would not use racism as a weapon if it were not rewarded by their voters, and encouraged by the party’s leadership. An army travels on its stomach; it needs foot soldiers and shock troops to advance its aims. From the ugly, race-based conspiracy fantasies of Birtherism to the astroturf politics of the Tea Party to a news network whose guests routinely disparage Barack Obama with such labels as “ghetto crackhead” to the bloviating racist utterances by opinion leaders such as Rush Limbaugh, to the common bigotry on display at right-wing Web sites that use monkey, ape, gorilla, pimp, and watermelon imagery to depict the United States’ first black president and his family, it is clear that racism “works” for the Republican Party. To ignore the attraction of rank-and-file white conservatives to such ugliness is to overlook the driving force behind the Republican nominees’ behavior.
About The Author: Chauncey DeVega — Editor and founder of the blog We Are Respectable Negroes which has been featured by the NY Times, the Utne Reader, and The Atlantic Monthly. Writing under a pseudonym, Chauncey DeVega’s essays on race, popular culture, and politics have appeared in various books, as well as on such sites as the Washington Post’s The Root and Popmatters.
Outside of Fox, the bunch of racists, homophobes and gymnastic flip-floppers contending for the GOP presidential nomination — for November’s fight against Obama — have not shied way from the Republican tradition of race-baiting.
One, Newton Leroy Gingrich landed in hot water a couple of weeks ago when he said he wanted to appear before the NAACP and tell them why they should want pay checks over food stamps.
When Gingrich appeared at a town hall at the Jones Memorial AME Zion Church in Columbia, South Carolina, on Saturday, he launched straight to economic issues, offering his “solutions” to create jobs by drilling for offshore natural gas and modernizing the Port of Charleston for when the Panama Canal is expanded, writes: Sarah Posner
The audience didn’t care about Gingrich’s “solutions.” The first question out of the box came from a gentleman who wanted to know, quite simply (to paraphrase), what in the hell was Gingrich thinking when he said that kids should work as janitors?
The questions didn’t let up: will you retract your remark that Barack Obama is the “food stamp president?” (No, because more people are on food stamps under Obama, said Gingrich.) Why do Republicans place all blame for the country’s economic woes on Obama? And a heartbreaking question, from a schoolteacher and mother who recently became homeless, to which Gingrich failed to react like a, um, human. [ READ MORE ]
In Atlanta, Raphael Warnock, senior pastor Ebenezer Baptist Church, blended religion and politics into Sunday’s sermon and took a swipe at Newt Gingrich:
“He is playing an old game that’s part of the southern strategy…I think he’s relying on old logic of scapegoating and race baiting,” Warnock said, while referring to Gingrich’s anti-black “FoodStamp” slur.
The old goat also contesting for the GOP Nomination, Ron Paul — once described Dr. King as a “world-class philanderer who beat up his paramours” and “seduced underage girls and boys.” He even claimed — without a hint of proof — that Dr. King “made a pass at” fellow civil rights warrior Ralph Abernathy, who succeeded King as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). [ READ MORE ]
“Boy, it sure burns me to have a national holiday for Martin Luther King. I voted against this outrage time and time again as a Congressman. What an infamy Ronald Reagan approved it!” “We can thank him for our annual Hate Whitey Day,” he added.
Dr. King was the leading advocate of social justice and equality during his time. He rejected segregation and worked hard to alleviate economic inequality. He was against the Vietnam war — all wars. Like Obama, he was a “community organizer” — a noble title Republicans have defecated on with rampant abandon.
Republicans collectively stand for the polar opposite ideals. Since the New Deal, Republicans have been on the wrong side of every issue of concern to ordinary Americans; Social Security, the war in Vietnam, equal rights, civil liberties, church- state separation, consumer issues, public education, reproductive freedom, national health care, labor issues, gun policy, campaign-finance reform, the environment and tax fairness. No political party could remain so consistently wrong by accident. [ From EvilGOPBastards.com ]
Wrong on everything MLK stood for!
But, that has not stopped Republican hypocrites from trying to claim MLK as one of them — a stupid conservative bigot.
MLK was no Republican — and Gingrich and co. can harp all they want, …..the vast majority of black people want nothing to do with the Grand ‘White-Power‘ Party.
What Would ‘Community Organizer’ Martin Luther King Jr. Think of The Toxic GOP Politics Today?
