Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich says that liberals like the vice president, Rep. Maxine Waters, Rep. Barney Frank, and others are "smearing" the Tea Party to hide their lack of a solution to sky-high unemployment and historic budget deficits.
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"I would say that smearing your opponent is the last refuge of a failed ideology," he tells Washington Whispers in a telephone interview from Hawaii, where he is campaigning and celebrating his 11th wedding anniversary. "The people who are attacking Tea Parties have noting to offer. They have no solution, and they are creating no jobs, they are presiding over the worse unemployment since the Great Depression, the largest deficits in American history, and therefore the only thing they can do is smear their opponents," he says.
"I think it's a sad commentary on the American left that it has no new thinking it has no willingness to be inventive," added the former House speaker who has seen donations and his approval rating rise since he slapped down the deficit "super committee" during the last GOP presidential debate. [See political cartoons about the GOP.]
Over the past month, several Democrats have lashed out at the Tea Party, charging that the hardliners are pushing the already conservative House to the right. The latest was Waters who said that the Tea Party "can go straight to hell." [Check out editorial cartoons about the Tea Party.]
Gingrich said he is pretty familiar with those kind of attacks. In 1994, when he and his Contract With America put the Democrats in the congressional minority for the first time in 40 years, bewildered Democrats struck at his tactics.
"The Democrats had not been out of power for 40 years. They knew it couldn't be their fault. Therefore I must have cheated because I disrupted the natural order," he says.
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Reader Comments Read all comments (1)
Rita of TN 9:57PM August 23, 2011