The former speaker who led the charge against Bill Clinton raised eyebrows with a column touting the Democrats' first-term success
Republicans should "stop undercutting" Joe Biden, said former US House speaker Newt Gingrich, because the president won the race.
Writing on his own website, Gingrich said: “Conservative hostility to the Biden administration in our terms tends to blind us to how effective Biden is on his terms.
“… We dislike Biden so much, we narrowly focus on his speech difficulties, occasional odd behavior, memory loss, and other personal flaws. Our aversion to him and his policies led us to belittle him and the Democrats."
Gingrich's words pleased the White House – Ron Klain, Joe Biden's chief of staff, tweeted a link with the message: "You don't have to take my word for it anymore."
The column also caused consternation among Washington commentators, partly because, as Axios put it, “a leader of the New Right of the ’90s GOP argued that Joe Biden was not just a winner – but a role model.”
Gingrich has been a fierce partisan fighter since he entered Congress, in 1979, when he was the leading speaker in charges against Bill Clinton, culminating in a failed attempt to remove Democrats via impeachment. At the end of his column, he uses the term “Defeat Big Government Socialism” – his version of the title of his latest book.
Gingrich told Axios: “I'm thinking about football and the clarity of wins and losses. It struck me that, by the measure of his goals, Biden was far more successful than we would like to credit him with.
Biden recently turned 80. He said he would use the Christmas break to decide whether he would seek re-election.
Gingrich, 79, compared Biden to Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, the latter previously the oldest president ever to serve, was 77 years old when he left the White House in 1989.
Reagan and Eisenhower, says Gingrich, "preferred to be belittled" and "wanted people to think of them as likable — but harmless," and thus enjoyed great success.
“Biden has achieved something similar,” continued Gingrich, by taking an “unbelievably slim four-vote majority in the US House and a 50-50 tie in the Senate and turning it into a multi-trillion-dollar spending – and a series of radical bills.”
Gingrich also accused Biden of pursuing a “strategy of polarizing Americans against Donald Trump supporters” – more than 950 of whom have been indicted for their deadly Capitol riots following the former president's 2020 defeat – and of “grossly exaggerating the threat of abortion rights”, after The Supreme Court revoked that right this year.
But Gingrich also praised Biden for a major foreign policy challenge in his first term. President, t