By Wes Pedersen
We are being played again by a peckerwood preacher from the South.
This time it's Newt Gingrich laying on the gospel of distrust from the bible of discontent. He's taken over the role played fleetingly by Florida's creepy Terry Jones, the pastor who threatened to burn the Koran even though he had never read it.
Gingrich has found the devil and is doing his damnedest to exorcise him from the great white temple on Pennsylvania Avenue and send him back to his roots: Kenya.
Kenya? Gingrich implies strongly that the president's roots are there. Barack Obama's father was a Kenyan, but Obama was born in Hawaii.
But, says the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, the president of the United States is not only linked to Kenya, he is "anti-colonial."
Anti-colonial? That's one of the lines that makes you wonder this about the former Man of the House who wants to be The Man in the White House: is he flipping off lines like that without thinking or is he just plain flipping out?
Anti-colonials, after all, led this country to independence and greatness. The proverbial Man on The White Horse who commanded the tea partiers then was George Washington. Old George had anti Brit writ large on his presidency.
Newt's mind must have wandered when he accused the president of descending from an anti-colonial. Of course Obama Senior was anti-colonial. Is there any black in Africa who isn't and wasn't?
Newt is using the anti gambit to his own gain as he prepares for his run at big power a via new version of the Contract With America, the conservative political manifesto he coauthored in 1994 and is credited with sweeping Republicans into command of both houses of Congress.. The Teas are fair game for him.
Anyone in the Movement out on the streets shouting, We are the people! We are invincible! is reckoned by Gingrich as a potential voter for him. Gingrich paints himself as a caring, understanding conservative. He promises he will bring Republican greatness back to the White House and family values back to America.
Now that's a hoot in a Georgia holler, even for Preacher Newt. He knows family values all right; he's violated them serially. He's the guy who discussed divorce with his first of three wives as she lay in a hospital suffering from cancer. He's the guy who was playing around on his second wife with wife-to-be No. 3 even as he was demanding the ouster of President Bill Clinton for having sex with a young intern. He's the guy who reportedly quit his church when the pastor rebuked him for not supporting his two kids, and later converted to Catholicism in what some call a move to make his reputation seem a bit cleaner to those who may remember that he left Washington in political disgrace a decade or so ago and returned to the South.
In his new book, Tom Delay, also a disgraced former Majority Leader of the House, gives this insight into Gingrich's moral caliber: Gingrich confided to reporters that he would never have shut America down for five days via political manipulations had the then president, Bill Clinton, not made Gingrich and former Senator Bob Dole ride in the back of Air Force One on its flight to Israel for the funeral of Yitzak Rabin.
Gingrich finds Sarah Palin useful. She's hot right now, and he knows that each knock she gives Obama and any liberals still in the president's posse is a boost for conservatism and, in a way, for him. He's No. 1 in the Washington-wise guy, anti-Obama, faction of the anti-spending crusade, but she's getting The Passion of The People, which may suit Gingrich just fine. If he can't get the GOP nomination in 2011, he'll be delighted to be the power behind the throne.
Palin may endorse Tea candidates but she's not about to leave the Republican party and join the movement. Nor is she ready to cede clout to Gingrich, Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, Dick Armey or other members of the GOP hierarchy who have their own eyes on the White House.
Tea party members are portrayed by pundits as conservatives who can't stand Obama but think the Republicans have helped lead the country into spendthrift hell. Their renegade nature, however, is attractive to many Democrats convinced that Obama has lost his grip on the presidency,
As the presidential campaign gets under way full force, look for antis from both parties to wind up together in a Gerry-built party working to unseat Obama. Gingrich would be selling himself as a conciliator between the GOP and Democratic leaders. It's doubtful he would leave the GOP to join a third party, but remember, he doesn't like being made to take a seat in the back. Given similar treatment by his party, he could defect to another in a flash.
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Wes Pedersen is a retired Foreign Service Officer and principal at Wes Pedersen Communications and Public Relations Washington, D.C. |