Gingrich cheats as a historian

“A closing argument is the central choice you want voters to have in mind as they head to the voting booths,” he writes. “It should be very simple and resonate at a personal, emotional level with the American people. In 1980, Reagan’s closing argument was ‘morning in America’ versus the malaise of Jimmy Carter.”

That’s a very nice example, Dr. Gingrich. It makes a nice, simple story, even if it does happen to be flat out wrong.

“Morning in America” had nothing to do with Jimmy Carter or the election of 1980. In fact, actual factual history tells us that Reagan wouldn’t adopt that campaign theme until four years later, in the 1984 campaign against Walter Mondale. But since Mondale doesn’t have the same emotional resonance among Republicans as Carter, Gingrich simply rearranged that history to suit his needs.

Gingrich then goes on to blame the Democrats for creating today’s bad economy, contrasting current unemployment rates and record food stamp usage to what occurred after he and his fellow Republicans took control of the House in 1994:

“In four years, unemployment fell from 5.6% to 4.2% and food stamp usage dropped by 8 million Americans thanks to record job creation. Furthermore, we turned a $107 billion deficit into a $125 billion surplus in four years, paying off more than $400 billion in federal debt. And we did it with a liberal Democrat in the White House.”

Wrong yet again, Dr. Gingrich, particularly in those phrases “we did it …” and “we turned” a deficit into a surplus.

That bit of alternate history — a Gingrich specialty, by the way — neatly sidesteps the fact that in 1993, President Clinton signed into law the second largest tax increase in modern history (for the record, the largest was signed into law by President Reagan in 1982.) The bill was passed without a single Republican vote and with the tie-breaking vote in the Senate cast by Vice President Gore.