The Gingrich ‘Conversation’ Challenge
March 24, 2007, 5:57pm
Everyone has been jabbering about the “Vote Different” online video the past couple of weeks, most of them in admiration of the technical skill involved to pull it together and of the mastery of the message. But former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is not a fan. He trashed the video in a speech to the Independent Women’s Forum this week.
The Republican Gingrich called the ad “a very interesting attack” on New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and a “modest promotion” of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, two of the leading Democratic presidential candidates for 2008. “Oh, it’s clever,” he said. “It fills up space on television. People can talk about it.”
But he also condemned the video as “utterly, totally destructive of the process of thought. There is not a single thing in that commercial that enables America to solve a problem. … It’s the Entertainment Tonight version of governing a great country. … Everything is reduced to gossip, attack, whose consultant is cleverer. And it’s really very destructive.”
Ironically, Gingrich then challenged the eventual presidential nominees next fall to engage in an ongoing “conversation” — the very word that Clinton used in announcing her presidency and that prompted the video against her.
Gingrich proposed that the nominees agree to 90-minute dialogue one night a week, from Labor Day 2008 until election. “Once a week with a timekeeper and no moderator,” he said. “No Mickey Mouse questions. No gimmicks. Two adults, much like [Abraham] Lincoln and [Stephen] Douglas,” the two men whose series of U.S. Senate debates 150 years ago in 2008 launched Lincoln to national prominence.
Categories: Issues, Presidency 2008
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March 24th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
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