Thoughts on Ideological Perfection: Standing with Speaker Newt Gingrich in Newport Beach

Lincoln once said: "Stand with anybody that stands right, stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong." In that spirit, Tricia and I did a crazy thing today and drove up to attend Speaker Newt Gingrich's book signing at the Barnes and Noble in Fashion Island, Newport Beach, CA.



It seemed like a crazy thing to do and so we did it. We drove along the coast and didn't have a clue where the bookstore was located. In the parking lot Tricia surprised me by asking some other folks for directions. We drove to the other side of the mall and were right in time to see Speaker Gingrich signing books with a thick felt tip pen.

I was first aware of Rep. Gingrich in 1988. I was a hopeless GOPAC candidate back back then and I was recruited by the local Republican party to play a small role in keeping some of Gov. Michael Dukakis' top lieutenants pinned down in MA instead of working for Gov. Dukakis in Iowa or where ever. The whole thing was a disaster, in part, because I was a registered Democrat at the time and needed to change my party registration and run for office at the same time.

Nevertheless, I listened to Rep. Newt Gingrich on tape for hours learning the details of how to run a political campaign. The summer I spent running for a state assembly seat in MA was one of the happiest of my life.

I wanted to use my scarce moments with Speaker Gingrich wisely so I shared with him something he probably already knew - that I had met the young Barack Obama while he was a sophomore at Occidental College and that he was definitely a Marxist at that time. "Did you ever think he would become President?" Gingrich asked. "No...never," I said, "he was a drinker and a drug user...a party guy when I knew him." After that, we fumbled through the photos and Speaker Gingrich was gracious and charming with us. He observed that I was "efficient" and sort of made my day.

In a larger sense, however, I was wanted to make the extra effort to see Speaker Gingrich today because he is taking heat for defending a liberal Republican running for office in New York's 23 Congressional District. This is a special election caused by Obama's willingness to attract an otherwise unbeatable GOP Congressman, John McHugh, into quitting Congress to become Secretary of the Army.

The liberal Republican candidate emerged, in part, because New York state law requires each party's 11 county chairmen in the district to pick their candidate. The local GOP county chairmen chose Dede Scozzafava, a five-term state assemblywoman. Unhappy with this result, one of the more conservative nomination seekers, Doug Hoffman, bailed on the Republican party and got into the same race through a different party affiliation - the Conservative Party.

Gov. Sarah Palin and a lot of other Republicans I admire have endorsed Hoffman. Gingrich, however, has pleaded with them to show more deference for the local New York Republican party. As you might suppose, Gingrich is in a lonely position right now. Nevertheless, I think he is right to suggest that we should be focusing more on our enemies and less on the qualifications of our Republican candidates. I think he is right to assert that a stress on ideological purity makes it impossible to assemble large majorities. Purges of imperfect Republicans is the sure road to minority party status.

Part of the reason why ideological purity burns out political parties is systemic. Our U.S. Constitution sets us up with single seat, majority rule Congressional elections. Such election rules are murder for third parties. Luckily for Republicans, however, only a small change in the electorate can produce broad and massive change in party control of Congress and subsequent public policy achievements. As such, I think Newt Gingrich is on the right track in asking for some ideological slack in an environment where the conventional wisdom is demanding righteous purity to Republican ideals.

All in all, it was a pleasure and an honor to met Speaker Newt Gingrich face-to-face today. I was proud to stand with him.

Repeating the New Deal: Evidence the Stimulus Made Things Worse

The folks at the Innocent Bystanders blog have been providing a wonderful service by tracking the current unemployment rate and comparing it to what Obama and his advisors predicted would happen - with and without the impact of their stimulus bill.



To those of us who study political economy, however, these results are not surprising since government spending programs take money from useful, high-return private investments and transfer it into low yield, wasteful government expenditures. To see how, FDR's New Deal programs actually lengthened and worsened the Great Depression, see Burton Folson, Jr.'s book, New Deal or Raw Deal: How FDR's Economic Legacy Has Damaged America (2008).

