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“QUIT UNDERESTIMATING BIDEN”: Newt Gingrich shocks America with rare praise for President

“QUIT UNDERESTIMATING BIDEN”: Newt Gingrich shocks America with rare praise for President

Newt Gingrich shocks America with rare praise for President Biden

Longtime Republican stalwart Newt Gingrich has a stern warning for the GOP: “Quit underestimating President Biden.”

In a rare moment of clarity, the former Speaker of the House acknowledged that the President is winning – and that the Republican party had better recognize it before it’s too late.

“The clarity of winning and losing creates a clarity of analysis about who is doing well and who isn’t,” the lifelong conservative wrote on his blog Gingrich 360. “If you apply that simple model to Biden, you realize how well he is doing by his own definition of success.”

“We dislike Biden so much, we pettily focus on his speaking difficulties, sometimes strange behavior, clear lapses of memory, and other personal flaws. Our aversion to him and his policies make us underestimate him and the Democrats.”

“The Biden team had one of the best first-term off-year elections in history,” Gingrich conceded. “If Republicans are going to successfully work through the next two years in the Congress – and win the presidency in 2024 — we need to look much more deeply at what worked and what did not work in 2020 and 2022.”

But Gringrich’s analysis was not without predictable criticism of the successful policies introduced and passed since Biden took office — throwing the obligatory accusations of a “left-wing Big Government Socialist woke culture system,” into the diatribe.

Who wants to tell him that that isn’t a thing?

Gingrich is credited with setting the GOP on the trajectory that got it to where it is now — increasingly partisan, xenophobic, bigoted, and motivated by Christian nationalist beliefs.

Since winning congressional office in 1978 and being overwhelmingly elected as speaker in 1994 during former President Bill Clinton’s first term in office, Gingrich has always been unapologetic in his unrelenting crusade against the Democratic Party.

Which makes his pseudo-praise of President Biden’s accomplishments during the first two years in office both surprising — and suspect.

Both Biden and the lifelong Republican were elected to Congress in the ’70s, though serving in different chambers. So, Gingrich is well aware of POTUS’s ability to get things done across the aisle.

He admitted that although the current administration was working with a razor-thin House majority — and an evenly split Senate — they managed to pass bills that would traditionally have been voted down by conservatives in the legislature.

“The latest bill on sexual rights overriding all other rights was bitterly opposed by virtually every conservative even as it passed with Republican support,” Gingrich noted.

Julian Zelizer, the author of 2020s Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker and the Rise of the New Republican Partypointed out that Gingrich is at least partially — if not fully — responsible for the party’s current rhetoric and the tactics used to further their political agenda.

This was done “through a calculated campaign of attacks against political opponents, casting himself as a savior in a fight of good versus evil,” Zelizer wrote.

“Today there is not nearly enough understanding (or acknowledgment) among leading Republicans that our system and approach failed,” Gingrich said.

The former longtime congressman has stayed mostly in the background after resigning from office in 1999 amid backlash for the GOP’s poor showing in the 1998 election, as well as accusations of ethics violations.

But Gingrich has mounted a comeback recently — appearing regularly in interviews on right-wing media outlets and, more recently, going down to the state of Georgia to campaign for embattled Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, Herschel Walker.

That isn’t a good thing. With Newt Gingrich’s resurgence at a time when the country is the most polarized its been in recent history, the hyper-partisan former politician’s brand of polarization is the last thing that America needs.

Original source: Gingrich 360.

Follow Ty Ross on Twitter @cooltxchick

Ty Ross
News journalist for Occupy Democrats.

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