I have four items for my write-up today on Newt Gingrich's 1998 book, Lessons Learned the Hard Way.
1.
Newt talks about how he and several House Republicans sought to block a
measure to cut Medicare premiums, since Medicare needed those premiums
to keep up with the rising cost of health care; otherwise, Medicare
would go bankrupt. Newt states on page 51 that the attempt to freeze
premiums "would give the President [Bill Clinton] the opportunity to
sound the old class warfare theme of the Republicans' plans to offer tax
cuts to the rich while blocking premium cuts for the poor."
I
can appreciate the idea that people need to pay into a system to keep
it solvent. My problem is that Republicans largely seem to have this
sort of attitude when the people paying into the system in question are
middle income. When it comes to upper income people, however, they sing
a different tune, for they promote tax cuts. But I cannot speak in
absolutes here, for there are times when Republicans support cutting
taxes that hurt the poor and the middle class, such as the gasoline tax,
or the tax on cigarettes and alcohol.
2. One error
that Newt Gingrich thinks he and the House Republicans made was to
underestimate Bill Clinton. I enjoyed what Newt said on pages 55-56:
"People
feeling confident of their own strength often fail to take the proper
measure of their opponents. That was certainly the case with us and the
President. Had we done our homework about this man, especially about
his career in Arkansas, we would never have been quite so confident of
our ability to push him into signing our legislation into law. This was
a man who had lost a congressional race, bounced back to become
Arkansas attorney general, been elected the youngest governor in the
country, failed to win reelection, then became governor again for four
terms. Next he ran for President against an incumbent George Bush, who,
coming off a very popular war, for a time had very high approval
ratings. Though in the early summer of 1992 he was running third in the
polls behind Bush and Ross Perot, he survived both the revelation that
he had dodged the draft and what a member of his campaign team had
unforgettably dubbed 'bimbo eruptions' and gone on to win the
presidency. To underestimate such a politician is a serious error, and
it is, I am afraid, an error we committed in 1995-96."
3. Newt
made an interesting point about Democrats in the House of
Representatives who became Republicans. According to Newt, they're
usually shocked because, whereas the Democrats are cohesive and
encourage a great deal of group-think within their own ranks, the
Republicans are more independently-minded. Newt speculates that this is
because many Republicans were entrepreneurs, who are quite
independent. My impression is that the Republican Party in the
House and Senate became more cohesive with time, for I've heard about
Tom Delay's tough party discipline, and how Republicans were pressured
to vote for the prescription drug bill.
4. Newt talks
about how the Washington establishment equates departure from
conservatism as "growth". This sort of attitude annoys me, too. But I
see it on both sides. How many conservatives have presented
liberalism as immature, youthful idealism that people will outgrow once
they try to earn a living and have to pay taxes? Many
conservatives quote Winston Churchill's remark that, if you reach a
certain age and are still a liberal, you must not have a brain.
But,
in a sense, I can identify with both sides on this. I think that there
is idealism and realism, maturity and immaturity, on both sides.
Conservatives are realistic about how taxes and regulations are a
burden on people, and also about the inefficiencies of government
bureaucracies. But they are overly idealistic in that they expect for
tax cuts to create an economic Garden of Eden. Liberals often (not
always, but often) tend to turn a blind eye to government inefficiency,
but they are more aware of the problems that lower and middle income
people face, in terms of health care, the decline of the American dream,
etc.