“I WISH YOU COULD HAVE COME UP WITH A BETTER STORY; I FELT DISTINCTLY LIKE AN IDIOT REPEATING IT.”

11/17/11

Now that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has become nearly viable in the GOP race for the 2012 presidential nomination, his ethics are drawing new scrutiny, and not those aspects of Mr. Gingrich’s ethical life that seem to most titillate the public.

It seems that a “consulting” firm run by Mr. Gingrich was paid $1.6 million by Freddie Mac, off an on from 1999 to 2006, for what Mr. Gingrich calls “strategic advice” on how to portray the company to skeptical conservatives who wanted to cap the firm’s growth, according to the Wall Street Journal (Thursday, 11/17/11, page A5). Mr. Gingrich insists that he was not paid to lobby, not for his clout, no sir. He was paid for “strategic advice.”

Let’s just say that we are to buy Mr. Gingrich’s story, that his “consulting” practice was not, as are about 99% of such consulting practices by former office-holders and current hangers-on, a thinly veiled way of selling his influence, designed not only to line his pockets but to enable him, and his ilk, to brag of his “private sector experience” when next pushing for a spot at the public trough. Let’s stipulate that Mr. Gingrich was indeed being paid for “strategic advice” on how to fend off conservatives who wanted to curb the growth of Freddie Mac and who were, in retrospect, clearly onto something. Even if Mr. Gingrich’s at best semi-plausible and at worst ludicrous defense is somehow legitimate, he is still admitting that he (and his firm, of course; this was not a one man operation, no sir) helped Freddie to grow. Since Mr. Gingrich and his fellow Republicans insist, with some (but not as much as they think) justification, that Freddie and Fannie were at the root of the financial problems from which we are supposedly emerging, Mr. Gingrich’s defense is that he was only helping to put the U.S. housing market in the tank and thus abetting what most are calling a financial disaster.

One would think that a guy with Mr. Gingrich’s obviously abundant intellectual firepower could have come up with a better story.