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United States News Title: Gingrich--the Man with the Plan! Some British readers of my first little screed were bewildered, even offended by the insertion of Charlie Sheen into a political column. What does a properly disgraced film star have to do with the presidential race? I don't blame non-American readers for not understanding the most basic fact of American politics, that it is not simply British politics subjected to media hype. It is media hype, pure and simple, a form of mass entertainment that has more in common with soap operas and sit coms than with even the most degraded politics in Europe. Here's one way of understanding it. Silvio Berlusconi is a classically Italian political figure: he struts like Mussolini and enjoys a private life that Elagabalus might have envied. Nonetheless, Berlusconi has modelled himself on American politicians. What Berlusconi understands, and I admire him for it, is that in postmodern politics there is no reality beyond the media. That is why he has tried to own whatever television channels he cannot control. One of the American who has understood the game is presidential candidate New Gingrich. One of the most basic rules is the rule of contemporaneity. Nothing that happened much before the last election matters. President Obama, in blaming George Bush for all our economic woes, is whistling past a graveyard. It may be true, but it doesn't matter. So, the Americans who bother to listen to what Gingrich is saying these days have forgotten his infamous book deal with Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch was seeking political support for the media monopolies he was establishing in major US markets, particularly New York, and it was a simple matter to give the Republican Party's then master, House Speaker Gingrich, a fat deal. There were captious critics who compared the Gingrich deal with Speaker Jim Wright's sweet arrangement by which supporters who attended his banquets could "buy" Wright's "book." It was none other than Newt Gingrich who drove Wright out of politics for this comparatively innocent piece of fund-raising. Challenged on his hypocrisy, Gingrich retorted that his was a real book. Gingrich is now back on the campaign trail posing as the reigning intellectual of the GOP. His enemies always concede, "Newt may be crazy, but he's real smart." Nothing could be farther from the truth, but Gingrich knows--I hate to repeat myself--that in American politics, media is the only reality. So a small-college professor, ignorant of all humane learning, can parade around the USofA as a paragon of erudition. Gingrich is living proof of H.L. Mencken's dictum that nobody every went broke underestimating the American people. An ignoramus who poses as a scholar, a serial adulterer who wants to lead the Moral Majority, a Catholic convert who was converted by his third wife (do the math, as we say over here), a self-styled conservative who is actually a disciple of Alvin Toffler, the zany author of Future Shock--if Gingrich did not exist, some political satirist would have to invent him. When I first became aware of Newt he was peddling his current idea du jour: inner-city children should be given Speak-and-Spell toys that would teach them standard English and prepare them for careers at major universities. Later he would adapt to the changing technological realities and call for free laptop computers. When I met him in, as I recall, 1984, he told a small group (perhaps half a dozen political intellectuals) that he could solve the problem of poverty by shipping the poor off to the moon or offworld planets. I ever so delicately inquired if the Sahara Desert or Antarctica would not be cheaper--there was, after all, air and a climate, though extreme, to which human beings could adapt themselves. He smiled the indulgent and benevolent smile you see in asylums, when you question the evidence for some poor man's paranoid obsession with invading extraterrestrials. To ramp up his campaign, Newt is now promising a 21st century version of his Contract with America. During the recent debate, he described his new deal as "more profound" than the 1994 Republican Contract that brought the Republicans roaring back against Bill Clinton. For a donation of only $19.94, you can get a seat at a Gingrich show in which he will unfold the marvels of the new plan. There is just one problem. The old plan led eventually to the triumph of George W, two unwinnable wars, cancerous deficits, and a Republican Party that sold out its committment to fiscal responsibility. Republicans leader who play by the rules simply sat on their hands. Only in America could a Mitch McConnel or Newt Gingrich insult audiences by calling for deficit reduction. A political diet of smoke and mirrors seems harmless until you try to live on it. Worse, Gingrich's contract nationalized local politics. The crooks running for Congressional seats no longer campaigned on the usual issues--more highway construction and pork for the district--but against the personal shenanigans of the most fiscally responsible President since Ronald Reagan's first term. At the time conservatives loathed Bill Clinton, but in retrospect he seems like a statesman. It is Gingrich's style of big-idea politicing that has made people like Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann and Herman Cain possible. It was he--though not he alone--who capped the transformation of American politics into mass-media events reminiscent of 1960's "Be-Ins." But here is the good news. The moving finger writes--or rather, the moving camera shoots, and then moves on. Gingrich and his fatuous bright ideas is as 20th century as 8-track tapes and Burt Reynolds movies. He lowered the bar so far that now anyone can hop over it.
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