Words in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘Letter From The Birmingham’ City Jail in April 1963
On MLK Day, Fox Hosts ‘UNTIE-TOM’ Star Parker To Discuss How MLK’s Message Has “Been Hijacked By Government Welfare Programs” — READ: Black Welfare Queens! [ REF: WELFARE: A WHITE SECRET ]
The Republican ‘voter fraud’ fraud: All over the US, GOP lawmakers have engineered schemes to make voting more difficult. Republicans all sing from the same hymnal on this one: voting must be tightly controlled to prevent fraud. Never mind that there is no fraud. Indeed, the Brennan Center found that voter fraud is so “exceedingly rare” that “one is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud.” Mickey Mouse was not allowed to register. Paul Newman did not vote from beyond the grave. Hordes of undocumented Mexicans have not stuffed ballot boxes (though a great many new, legal Latino voters have registered in Florida, Texas and other large states).
Hyper-conservative governors and legislators, working with templates produced by a shady cabal called the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), have pushed through laws to cut the number of voting days, impede groups registering new voters, demand proof of citizenship and otherwise make it more difficult to cast a ballot. Alec, partly funded by the John Birch-er billionaire Koch brothers and affiliated with Liam Fox’s Atlantic Bridge, is on a mission to shrink not just government (which it regards as a cancer on capitalism), but democracy itself. Ion Sancho, elections supervisor of Leon County, Florida, and veteran of Florida’s 2000 presidential election fiasco, says: “Every state that has a Republican legislature is doing this, from Maine to Florida. It’s a national effort.”
In the 2008 election, Barack Obama benefited from extended voting hours and early voting days, as well as rules allowing citizens to register and vote on the same day. It’s pretty obvious why: students, the elderly, and hourly-wage workers who can’t queue for hours without making the boss angry, tend to favor Democrats. Florida — which became a byword for Banana Republicanism and electoral corruption 11 years ago — has been positively zealous in attempts to restrict voting rights on the grounds that easy voting leads to waste, fraud and abuse. One lawmaker pitched a hissy fit, claiming that dead actors (Paul Newman, for one) constantly turn up on voter rolls and that “Mickey Mouse” had registered to vote in Orlando. State senator Mike Bennett wants to make voting “harder”; after all, he said, “people in Africa literally walk 200 or 300 miles so they can have the opportunity to do what we do, and we want to make it more convenient? How much more convenient do you want to make it?”
Souls to the Polls, Early Voting, League of Women Voters, 1965 Voting Rights Act., Governor Rick Scott, Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Indiana, Tennessee, Ohio, Student ID Cards
Florida Republicans addressed the problem of “convenience” earlier this year by cutting early voting days from 14 to eight, cutting budgets for expanded polling places and eliminating Sunday voting: African American (and some Latino) churches had successfully run a post-sermon “Souls to the Polls” operation, getting out the vote in 2004, 2006 and 2008. Florida has also attacked civic-minded people trying to register new voters. Jill Ciccarelli, a teacher at New Smyrna Beach High School, wanted to foster a sense of citizenship amongst her pupils, so she helped the ones who were old enough register. She didn’t know she was breaking the law. Now, all individuals or groups must file a “third party registration organisation” form with the state, and instead of having ten days to deliver the paperwork, they must now do it in 48 hours. Failure to comply could draw felony charges and thousands of dollars in fines.
The nonpartisan League of Women Voters, promoters of civic responsibility since 1920, has now abandoned its Florida voter drives: LWV is suing the state, saying that Florida’s clampdown on the franchise violates the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Florida’s response? Governor Rick Scott, a Republican elected in 2010 and steeped in Koch-flavored Tea, wants to largely exempt Florida — a former slave state with as rich a racist history as Alabama or Mississippi — from the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
Florida’s not out front on this: many states, including those fat with electoral college votes such as Texas, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Indiana, Tennessee and Ohio, have passed harsh restrictions on who can vote and how. More than a dozen states demand that people show an approved photo ID card. Surely, the middle-class reasoning goes, every red-blooded American has a driving license? But hundreds of thousands — many elderly, disabled or just plain poor — do not. Representative Terri Sewell, a member of Congress from Alabama, told the New York Times that her wheelchair-bound father had used his United States social security card as proof of identity when voting. Now that’s been outlawed.
In Texas, student ID cards are no longer be valid for voting; neither are ID cards issued by the federal Veterans Administration. All those students and war vets need to do is go buy a gun: concealed weapons permits are acceptable at the polls.
Republicans all sing from the same hymnal on this one: voting must be tightly controlled to prevent fraud. Never mind that there is no fraud. Indeed, the Brennan Center found that voter fraud is so “exceedingly rare” that “one is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud.” Mickey Mouse was not allowed to register. Paul Newman did not vote from beyond the grave. Hordes of undocumented Mexicans have not stuffed ballot boxes (though a great many new, legal Latino voters have registered in Florida, Texas and other large states).
