Joe Conason: Gingrich has not changed

Very few politicians have provided as much villainous entertainment over the years as Newt Gingrich, who now assures everyone that he has "matured" since his brief and tumultuous reign on Capitol Hill.

While the former speaker may at last have settled into a third marriage, there is no sign of improvement in his character. Gingrich is rising in current polls because Mitt Romney repels many Republicans and he is the last alternative.

But Gingrich's most recent debate performance revealed the same brazen dissembler whose flaws proved ruinous to him and — were he to win the nomination — would be disastrous for his party. On Nov. 9, with millions watching, he uttered a bald lie that revived memories of his most embarrassing moments in Washington.

The moment of truth — or more accurately, falsehood — came when CNBC's John Harwood noted that back in 2006, Gingrich was paid $300,000 by Freddie Mac, the gigantic federally backed housing financier.

"What did you do for that money?" asked Harwood, while trying to suggest that Gingrich sought to "fend off" stricter regulation of Freddie Mac and its sister company, Fannie Mae, by officials in the Bush administration while the Federal Reserve worried about the firms' inflated $5 trillion in mortgage securities.

Gingrich claimed he had warned the Freddie Mac officials who hired him that their lending practices were causing "a bubble" that was "insane" and "impossible."

He was not a lobbyist, he proclaimed, but a prophet: "It turned out, unfortunately, that I was right. ... And I think it's a good case for breaking up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and getting much smaller institutions back into the private sector to be competitive and to be responsible for their behavior."

The transcript shows that the audience applauded Gingrich after those closing conservative buzzwords — "private sector," "competitive," "responsible."

All politicians lie, but Gingrich specializes in this brand of self-puffing fantasy. The actual history of his employment by Freddie Mac is far less flattering to the former speaker than his own dramatic account.

According to stories published by the Associated Press and Bloomberg News since the debate, Freddie Mac hired Gingrich precisely to head off stronger regulation by arguing to Republicans that the mortgage firm had demonstrated the benefits of private-public partnerships.

The executives who dealt with Gingrich don't remember any brisk lectures about their risky "bubble." Instead, he attended strategy sessions at Freddie Mac's Washington offices — and failed to live up to their hope that he would provide useful advice or written materials defending their business. Bloomberg reports that Gingrich stuffed his bulging pockets with as much as $1.8 million in Freddie Mac consulting fees from 1999 to 2007.

Confronted with the Freddie Mac denials this past week, a Gingrich spokesman had the gall to cite a "confidentiality clause" in his 2006 contract that prohibits Gingrich from discussing his work for them. Evidently that clause only forbids him from telling the truth about the consulting deal, while leaving him free to invent a version that portrays him as prescient and honest.

Gingrich's conduct may not trouble the pork-choppers in the Republican hierarchy, who punted him as speaker only when he became a political liability after the Bill Clinton impeachment fiasco. But it ought to infuriate the Tea Party faction, which supposedly despises Washington insiders feeding off the public-private teat, as Gingrich obviously did.

As Salon.com's Joan Walsh so wittily put it, even Newt's baggage has baggage. His flip-flopping on climate change and health care makes Mitt Romney look consistent; his anti-Muslim extremism (almost) makes Michele Bachmann sound tolerant; and his record as the only speaker ever punished by the House Ethics Committee makes Rick Perry appear virtuous.

This sequel to Gingrich's failed career will likely end in farce — just like the original.

Contact the writer: info@creators.com

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