These last words display the perfect pitch of a professional sophist. By drawing the other candidates in under his protective umbrella, he appears to raise the issue beyond the petty wrangling of a primary debate, and into the sanctified realm of a shared cause. In fact, with this clever maneuver he effectively camouflages himself by association with the other three men, like a movie character on the run who seeks to avoid notice by blending in with a passing throng.
In this case, Gingrich not only protected himself with this "safety in numbers" shtick; he also implicitly used a moral equivalency argument to muddy the other candidates in the name of supposedly defending them. The implied message in Newt's ersatz magnanimity: "Every candidate can have questions raised about his past, comparable to the one's raised about my past. Ergo, I am no more morally questionable than anyone else."
Rick Santorum, to his credit, wasn't having any of this.
"I am a Christian too, and I thank God for forgiveness. But, you know, these are issues of our lives, and what we did in our lives, they are issues of character for people to consider, but the bottom line is, those are things for everyone in this audience to look at...."
In other words, cheap media tactics are what they are, but voters should not allow their disdain for the messenger and his methods to obscure the legitimate issue of character. The "no one's perfect" defense, which has been the core argument for Gingrich since October, is merely a truism. No one is perfect, to be sure, and the President is not required to be the Saint-in-Chief, but voters must nevertheless judge candidates, to some degree, by their apparent efforts to be as virtuous as humanly possible.
And no, this is not, primarily, an issue of private behavior. The "personal" issues are not, in themselves, decisive, or at least they should not be. On the other hand, Rick Perry's pre-endorsement argument about Gingrich that "a man who cheats on his wife will cheat on his business partner," while hardly a universal truth, was nevertheless more than empty verbiage. The question is not whether a man is capable of failing, of violating a trust, or of succumbing to temptation of one sort or another. That is merely the human condition. The question is whether such shortcomings have, over a prolonged period, become more than the occasional aberration--whether a self-serving propensity to manipulate others has become a hardened character trait.
Rhetoric, i.e. clever debating tactics
The ancient Greek sophists were professional teachers who traveled to various cities, offering to teach young men the skill of rhetoric, i.e. clever debating tactics. Socrates singled them out as the particular enemies of philosophy, because whereas philosophy begins with questioning one's own presuppositions, the sophists taught men how to defend their presuppositions, however questionable those might be, by means of various argumentative techniques designed to confute an opponent. In other words, whereas the philosopher tries to draw men to the truth, even when it hurts, the sophist teaches men the art of protecting their vested interests against all challenges--including against the truth, when necessary. This makes them valued friends of partisan factions, for whom the goal of expanding one's sphere of influence typically supersedes the goal of being right. And it makes the sophists powerful, as the apparent purveyors of truth, although their truth is actually just the opinions they have (temporarily) absorbed from the paying customers.
One of the most common methods of sophistry is to bring the audience into play, and to bring their shared sentiments to bear against an opponent's line of questioning. It is a purely manipulative technique, and has little in common with rational argument, but it typically wins over a crowd, as it has an emotional appeal that hard truths, by definition, cannot have. This method has been Gingrich's stock-in-trade throughout the campaign thus far. His success with voters, as we all agree, can be attributed almost entirely to his "debating skill." And in his case--all of Gingrich's self-aggrandizing Lincoln-Douglas comparisons notwithstanding--debating skill means sophistry.
This ought to be a grave concern for those considering the possibility of a Gingrich-Obama match-up. For Gingrich's talent for presenting obfuscating self-justifications in the guise of rational arguments is not confined to his debating technique. One might argue that today's political debates are so far from serious discussions of principle and policy that rhetoric, rather than reason, is the best one can hope for. The same case, however, cannot be made for some of Gingrich's other actions and statements over recent years, or for some of the specific claims he has made about himself during the debates themselves.
Allow me to emphasize once more that the sophists were professional teachers, which is to say that they charged a fee for their lessons. Socrates encouraged distrust for them on this basis alone, given the nature of the subject matter about which they "taught." The reason: given the danger (at that time) of speaking truth to power, a professional teacher of politics and philosophy, if he expected to be paid, rather than exiled, had to avoid saying or teaching anything that would scandalize an audience, or contradict their accepted norms. On the contrary, his job, as he saw it, was precisely to offer his listeners the intellectual means to support those norms. That is to say, the sophist measures his success and influence by his ability to persuade his patrons that he can help them get what they desire, regardless of his own real opinion, or of the worthiness of their desires.
Keep that in mind as we consider the following. In April 2011, Gingrich
appeared on Bill Bennett's radio program. Asked about Paul Ryan's budget, he said, "Paul Ryan has stepped up to the plate. This is a very, very serious budget and I think rivals with [what] John Kasich did as budget chairman in getting to a balanced budget in the 1990s, just for the scale and courage involved." Gingrich continued, "You can quibble over details but the general shape of what he's doing will define 2012 for Republicans."
Then, in May, Gingrich made this famous statement about Ryan's budget on "Meet the Press": "I don't think right-wing social engineering is any more desirable than left-wing social engineering. I don't think imposing radical change from the right or the left is a very good way for a free society to operate."
