Newt the uniter?

As I was listening to Newt Gingrich’s acceptance speech after his primary victory in South Carolina on Saturday night, I was quickly perplexed by what I was hearing from the former Speaker of the House.

After spending an uncomfortable amount of time praising Rick Santorum for his effort in Iowa two weeks ago, Newt said he is running “not a Republican campaign” but “an American campaign.”

Something about those particular words struck a chord with me. They sounded eerily familiar to another speech I heard only a few years ago.

Which speech was it that I was remembering?

I’ll give you hint, the man who gave it is currently occupying the residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Shortly after his improbable victory in Iowa a little over four years ago, then-Senator Barack Obama used what would be one of the more memorable lines of his campaign.

“We are not a collection of red states and blue states. We are the United States of America.”

You might argue the connection between those two statements is a bit tenuous and perhaps with some justification.

I will submit, however, a further line from Gingrich’s South Carolina speech that also appears to play on themes that Obama used so masterfully in 2008.

Newt spoke of rising to political power in the U.S. “Because we are free we can produce leadership from an amazing range of places,” he said.

“The genius of America is that you can come from any background.”

Senator Obama, in the very same Iowa speech Newt had already echoed, said, “Hope — hope is what led me here today, with a father from Kenya, a mother from Kansas and a story that could only happen in the United States of America.”

To be fair, themes like the American Dream and American unity are not unique to any president, and all candidates work them into their speeches when they can.

It just seems a bit bizarre to me to hear Speaker Gingrich offer the first half of a speech remarkably similar to a man whom he spends the second half of the speech mercilessly denigrating with his infamously acerbic tongue.

With such similarity, perhaps it won’t be too long before Newt begins to attack corporations and CEO’s for making unreasonable profits at the expense of average Americans.

Oh, right, he also did that in South Carolina last week with advertisements attacking Mitt Romney for his time as CEO of Bain Capital.

Still not enough for you? I’ll give you one last quote. Newt began by thanking South Carolina for deciding to “be with us in changing Washington,” which I suppose is something entirely different from the “change we can believe in.”

For a man that regularly declares his vehement disagreement with the President on nearly every issue, Newt Gingrich is doing a fine impression of the President on the campaign trail.

The best part about it is that irony appears to elude both Gingrich and his supporters.
  
As for me, I would much rather have the real thing than a hollow imitation.

— jontodd@indiana.edu