Newt Gingrich : Who Is ?

Newton Leroy "Newt" Gingrich ( /ˈnjuːt ˈɡɪŋɡrɪtʃ/; born Newton Leroy McPherson; June 17, 1943) is an American politician, author, and political consultant. He represented Georgia's 6th congressional district as a Republican from 1979 until his resignation in 1999, and served as the 58th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. Gingrich is a candidate for the 2012 Republican Party presidential nomination.

In the 1970s, Gingrich taught history and geography at the University of West Georgia. During this period he ran twice (1974 and 1976)[3] for the United States House of Representatives before winning in November 1978. He served as House Minority Whip from 1989 to 1995.


A co-author and architect of the "Contract with America", Gingrich was a major leader in the Republican victory in the 1994 congressional election. In 1995, Time named him "Man of the Year" for "his role in ending the four-decades-long Democratic majority in the House".[4] While he was House speaker, the House enacted welfare reform, passed a capital gains tax cut in 1997, and in 1998 passed the first balanced budget since 1969. The poor showing by Republicans in the 1998 Congressional election and pressure from Republican colleagues caused Gingrich's resignation from the speakership on November 5, 1998, and then the House on January 3, 1999.

Since leaving the House, Gingrich has remained active in public policy debates and worked as a political consultant. He founded and chaired several policy think tanks, including American Solutions for Winning the Future and the Center for Health Transformation. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.[5] He has written or co-authored 27 books. In May 2011, he announced his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

Gingrich converted to Roman Catholicism in 2009 with the help of Father C. John McCloskey[6], after being raised Lutheran and spending most of his adult life as a Southern Baptist. He has been married three times, with the first two marriages ending in divorce. He has two children from his first marriage and has been married to Callista (Bisek) Gingrich since 2000.

Early life, family, and education

Newton Leroy McPherson was born at the Harrisburg Hospital in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on June 17, 1943. His mother, Kathleen "Kit" McPherson (née Daugherty; 1925–2003), and father, Newton Searles McPherson (1923–1970),[7] married in September 1942, when she was 16 and McPherson was 19. The marriage fell apart within days.[8][9][10] He is of German, English, Scottish, and Irish descent.

In 1946, his mother married Army officer Robert Gingrich (1925–1996), who adopted Newt.Gingrich has three younger half-sisters, Candace Gingrich-Jones, Susan Gingrich, and Roberta Brown Gingrich was raised in Hummelstown (near Harrisburg) and on military bases where Robert Gingrich was stationed. The family's religion was Lutheranism. He also has a half-sister and half-brother Randy McPherson from his father's side.
In 1961, Gingrich graduated from Baker High School in Columbus, Georgia. He had been interested in politics since his teen years while living in Orléans, France, where he visited the site of the Battle of Verdun and learned about the sacrifices made there and the importance of political leadership.[14] Choosing to obtain deferments granted to college students and fathers, Gingrich did not enlist in the military, and was not drafted during the Vietnam War. He expressed some regret about that decision in 1985, saying, "Given everything I believe in, a large part of me thinks I should have gone over.

Gingrich received a B.A. degree in history from Emory University in Atlanta in 1965. He then proceeded to earn an M.A. (1968) and Ph.D. (1971) in modern European history, both from Tulane University in New Orleans.[16] He spent six months in Brussels in 1969–70 working on his dissertation, "Belgian Education Policy in the Congo 1945–1960".[17] In 1970, Gingrich joined the history department at West Georgia College as an assistant professor. In 1974 he moved to the geography department and was instrumental in establishing an interdisciplinary environmental studies program. Denied tenure, he left the college in 1978.

Congressional campaigns

In 1974, Gingrich made his first bid for political office as the Republican candidate in Georgia's 6th congressional district, which stretched from the southern Atlanta suburbs to the Alabama state line. He lost to 20-year incumbent Democrat Jack Flynt by 2,770 votes. Gingrich ran up huge margins in the more suburban areas of the district, but was unable to overcome Flynt's lead in the more rural areas.[20] Gingrich's relative success came as a considerable shock on two fronts. Flynt had never faced a serious challenger—indeed, Gingrich was only the second Republican to even run against him.[21] Additionally, 1974 was a disastrous year for Republicans nationally due to fallout from the Watergate scandal.
Gingrich sought a rematch in 1976, this time losing by 5,100 votes.

With Gingrich priming for another run in the 1978 elections, Flynt decided not to run for re-election and retired. Gingrich defeated Democratic State Senator Virginia Shapard by 7,500 votes.[23][24] Gingrich was re-elected six times from this district, only facing a close general election race once—in the House elections of 1990—when he won by 978 votes in a race against Democrat David Worley. Although the district was trending Republican at the national level, conservative Democrats continued to hold most local offices, as well as most of the area's seats in the General Assembly, well into the 1980s.

