The New York Times Magazine today runs a longish article about the former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, that is noteworthy more for what it says about the Times than for what it says about Mr. Gingrich.
The article lets readers in on the fact that, even after the report of the Thompson Committee in Congress conclusively detailed the attempt by the Chinese Communists to influence the American election, the Times is still in denial. So, the article quotes Mr. Gingrich as saying, "In 1995 and 1996, between the unions, the Democrats and the Chinese Communists, I took 125,000 negative ads." The Times reporter is quoted as replying, "The Chinese Communists?" Mr. Gingrich replies, "Where do you think Clinton got part of the money?" The Times reporter is quoted as saying, "Isn't that pretty indirect?" No, really, it's not indirect, it's scandalous, and it's exasperating that the Times is still trying to minimize it.
The article goes on to claim that Mr. Gingrich "united the traditional party of the establishment behind an incendiary language scarcely heard in Washington since the days of Pitchfork Ben Tillman." What is the Times talking about? The article contains one quote Mr. Gingrich allegedly said in 1993 that might be characterized as incendiary, but the language he rallied the Republicans around was mainly carefully poll-tested phrases such as "opportunity society" that had overwhelming popular support and can hardly be characterized fairly as "incendiary."
The article goes on to claim that "in late 1995 the Republicans forced a shutdown of the government over their demand for a balanced-budget bill, thus sacrificing forever whatever moral advantage it had gained over the president." Never mind the use of "it" instead of "they" to refer back to "Republicans." For one thing, President Clinton is just as much to blame for the government shutdown as the Republicans were. For another thing, the notion that the Republicans, by shutting down the government, sacrificed "forever" whatever moral advantage they had over Mr. Clinton is just absurd. The Times doesn't even bother trying to substantiate this notion or to support it by marshaling any facts. The Times just flatly states its opinion, as if it were incontrovertible.
The Republicans "failed," the Times article about Mr. Gingrich goes on to assert, "because the American people did not in fact hate government, or the Democrats, or even the liberal culture. Not only did Clinton win the battle of public opinion, but on all those issues that had to do with personal values and cultural choices -- abortion, gay rights, school prayer, even the despised National Endowment for the Arts -- the G.O.P. made virtually no progress. And these failures culminated in the fiasco of the impeachment battle." Similarly, the article speaks of "the rejection" of the Republican "cultural agenda." This is just plain divorced from reality. This is nowhere more clear than in the way the Democratic Party's presidential ticket is conducting itself this year. If the American people have so throughly rejected the Republican views on "personal values and cultural choices," why did Al Gore choose as his running mate the Hollywood-bashing Senator Joseph Lieberman, who was the first Democratic senator to take to the Senate floor to condemn Mr. Clinton for Mr. Clinton's behavior in the Monica Lewinsky affair? Why is Mr. Gore himself making such a big deal of how happily and long he has been married to Tipper? Why is Mr. Gore going around on the campaign trail soft-pedaling his defense of abortion rights and soft-pedaling his support for gun control? Why is Mr. Gore billing himself as the candidate of small government and vowing not to expand the government payroll by a single additional worker? Even Mr. Clinton himself allowed the Defense of Marriage Act to become law, handing the Republicans in Congress a victory against gay rights. If the Republican agenda has been so thoroughly repudiated by the American people, why are the Democrats running on that agenda? Needless to say, the Times article doesn't grapple with these facts.
There They Go Again: The world view the Times displays in the magazine article about Mr. Gingrich resurfaces in the lead article in the Week in Review section of today's Times. The Week in Review article claims "the fact of the matter is that diatribes against a big federal bureaucracy don't resonate on the stump these days the way they did in Ronald Reagan's heyday." Again, the article gives no evidence for this assertion. The article also doesn't even bother to explain why, if this argument "doesn't resonate," both Al Gore and George W. Bush, who have lots of expensive polls and no interest in wasting the precious few closing days of the campaign making arguments that don't resonate, are each campaigning as the small-government candidate.
The same Week in Review article throws in a disparaging adverb about the Bush campaign in an otherwise parallel construction. "The Bush campaign desperately wants to cast the vice president as a Democratic caricature: spending big, promising big, regulating big and using the tax code to interfere with your life. Meanwhile, Mr. Gore's operation wants Americans to dismiss the Texas governor as a captive of big business, who will sacrifice the middle class in the name of cutting the government." The Bush campaign "desperately wants," while the Gore campaign just plain "wants." Talk about getting desperate.