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Hitler Working For Obama? Time to Appreciate the Controversy

I'm noticing that Democrats are howling mad that folks are starting to see President Obama as a second Hitler. Above, I've posted a video that illustrates the issues. These videos are pretty common on YouTube. Most of the one's I've seen feature Hitler complaining about a video game or a pop star. Here's a link to a NYT The Caucus Blog that discusses the controversy: http://bit.ly/57mx6

To the Democrats, the Obama as Hitler meme is an outrageous charge. What they are missing is the way that Hitler was loved by the German people, the way Hitler was eager to control private sector businesses, and the fact that the NAZI abbreviation actually stood for the National Socialist German Worker's Party. Hitler wanted his own Olympic Games to celebrate his regime too.

Reviewing Democrat outrage, it seems to me that they think independents and conservatives do not understand that Hitler's government killed six million Jews during the Holocaust. Liberals seem to attack this comparison without fully appreciating the honest fear of big government and Obama that fuels this comparison. I do not think they completely understand how much damage Obama has already done to our economy with his stimulus package or the considerable danger of moving the U.S. toward a single-payer socialized medical system.

I have been the victim of Democrat ideology - due to affirmative action - so I know how Democrat ideals create real pain and suffering for innocent people. The fact that so many Democrats seem completely blind to the hurt and damage they do makes comparisons with Hitler surprisingly appropriate and healthy for our nation’s future.

Here’s my take away, when large numbers of people are comparing you to Hitler, it’s time to slow down and ask what are you doing to create this sort of extremely negative feedback…

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist.

Bad Obama, No Olympic Capstone - The Marxist In Chief

I'm grateful I was able to get our new website up and running. You can check it out at
http://drdrewguaranteedgrants.com/about-us/

In other news, it looks like our inexperienced new President has made another bad mistake. He was looking to make the Olympic games into some sort of heroic celebration of his tenure as President and the IOC sort of choked on the idea.

I watched some tape of Obama's pitch to the IOC and it was a lame attack on the U.S. and a pathetic request for them to sign-off on Obama's partisan ideology. As far as I can tell, the Obama administration invested a lot more time and energy into this mission than they are letting on. It was a terrible mistake. It is all the worst because it follows in the wake of Obama's failure to sell his health care proposals to the American people.

Update - May 2013: Although Obama has been re-elected, I still think it is important to remind people that he has been among some of our worst Presidents in terms of the damage he has done to the economy and the job market. As I have indicated in the past, the young Obama was an all out Marxist socialist extremist when I met him in 1980.

Ironically, new research by David Maraniss confirms that young Obama was in the San Francisco area at exactly the time when I first indicated that I confronted his naive faith in a coming Communist revolution. For my confrontation with David Maraniss, please check out this article at American Thinker.

http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/11/how_i_confronted_obama_biographer_david_maraniss.html

Here is the Youtube video of me and Maraniss together at Occidental College. According to Maraniss, he did not know that my story was out there until after he published his book. This is obviously crazy. My take on young Obama appeared in about four other books before Maraniss published his book on Obama.

I think Obama's ties to Bill Ayers and Alice Palmer demonstrate that he never really abandoned his socialist point of view. At the very least, Obama has never explained his conversion story. I have a conversion story. Where is Obama's? Meanwhile, I am surprised that there has been so little attention devoted to the fact that the young Obama acted like a white guy while he was at Occidental College. To read my take on young Obama's cultural identity, please check out my new article, White Like Me.

Also, for more information on what it was like for me to be a conservative teaching at a liberal college, please see the following articles.

http://anonymouspoliticalscientist.blogspot.com/2011/05/dr-drew-on-mental-health-issues-at.html

or

http://anonymouspoliticalscientist.blogspot.com/2010/01/victory-is-so-sweet-for-those-who-have.html

John C. Drew, Ph.D. is an award-winning political scientist. He applies his skills as a grant writing consultant in the Southern Calfornia area. His website is at the following link: http://drdrewguaranteedgrants.com/about-us/