Gingrich would be worse than Obama

Newt Gingrich calling Ron Paul “no better than Obama” was a top Drudge Report headline yesterday. Right below it read another headline, “I need another $1.2 trillion,” featuring a smiling Obama and a story about the president’s plan to increase the debt limit.

When Ron Paul introduced a budget plan in October calling for $1 trillion in cuts in one year, even conservatives who were not Paul supporters cheered. Said Gingrich of the plan: “It’s a non-starter.” When Rep. Paul Ryan introduced an entitlement reform plan this year, conservatives supported it as a bold first step. Gingrich called it “right-wing social engineering.”

Gingrich insists that he is a conservative. Gingrich says Paul is “divorced from reality.”

There is a candidate in this race who is divorced from reality. But it isn’t Ron Paul.

America faces an unprecedented debt problem. It’s without question America’s biggest problem. Former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen has called our debt the greatest threat to national security. It’s no secret that our current president is unwilling to face this problem.

But we also have Republican presidential front-runners who are equally unwilling to face it. GOP voters have already figured out that neither Gingrich nor Mitt Romney have conservative records worth crowing about. In fact, when it comes to actually limiting government, both men are pretty pathetic. It’s one thing to now say “nobody’s perfect.” It’s quite another to say that on virtually every issue of importance to conservatives in the last decade — amnesty, TARP, climate change — these men have mostly been on the liberal side. Watching Gingrich now argue with Romney over who’s more conservative is like watching the two guys from Milli Vanilli argue over who’s a better singer. And not surprisingly, for a significant portion of Republicans — Mitt and Newt’s lip-synch conservatism increasingly falls on deaf ears.

Comparatively, Ron Paul is the Pavarotti of limited government, whose tune continues to excite the base and roil the establishment. While Paul wants to cut $1 trillion tomorrow, Gingrich and Romney are stuck bickering over who is more responsible for giving Obama the blueprint for government healthcare — as both men have supported the individual healthcare mandate as “conservative.” It was reported this week that as late as 2006, Gingrich was still praising Romneycare in Massachusetts as the ideal healthcare model for the nation.

Paul would be “worse than Obama”?

To be fair, Gingrich’s contention that Paul is worse than Obama focuses largely on foreign policy — and it is on foreign policy where Gingrich is most like Obama and Paul is not. Writes Salon’s Glenn Greenwald: “As slim as the pickings are for Republican candidates on the domestic policy front, at least there are some actual differences in that realm … It is in the realm of foreign policy, terrorism and civil liberties where Republicans encounter an insurmountable roadblock.” Greenwald explains the similarities between Obama and contemporary conventional Republican foreign policy:

A staple of Republican politics has long been to accuse Democratic presidents of coddling America’s enemies (both real and imagined) … But how can a Republican candidate invoke this time-tested caricature when Obama has embraced the vast bulk of George Bush’s terrorism policies … extinguished the lives not only of accused terrorists but of huge numbers of innocent civilians with cluster bombs and drones in Muslim countries; engineered a covert war against Iran; tried to extend the Iraq war; ignored Congress and the constitution to prosecute an unauthorised war in Libya; adopted the defining Bush/Cheney policy of indefinite detention without trial for accused terrorists; and even claimed and exercised the power to assassinate US citizens far from any battlefield and without due process?

Greenwald asks:

How do you demonise Obama as a terrorist-loving secret Muslim intent on empowering US enemies when he has adopted, even extended, what was right-wing orthodoxy for the past decade? The core problem for Republican challengers is that they cannot be respectable Republicans because Obama has that position occupied.

Indeed. How Obama is handling these issues isn’t very different from how Bush did or how Gingrich says he would. Former Vice President Dick Cheney has even suggested that Obama owes Bush an apology for carrying on the exact same security-related policies as the last administration.

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