But why let the facts get in the way of rigging an election? Some conservative sages have let the veil slip long enough for us to see what’s really going on. Former Arkansas governor-turned-paid-Murdoch-mediaite Mike Huckabee likes to say that if people have friends who don’t plan to vote the rightwing line, “Let the air out of their tires on election day. Tell them the election has been moved to a different date.”
Obviously, democracy is no fun if just anyone can play.
Republican Voter Suppression
Republican Election Fraud — How They Steal Elections
About The Author: Diane Robertsis a writer and broadcaster. A native Floridian, she was educated at Oxford where she was a Marshall scholar. She broadcasts regularly for the BBC and National Public Radio in America, and writes for newspapers such as the Washington Post, the New York Times and the St Petersburg Times. She is also professor of literature and writing at Florida State University and the author of four books, the most recent of which is Dream State, a political history of Florida. Visit her website at: http://dkroberts.com/
In this investigative biography of the outspoken and controversial Speaker, correspondent Peter J. Boyer takes an inside look at how Gingrich led the GOP to become the majority party and examines the childhood, people and events that shaped Gingrich’s personality and political career. [CLICK HERE FOR MORE]
—————————————————————– The Inner Quest of Newt Gingrich
By Gail Sheehy Vanity Fair, September 1995
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[ PART 1 ]
From the cauldron of his childhood — the father who abandoned him, the manic depressive mother who loved him too much, the stepfather whose anger shaped the family — Newt Gingrich emerged with a heroic need that became his mission. Talking to his inner circle of family, friends, and associates, and to the Speaker himself, GAIL SHEEHY learns the details of Newt’s wars, his women, and his contract with himself.
“I think you can write a psychological profile of me that says I found a way to immerse my insecurities in a cause large enough to justify whatever I wanted it to.” Newt Gingrich is coaching me on writing about himself. Ten years ago he was arguably the most disliked member of Congress. Today he is holding forth from the veranda of the office of the Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, looking down on the Capitol Mall as if it were the great lawn of his own vast estate.
Newt Gingrich is the sonic boom of a presidential election season –a loud noise generated by a media meteor moving at supersonic speed. In June he declared that all presidential candidates would have to adjust to a world in which his Congress is “relatively more important than the White House.” True, he has shaken up the jowly House and led the Republicans out of the wilderness, but he remains an untested national commodity. Maybe that explains the big presidential tease, which will continue as long as he can hold the spotlight. “If there were a large enough vacuum, then obviously I’m willing to consider it,” he said in July.
No, no, Newt! plead many of his ardent supporters and strategists. But other observers say the G.O.P –a party which, in columnist Joe Klein’s words, “can’t resist a tent show”– won’t be able to resist “drafting” Newt. Meanwhile, he is honing his evangelical skills on a 25-city P.R campaign bankrolled with a loan from Rupert Murdoch and designed to sell his new book To Renew America –and himself.
But his greatest presidential stumbling block may be right under his nose. At home, Newt’s second wife, Marianne Ginther Gingrich, tells me she doesn’t see herself in the First Lady’s job. “Watching Hillary has just been a horrible experience,” commiserates Marianne. “Hillary sticking her neck out is not working.”
What happens if Newt runs?, I ask.
“He can’t do it without me,” she replies. “I told him if I’m not in agreement, fine, it’s easy” –she giggles at her naughtiness. “I just go on the air the next day, and I undermine everything…I don’t want him to be president and I don’t think he should be.”
Why not?
“Right now, the presidency is not a single person. It’s not so much what he’d be doing. It’s what I’d be doing.”
On the day of our interview, Newt looks relaxed. It’s Sunday, Marianne is far away, and he can sit back, roll up his sleeves, scratch his arms, even let his belly flop over his belt. He has agreed to see me after months of my petitions because he knows I have done 70 interviews with his family, friends, and political operatives. As I told his press secretary, Tony Blankley, there are many conflicting stories about Newt and I wanted the man himself to sort them out. Newt Gingrich is his own creation, and I was fascinated by how this extraordinary person developed.
Newt’s friends have told me that his primary references are movies. They have informed his heroic ideal. “When he watches John Wayne or Jimmy Stewart on TV, he lives out these movies,” says Melvin Steely, a former colleague at West Georgia College.
So we start with films, namely Rob Roy.
“I liked half of Rob Roy,” the Speaker says, “but The Last of the Mohicans is a much more romantic movie…Rob Roy is much too harsh…The best of America is romantic realism. It leads us to be permanently frustrated with ourselves because we set an impossibly high ideal.”
It is no small coincidence that the medieval hero Robert the Bruce came to our attention as a character in Braveheart during Newt’s big summer. Gingrich has long enshrined the legendary Scot in his pantheon of psychic heroes.
