Tom Connor - Newtwit

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Tom Connor & Associates

Is Martha Stuart Living?

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Copyright 1995 by
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v3.1

Thanks to Lisa Grenadier, David Gernert, Gerald L. Manning, Rick Wolff, Darryl Manning, Mary Moffitt, Anne Moffitt, Maureen Kindilien at the Fairfield University Library, Judith Mandelbaum at Burrelles Business Research Center, Joy Haenlein, John OHern, Emily Gordon, JoAnn Bilyard, and Jim Downey.

Newt Gingrich is the Tonya Harding of politics. If he disapproves of you, he will try to break your knees.
New York Post columnist Jack Newfield (December 9, 1994)

[Gingrich is] a strategic thinker of the first rank.
William A. Rusher, Publisher,
National Review

There is the Newt Gingrich who is the intellectual, appealing and fun to be with. And theres the Newt Gingrich who is the bloodthirsty partisan whod just as soon cut your guts out as look at you. And who, very candidly, is mean, mean as hell.
Lee Howell, former
Gingrich press secretary

A practical man of ideas, a deeply committed conservative with a bold vision of the future, a finely honed ability to communicate and an unusual grasp of political strategy
Steven K. Beckner, Conservative Digest

My views of him are somewhat similar to those of a fire hydrant toward a dog.
Ex-Speaker Jim Wright when asked his feelings about the future Speaker of the House (Congressional Quarterly Almanac, 1988)

The polls say an overwhelming number of Americans do not know who Newt Gingrich is yet. The safest bet in American politics: they will.
(Joe Klein in Newsweek
December 26, 1994-January 2, 1995)

I believe you ought to have affirmative action on the individual basis based on economics and culture, not based on race. I think if you have a poor person from West Virginia who happens to be white or a poor person from Harlem who happens to be black, and they are deserving of a chance, you ought to bend over backwards to give them a chance because from their background, economically and culturally, they are striving to rise. But to say, as a matter of pure race, that a millionaire son or daughter whos black deserves more preference than a poor white or a poor Asian or a poor Hispanic strikes me as madness.

(NBCs Meet the Press, December 1, 1991)

People like me are what stand between us and Auschwitz. I see evil around me every day.

(Atlanta Journal and Constitution, January 1994)

It is impossible to maintain a civilization with twelve-year-olds having babies, fifteen-year-olds killing each other, seventeen-year-olds dying of AIDS and eighteen-year-olds getting diplomas they cant read.

(The New York Times, October 27, 1994)

We are at the edge of losing this civilization. You get two more generations of what we had for the last twenty years and were in desperate trouble. As long as I believe thats true, Ill keep trying to recruit another generation and train another generation so that when Im too tired to keep doing this, theyll be ready to step in.

(Atlanta Journal and Constitution, January 1994)

My dads a retired career soldier and we have no great family wealth. And certainly a name like Newt Gingrich is weird enough that it sort of fits the classic American pattern. Maybe theres a long tradition in America with people with unusual backgrounds having an opportunity to rise. But remember, its not Gingrich alone.

(CBS This Morning, November 9, 1994)

[It is] a major, major mistake weve made since World War II to suggest that life is easy and the difficulties are the aberration. I think the opposite is true. I think life is normally hard, and its the good moments that are the aberration. And that you work hard and you try to raise a family and you try to earn a living and you try to have a safe neighborhood precisely for the good moments. But that a healthy society starts out saying: Life is hard.

(From a motivational tape by Gingrich entitled
History and Leadership/Quoted in
The Washington Post, December 19, 1994)

They are a disaster. They ruin the poor. They create a culture of poverty and a culture of violence, which is destructive of this civilization, and they have to be thoroughly replaced from the ground up. We need to simply reach out, erase the slate and start over.

(Commenting on the programs begun in the 1960s
Great Society/The Washington Post,
November 12, 1994)

We can reach twice as many kids as President Clinton is proposing in the summer jobs program if we enlist the private sector, and instead of having a politicians and bureaucrats jobs program, we find a way to give a $700 tax credit to every business that hires a teenager who is below, say, the school lunch program line. You could literally double the number of jobs with no new bureaucracy and no government effort, but the politicians wouldnt get the credit for it.

(NBCs Meet the Press, February 21, 1993)

I think that people who argue that on the one hand you cant allow prayer in school because thatll be subsidizing religion, but on the other hand you have an absolute obligation to subsidize an artist who, as part of his art, urinates on a picture of Christthose are values most Americans dont understand, period.

(NBCs Meet the Press, June 17, 1990)

I think this is an example of some liberals hyperventilating without adequate information. The fact was, it was George Bushs birthday. The press had come in wearing birthday hats, and everybody was having a good time talking about George Bushs birthday making fun of the President on his birthday, and Bob Dole had brought a flag with him. But in fact, it was a birthday event; it was not a flag event.

(Commenting on Senator Bob Kerreys criticism of a
flag-waving incident in the Cabinet Room/
NBCs Meet the Press,
June 17, 1990)

I personally would privatize them.

(Response to a question on the future of
the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the
National Endowment for the Arts/ABCs This Week
with David Brinkley,
November 13, 1994)

All Im suggesting is if you want the arts to survive with federal funding, you have to assure the average taxpayer that they are not going to have blasphemy and egregious obscenity forced down their throat that theyre going to have to pay for.

(NBCs Meet the Press, June 17, 1990)

I think that the President is correctly moving to the right position on the National Endowment for the Arts, that there is a distinction between subsidy and censorship.

(NBCs Meet the Press