Newt: In the 1990s, Who Cared About the 10th Amendment?

By David Weigel

 

I've been working on other stuff today and couldn't keep track of the buffeting Newt Gingrich is taking even if I wanted to. Politico's scoop about the Gingriches' debt to Tiffany's is the kind of detail, like John Edwards' haircuts or Dan Quayle's spelling, that lends itself so easily to Jay Leno monologues that it might never fade. It's like watching a Street Fighter II character get flurry-slapped by E. Honda. And it's all happening to a fascinating candidate whom no one would call the frontrunner.

Phil Klein has a solid recap of Gingrich's air-clearing conference call, which succeeds in clearing very, very little. He's a prisoner of his record, which stretches back to times when Republicans entertained the idea of carbon caps, or health care mandates, or when they experimented with entitlement reform and got burned. He's failing litmus tests left and right. On the mandate:

It's nonsense to start a conversation by going back 18 years and playing "gotcha." I was explaining the position of conservatives who were trying to defeat HillaryCare. In 1993, you had nothing like the current focus on the 10^th amendment. You had nothing like the current desire to get power out of Washington. And you didn't have the sense of radicalism that Obama has injected into the system, in the sense of drifting toward a socialized bureaucratic structure that runs the whole country.

read more: http://www.slate.com/BLOGS/blogs/weigel/archive/2011/05/17/newt-in-the-1990s-who-cared-about-the-10th-amendment.aspx