A quantum of umbrage: The only smart thing Newt Gingrich ever said

Updated -- you'll see.

I haven't been able to track down the specifics -- Yes! As of May 2014 I have been! -- but I vividly remember a story Newt Gingrich told back before he became a disgraced former Speaker of the House (which was, in turn, before he began making a comfortable living as the Harold Stassen of modern Republican presidential politics and an inexplicable green room legacy). It was the one smart thing I ever remember him saying.

He told about driving along the Autobahn in Germany like a bat out of hell, and reflecting on the reduced speed limit that his own country had not long before placed on federal highways (in the name of fuel efficiency, or fewer deaths, or some other reason he didn't see any point to). If the German government imposed a 55 mph speed limit on the Autobahn, he reflected, the Germans would all begin driving 55 mph, and would vote that government out at the next election, whereupon they would all go back to driving like bats out of hell. Americans, faced with the same problem, complained about the speed limits, continued to drive 90 mph on federal highways, and re-elected their same representatives anyway.

All of which brings us to this (emphasis added):

With a potential government shutdown now looming, Americans find it unacceptable for either a president or members of Congress to threaten a government shutdown in order to achieve their goals, according to a new CBS News/New York Times poll.

Eighty percent of Americans say threatening a government shutdown during budget debates is not an acceptable way to negotiate; only 16 percent think it is.

While partisan divides may exist on a number of issues, majorities of Democrats, Republicans and independents all agree that threatening a shutdown of the government is not the way to negotiate.

Now you probably remember that it was Gingrich forcing two government shutdowns in the mid-1990s in the belief it would harm Bill Clinton, and the attendant political backlash, that cost Newt his speakership. So there's that.

And yet Gingrich's Law will no doubt apply in the present case: Although every member of the House will be up for re-election next year (including every single break-the-government Obama-contrarian Tea Partier), and one-third of the members of the Senate (including too few of the worst of the worst like Cruz and Lee, but a big slice of their colleagues who enable them), would anyone bet actual money that there will be a noticeable electoral price to pay for their narcissistic, nihilistic antics?

There are never German voters around when you need them.


(Hat-tip to C&L.)

Quote of the day: Don't ask why

[W]hy would you shut down the National Weather Center that just saved a whole lot of lives in central Oklahoma by giving us 16 minutes of warning instead of two. Why would you put 15,000 families — that’s families — out of work at Tinker Air Force Base. There are four million important national defense workers. Why would you go to Sulphur, where there are guys in their 80s and 90s who gave this country everything they possibly had in its darkest moment, and say, “sorry, there’s not going to be anybody here showing up to fix your meals or look after you or do the commitments we made.” I don’t think it’s smart politics. Anytime you hurt millions of people, and inconvenience tens of millions more, I don’t think you usually achieve your end. I think they wonder why you did that to them.

- Rep.Tom Cole (R - OK) explaining to his constituents why he is not sufficiently crazy to be reelected from his home state in 2014.

The unforgiving minute: Oh please, oh please, oh please!

Can we be this lucky?

But despite that presidential fade-out and close call back home, [Minnesota Republican Representative, conservative whackjob (but I repeat myself -ed.) and political Gaffe-O-Matic Michele] Bachmann is again being mentioned as a candidate for higher office -- this time as a potential challenger to first-term Democratic Sen. Al Franken in 2014.

As Charlie Pierce tastefully frames it:

Surely, I don't have to explain all of the eight million reasons why this race would set the political Orgasmatron at about a 12, do I?

Talk about drawing the short straw

As best I can remember, the Oregon GOP hasn't won a statewide race in Oregon since Gordon Smith's booby-prize re-election in 2002 (not counting Greg Walden's seat in OR CD2, where he will apparently continue to serve until god one day takes him home, after which the citizens of CD2 will probably re-elect him another time or two, just to make the point).

But OR GOP has a new state chair -- the fifth one in ten years. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Suzanne Gallagher:

The owner of an interior design business, Gallagher said she wouldn’t try to change the party’s conservative stance on issues but added that she would “develop target marketing to reach a variety of demographic groups.”

The strategic analysis is trickling down from the national GOP leadership: People are avoiding the Republicans in droves not because their policies are toxic, but rather because Republicans haven't found a way to get their message out properly -- to hispanics, blacks, women, gays, working people of all colors and gender, and so on, all of whom presumably will find GOP policies less toxic if they learn even more about their toxicity. (One is reminded of Charlie Pierce's observation that the better people got to know Mitt Romney in 2012, the more they disliked him.) So, if nothing else, it's a favorable wind for Oregon Dems in 2014.

But wait -- there's more!

In particular, she said she wanted to restore the “trust and confidence of women voters” in the GOP, in part by recruiting more women to run for the Legislature. Gallagher, 65, said she learned how to talk to a wide variety of voters when she ran two losing races for the House and Senate in predominately Democratic districts.

She honed her talking-to-voters skills in two losing races. I'm just . . . I'm just . . . wow.

Just wow.

Honestly, is it possible that John Lee, Jr., and Art Robinson, the other two candidates for the top GOP slot in Oregon, just took a dive rather than be the face of the Oregon Republicans for the next two years?