Don`t You Know ?
Newt Gingrich, who is apparently (really?) a serious candidate for president, seems to kind of hate poor children. Or, if you think janitorial work is tons of fun, he loves them. I’m sure we all remember last summer, when Fox news broke the startling story that poor people have refrigerators.
Lamenting that people are not so hard up for cash that they can afford to keep their eggs at a temperature that won’t kill them, or that kids are spending time learning to read rather than mop, seems pretty harsh. I don’t usually hear that about the families I work with.
But I have been subjected to views along these lines. I’m sure you’ve all heard them as well. Everyone seems to have a neighbor who drives a Lexus to recertify for their foodstamps, or a deadbeat, unemployed cousin who has the ultra-premium cable package, complete with Showtime. Of course there are all those people in soup kitchens making calls on their iPhones, and every kid in a failing school is wearing the latest Jordans.
I mean, those people are living better than I am! And I work!
Of course, this isn’t true of many people we work with. I have a lot of families with video game addict children, but those expensive games are always purchased second hand at Game Stop. They’re looking fashionable, but that shirt was five bucks at a no-name warehouse on Fordham Road. The nice phone is most often a gift from grandma. People have told me that I’m not seeing the bigger picture–what about how much the phone plan costs a month? Um, you’re stupid. Everyone participant I work with has a pay-as-you-go deal, and very often they don’t have minutes at all.
We also hear a lot about how the people we work with just don’t know how to budget. They act like cable is a necessity. (It’s not, but I can see how you might feel that way if you have six kids.) They buy too much pre-made food. (Again, when you’ve got a bunch of hungry kids in a one bedroom apartment, and you’ve been working all day? I get it.) They don’t prioritize. (Unlike me. I needed that novelty size Pez dispenser.)
As a society, we’re too hard on the poor. We expect things of them that we ourselves can’t do. We learn to defend against these viewpoints in
Comedy Central
 social work school. But those who say low-income people need to budget and prioritize better? They’re not always wrong.
I don’t like to say it. It goes against my liberal social work sensibility. But I have worked with some people who frustrate me in this regard. They spend more money on junk than on concrete things that their children need. I had a mother ask me for band-aids to take home for her child, explaining that she didn’t have enough money because they had just bought a Nintendo Wii. Another worker was very upset to find out that her family that was facing eviction was still paying for three cable boxes. A friend was at a loss when a mother she helped to find a new apartment was late on her rent, because she spent her pay check on a dinette set instead.
I don’t like to tell these stories. Like I said, poor people get enough shit. There are enough people who think we waste money on public assistance programs by enabling people too stupid to budget properly. As long as the children’s needs are met, how adults choose to spend their money is none of my business.
Many people were scandalized when I mentioned that my first encounter with an iPad occurred when one of the two year olds I work showed me her family’s during a home visit. (I have never felt older than when that child rolled her eyes at my inability to operate it.) People couldn’t believe that this family could have afforded an iPad. I defended them strongly. Dad works fourteen hour days, mom is home with the kids, they live extremely reasonably, but they are geeks and love technology. It’s something they enjoy as a family. They can decide what to do with their money, so shut up with your faux concern/jealousy that you don’t have one.
Until the children’s needs (school supplies, clothing, and so on) aren’t met. Or they come to me asking for help paying their back rent. Then it is my business, whether I like it or not.
I understand some of it. I delay gratification and hold off on buying things I don’t really need, because I know that I’ll be able to save up for a
down payment on a house new car
 new pair of Chucks. When you’re making minimum wage or living on public assistance, and greatly struggling to pay rent, the idea of saving up for a larger goal is not really on the table. It doesn’t seem realistic. So spending the six dollars in your pocket on sending the kids down to the corner store to get french fries for dinner (which simultaneously gets them out of your hair for twenty minutes) seems to make sense.
I don’t think that this means the people who engage in this particularly frustrating behavior are bad parents. In my experience, a lot of them became parents very young, and are very overwhelmed in their day to day lives. I can understand that they would spend money on unnecessary, but fun, stuff.
As a broad social policy, acting like poor people don’t have it that bad, or would be fine if they just laid off the Dom Perignon to go with their steak dinners, is pointless. It’s not true, and it doesn’t work. It isn’t right, and it won’t change anything.
But one to one? We can’t feel wrong in recognizing this. And I know people do. We’re constantly defending our clients to people who think they’re bad parents, bad people, they’re free-loaders, public assistance is the reason we can’t have nice things, America!
The thing is, it’s never all or nothing. You can’t paint an entire group of people with one judgmental brush, solely based on their income. And we can’t be too protective of the populations we work with, or married to a certain point of view, that we deny that people are doing something wrong.
So in this safe space of like-minded individuals, I will say–I have a great deal of respect for all of the families I work with. They regularly blow me away with their resourcefulness and resiliency.
 But I kind of wanted to drop kick the woman who chose Nintendo Wii over band-aids.







Wednesday, March 21, 2012 0