Newt Gingrich: Big Idea Man, or Right Wing Crackpot?
Since malevolent gnome Newt Gingrich has a reputation as the right’s “idea man,” Ezra Klein is wondering: What are Newt Gingrich’s big ideas?
On Saturday’s edition of “Up With Chris Hayes,” Gary Johnson brought up an old Newt Gingrich idea I hadn’t heard before: Putting individuals who brought more than two ounces of marijuana into the United States to death. That sounded extreme, even for Gingrich. So I looked it up. And sure enough, there it is: “The Drug Importer Death Penalty Act of 1996.” What makes the bill even more amazing is that Gingrich himself is a confessed pot smoker. When he was young, he said, experimenting with drugs “was a sign we were alive and in graduate school in that era.”
Asked at Thursday night’s debate to name his campaign regrets, Gingrich said that he wished he had been “a big-ideas, big-solutions, Internet-based campaign from day one.” But like Ross Douthat, I’m at a loss to name even one big idea animating Gingrich’s campaign.
The only big idea that comes to mind is his proposal to fire union janitors in public schools, and put poor kids to work swabbing out the toilets instead.
Frank says: