Newt's Shop of Horrors

By Timothy Egan, The New York Times

07 January 12

here must be a Greek tragedy, a Shakespeare play or a "Daily Show" parody to explain the exquisite irony of Newt Gingrich being destroyed by the very forces he unleashed - a smack-down that sets up 2012 as the year the moneyed elite learn to use the limitless power granted them by the Supreme Court.

The deflated Newt balloon is pathetic, to use one of his favorite words. There he was, tired and bitter on election night, after getting carpet-bombed by advertisements painting him as a soulless hack tied to Washington like sea rust on the underside of a listing ship.

He complained about "millionaire consultants" buying every television outlet to "lie" about him. He whined about getting buried under "an avalanche of negative ads" that left him "drowning in negativity." You get the picture: ugly, sudden death, the very life snuffed out of him by things he could not control.

And yet, of course, what killed Gingrich was in part his own creation, and not just because he himself is a millionaire consultant paid to destroy or inflate on demand. The Frankenstein's monster emerged from his own shop of horrors.

Gingrich, for the last few years, has been partners in self-promotion with Citizens United, the group that prompted the worst Supreme Court decision of the nascent 21st century, the one that granted "personhood" rights to corporations and green-lighted them to dominate American elections. More to the point, that 2010 case gave birth to shadowy super PACs that can annihilate a candidate, no holds barred, no responsibility to those pulling the strings.

If you live in Cedar Falls, and didn't like seeing Iowa nice turned into the scene from "Fargo" when a victim is ground up in the wood chipper, blame Citizens United, and the Supreme Court majority that Republicans can't praise enough. Unlimited political filth by anonymous rich groups - this is John Roberts's America.

It was a hit piece, after all, a film on Hillary Clinton produced by Citizens United, that led to the Supreme Court case. Gingrich and Citizens United have worked closely together on several other films. Gingrich loved the court decision. And on the one-year anniversary of the case, Gingrich was still effusive.

"I actually think that the Citizens United case is one of the best examples of a genuine strategy that I've seen in the years I've been in Washington," he said.

Earlier, he'd sent out a video plea, saying, "Please join Citizens United and me in our fight for the First Amendment rights of every American."

Yes, because every lone citizen's voice is roughly equal to, say, the $3 million or so in negative advertising spent in Iowa to crush Gingrich. Those citizens who worked at corporations, or founded super PACs, were somehow denied their First Amendment rights, in the reasoning of the court and Gingrich. Money is speech, one and the same, in their world.

If Gingrich had any guts, or lasting principles, he would now sound alarms about the absurdity of a court decision equating the Norman Rockwell citizen standing at town hall to the anonymous millions that can kill a candidate in less than month. In Gingrich's case, he fell 20 points in 20 days.

This is your democracy on meth - the post-Citizens United world. I saw it in Colorado in the 2010 election, a close senate race, where retail campaigning was overshadowed by more than $30 million spent by outside groups answering to no one. In the last month of that election, negative television ads ran nearly every minute of every day.

But Colorado was training wheels for the current presidential race, the first since the court unleashed the worst demons of American political life. Gingrich himself has a super PAC, Winning Our Future, and he's now prepared to use it like a political suicide bomb as his campaign comes to its brutal end. That group, by the way, is not to be confused with Restore Our Future, the super PAC linked to Mitt Romney that took down Gingrich in Iowa.

By law, the super PACs are not supposed to coordinate with the candidates. Oh, heavens to Betsy, no! "My goodness," said Romney, when asked about the wealthy PAC that does his bidding, "if we coordinated in any way whatsoever we'd go to the big house."

So, who are the people behind Restore Our Future? They're former associates of Romney's at Bain Capital, business friends of his in Utah and some of the same donors who Swift-boated John Kerry in 2004.

This legalism of "no coordination" is a filament-thin G-string. Everyone coordinates. President Obama's allies may spend up to $1 billion through their own super PAC, Priorities USA Action, and other groups. Karl Rove has promised to pollute the air waves with tens of millions of dollars in attack ads from his organization, American Crossroads.

All of this is the spawn of the Citizens United case - free speech dominated by the few, the powerful, the wealthy. It can be stalled only by forceful appeals from the leading candidates, a multi-lateral disarmament that is highly unlikely.

Among the losers, Gingrich has the least credibility complaining of the effects. What happened to him in Iowa is not what he wished for, but it is certainly what he asked for.