Checking His Baggage At The Door
One of the most effective strategies for defusing potentially damaging information is to have the person it damages release it early, before his opponents have the chance. It works equally well in litigation as well as in politics, if it gets out very early. Newt Gingrich knows this full well, and yesterday employed the strategy in dealing with a messy chapter in his own life:
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich acknowledged he was having an extramarital affair even as he led the charge against President Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky affair, he acknowledged in an interview with a conservative Christian group."The honest answer is yes," Gingrich, a potential 2008 Republican presidential candidate, said in an interview with Focus on the Family founder James Dobson to be aired Friday, according to a transcript provided to The Associated Press. "There are times that I have fallen short of my own standards. There's certainly times when I've fallen short of God's standards."
Gingrich argued in the interview, however, that he should not be viewed as a hypocrite for pursuing Clinton's infidelity.
"The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge," the former Georgia congressman said of Clinton's 1998 House impeachment on perjury and obstruction of justice charges. "I drew a line in my mind that said, 'Even though I run the risk of being deeply embarrassed, and even though at a purely personal level I am not rendering judgment on another human being, as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials."
Gingrich, like Rudy Giuliani, has had two divorces and three marriages. John McCain has been divorced once. Only Mitt Romney, alone among GOP frontrunners, has remained married to the same woman. This contrasts sharply with the Democratic leaders in the 2008 race; neither Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, nor John Edwards have had a divorce.
Politically, Gingrich made the right move. His peccadilloes already have had wide exposure, but not in the context of a national race. He wants to ask forgiveness up front for his mistakes, and evangelical Christians will feel compelled to grant it. It's the NCAA football strategy; take a loss up early in the season and one can still win the national championship, but the same loss late will almost certainly spell the end of any hopes of winning the big prize.
The charges of hypocrisy will not go away as easily. Gingrich has it correct when he says the problem with Clinton was the perjury, not the sex, and it's important to recall why Clinton had to lie about it in the first place. Ken Starr had originally reached an agreement with Webster Hubbell to cooperate with his investigation into the Whitewater mess, but when Hubbell suddenly got $400,000 for work with Revlon -- allegedly arranged by Vernon Jordan -- he stopped talking. Starr believed that to be a delberate obstruction of justice, and when Monica Lewinsky got a job at Revlon after Jordan arranged it following her identification as a potential paramour by Paula Jones' legal team, Starr thought he had found a pattern of deliberate obstruction.
And why was Jones pursuing depositions? She claimed that Clinton had sexually harassed her, and wanted to establish that he preyed on female staffer and interns, a strategy that Democrats had proudly written into law following the Clarence Thomas hearings where Anita Hill accused him of harassment in an attempt to derail his nomination to the Supreme Court. Clinton wasn't smart enough to default on the lawsuit and instead decided to fight it, which allowed for the depositions -- and the perjury -- that followed.
Gingrich didn't commit perjury. However, Gingrich had the affair with his staffer at the same time he pursued Clinton's impeachment for perjuring himself about sex with an intern. Given that Republicans made a great deal of noise about Clinton's sexual escapades with an employee/volunteer in the Oval Office itself, that comparison is not completely apples to oranges.
Regardless of whether the underlying investigation is well-advised, perjury is still perjury, and Gingrich is correct in saying that perjurers have to be held accountable for their false statements under oath. That's true of Scooter Libby as well.
UPDATE: My friend La Shawn Barber says the infidelity is not news, and she's right. However, to paraphrase Peter Allen, all old skeletons become new again in a presidential race, and Newt's smart to address it now. And another good friend, Rick Moran, reviews a few more of the old bones in this post.