In the whole history of Europe, writes one historian, it would be hard to find a more “lunatic venture” than the Bruce’s. For eight solid years, in a quest that Professor G. W. S. Barrow termed “the private revolution of an ambitious man,” this weakling son of a tyrant king warred to restore the Scottish monarchy.
“I’m a mythical person,” says Newt, no stranger to revolutions. “I had a period of thinking that I would have been called ‘Newt the McPherson,’ as in Robert the Bruce.” He is referring to his childhood, when he strongly identified with his biological father, Newton McPherson.
“Robert the Bruce,” Newt continues, “is the guy who would not, could not, avoid fighting…He carried the burden of being Scotland.” Like the Bruce, Newt feels he must carry the burden of being his nation.
“What makes me unusually intense is that I personalize the pain of war, the pain of children being killed, the pain of a 16-year-old who has been permanently cheated by his school and cannot read.”
“Are you an emotional person?”
“Oh yeah, very emotional,” Newt declares.
“Compassionate?” I venture.
“I’m not sure what the word means.” Newt frowns. “I’m enraged that a 16-year-old has been cheated their entire life by a system that has paid $7,000 a year to educate them and did nothing for its money. Now, is that compassion, or is it just rage?”
Newt –who once called himself “a psychodrama living out a fantasy”– is growing interested in our dialogue. He props his hands, as acquisitive and chubby as a baby’s, on top of his head as I warily approach the issue of his patrimony.
“Let me back up for a second,” he interrupts. “I’ve never done this before. It’s totally dangerous. But I like the way you’re approaching this…I think it is fair to say, if you want to write a psychological piece, that part of my life has been trying to live up to a standard of toughness and responsibility…My relatives were either farmers, steelworkers, or industrial laborers. My uncle Cal was a highway-construction foreman who was enormously tough. He was shot and chased the guy…He couldn’t catch him because of the bullet in his leg.”
He unfurls his life story like a myth.
“My father grew up as a very angry person. When he signed up for the navy, the recruiting officer said, ‘Why did you fill out your application wrong?’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ And he said, ‘You put your grandmother’s name in where your mother’s name should be.’ He found out that he had been born out of wedlock. They never told him. Talk about being outraged!”
The saga continues: “Big Newt was physically enormous. Six foot three, and could use a nine-pound sledgehammer with one hand. I’d say from the time he was 16 to 35 he was in bar fights…My mother was very frightened of him. So she decides to file for divorce. He tries to talk her out of it, fails, scares her even more, so she divorces him and then marries Bob Gingrich, who is also adopted…So that’s the background, and people assume I’m some right wing, out-of-touch Neanderthal who doesn’t get it. I mean, I’m adopted! Both of my fathers are adopted! I mean, give me a break!”
Confusion over his identity was a recurrent theme in Newt’s boyhood. “I did not use the word ‘stepfather’ until I was talking to Marianne in 1982,” he says. “I had a very confused blockage in sorting out the relationships.”
“A heck of a mess when you think about it,” Gingrich’s mother, Kit, says reviewing the past. Big Newt, having been abandoned by his real father, Robert Kerstetter, was taken in by Newton and Hattie Belle McPherson and raised in a household where his real mother, Louise Kepner, was passed off as his sister. Bob Gingrich was a foster child, not adopted until he was 16. It sounds like a Faulkner saga. In Pennsylvania.
A painful turn came for Newt at the age of 16, when he and his family returned to the U.S. from Europe, where his stepfather had been stationed in the army.
“Your stepmother remembers you coming back furious,” I say. “You went to her and said, ‘Why did my father take my name from me?’”
Anger flashes in Newt’s face as he takes a sip from his dinosaur mug. “I was furious because I figured out in Europe that my real father had agreed to allow me to be adopted.”
Kit Gingrich has already told me the story of Newt’s adoption. According to Kit, Big Newt, who made little effort to see the boy, called her when Newt was three years old. “His new wife was pregnant,” says Kit. “He said that if I would drop the past four months of child support payments, Bob could adopt Newtie. Isn’t it awful, a man willing to sell off his own son?”
Newt’s stepmother, Marcella McPherson, recalls that after Newt’s return from Europe the tormented adolescent asked, “‘Why can’t I come live with you?’ He didn’t want to get out of my husband’s sight.”
Newt grows pensive as he thinks back to the summer of 1960. He was 17, rebellious, searching. “Wandering around Harrisburg,” he says, “I remember thinking that in the Scottish tradition…I would have been mythically called the McPherson. As in Robert the Bruce.”
“When did Big Newt decide he wanted to get you back?”
One cannot forget that the contemporary Republican Party was born with the 
Presidential candidate and angry white man 