Notice anything interesting about that apparent about-face over the course of six weeks? Precisely: The glowing praise came on Bennett's show, with a conservative host and audience base; the condemnation came on a program with a liberal host and audience base.
Gingrich, like John McCain, is a man who has become a frequent and eager guest on TV and radio talk shows of every stripe
Gingrich, like John McCain, is a man who has become a frequent and eager guest on TV and radio talk shows of every stripe. He loves the attention, and, like McCain, is a little too adept at getting himself re-invited by saying the sort of thing that gets a guest re-invited. This trait drove conservatives up the wall in McCain's case. It ought to have at least as strong an effect in Gingrich's case.
A few years ago, when the global warming agenda still seemed to some Washington types to be an inescapable part of the political landscape, Gingrich
appeared on a stage with John Kerry, in front of a Kerry audience. It was here--much more forcefully than on that infamous sofa with Nancy Pelosi--that he declared himself on board with the "science" of global warming, and advocated immediate government action, qualifying his statement only with an appeal for a "conservative" approach. Specifically, when invited by Kerry to respond to senators who were rejecting the science, Gingrich said, “the evidence is sufficient that we should move towards the most effective possible steps to reduce carbon-loading in the atmosphere."
Needless to say, the context, the staging of the big moment, and Gingrich's inimitable way of framing his every utterance as the definitive statement of modern conservatism on any subject, constituted an attempt to bring the Republican Party in line with globalist theocratic orthodoxy. Equally needless to say, the moment--as intended--brought that leftist house down just as effectively as his anti-media attacks have done in conservative company during the primaries.
These days, of course, he has taken to excising chapters related to man-made climate change from his books, and, when Mark Levin asked him to state his opinion on the subject in November, he said the most the science provides grounds for is "more research." Not quite the "do it urgently" message he was delivering to the Kerry crowd, is it?
If I were to discuss anthropogenic global warming twice, once with a proponent, and once with a skeptic, I might use two different tones in expressing my opinion, so as not to offend the proponent unnecessarily. I would not, however, in speaking with the proponent, concede--let alone declare--that "AGW deniers are wrong." There is a difference between adjusting one's manner of expression to suit one's audience, and simply changing one's message to win new friends.
Then there is the individual mandate, Freddie Mac consultancy, and so on. Throughout, the pattern is clear: Gingrich not only says what he thinks his audience wants to hear; he tries to take the lead on the issue, as though he were the official spokesman on the topic, in spite of what he himself may have said to the contrary in the past--even in the very recent past, as was the case with Occupy Wall Street, to which he was giving mixed reviews until he realized that Republican primary voters were firmly on Herman Cain's side on this one. Suddenly Gingrich commandeered the issue with his "take a bath" quip.
Grandiosity has never been a problem with Newt Gingrich
There is a heady feeling of power that a popular sophist can fall prey to. Plato regularly depicts the sophists as outrageously arrogant, certain that on any issue, they can win the day, and do so in a manner that reduces all opponents to gibberish. Add to this arrogance a strong whiff of megalomania, and you have Newt Gingrich. This, I believe, is what Santorum was trying to get at during the January 19
th debate, when he quipped that "grandiosity has never been a problem with Newt Gingrich."
Gingrich claimed, during that debate, that he had helped to develop supply-side economics. He regularly discusses the accomplishments of the Reagan years as though he had been Reagan's right-hand man, taking credit for the achievements of those years with frequent uses of "we." (Even McCain had the humility to refer to himself as a mere "foot-soldier in the Reagan Revolution.") These shades of Al Gore are no less laughable and/or disturbing coming from a Republican than they were coming from a Democrat. Newt Gingrich, as he constantly reminds us, sees himself as the "big ideas" candidate--not just of this campaign, but of this era. He is therefore irresistibly drawn to any issue that seems to be the coming storm--supply-side economics, welfare reform, healthcare reform, global warming, constitutionalism. The reason is simple: The megalomaniac's greatest fear is that any historical movement might seem to be progressing without or in spite of him, thus refuting his most fundamental theory, which is the theory of himself as the center of every storm.
Gingrich has a problem that is not a simple case of flip-flopping, or of being indecisive on key issues. He seems to think, as a matter of strategy, that he can get away with saying what his audience wants to hear, not in spite of having said something different to a different audience, but precisely
because he has said something different. Consider how he deals with criticism of his assault on the Ryan budget, for example--namely by citing those occasions on which he bestowed great praise on both Congressman Ryan and his budget. Having said everything on every issue, he can honestly claim, against almost any criticism of his record or past statements, that he actually said the opposite of whatever he is accused of having said. This technique is cleverer than the Big Lie; it is the Big Half-Truth.
Gingrich supporters ought to wonder, each time they feel the urge to cheer his pithy take-down of this or that opponent, or his rousing call to conservative arms on this or that issue: What will he say to a different audience? What will he say if and when he perceives that his audience is mixed, and does not necessarily want to hear what his current audience wants to hear? That, I suspect, is when all of his famous "21
st Century Agendas" and "American Solutions" will begin to take a more concrete shape--and not necessarily the shape his present supporters might have expected.
Mitt Romney has no ideas. Newt Gingrich has a plethora of ideas. Don't be surprised if he starts putting some of them up for auction. That's what sophists do for a living.
