This morning Paul Krugman contrasted the approach of the two parties to health care: the Democrats trying to accomplish something for the public good; the Republicans engaged in cynical and destructive partisan politics. In the course of his column he observed:
And on the other side, here’s what Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House — a man celebrated by many in his party as an intellectual leader — had to say: If Democrats pass health reform, “They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years” by passing civil rights legislation.
I just re-read Krugman’s column on line, and the following is appended to it:
Editors’ Note:
This column quotes Newt Gingrich as saying that “Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years” by passing civil rights legislation, a quotation that originally appeared in The Washington Post. After this column was published, The Post reported that Mr. Gingrich said his comment referred to Johnson’s Great Society policies, not to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Odd isn’t it, that David Brooks gets to make up facts without corrections (well, with one correction, but not of the most egregious lies), but Krugman doesn’t, even if this facts are well sourced, as Krugman’s column directly quoted the story from the Washington Post. But was the Post story inaccurate, as Gingrich now claims, or did Gingrich feel it necessary to backtrack? Gingrich prides himself as a student of history, though he has obviously learned very little from it, but as a beneficiary of the Republican Southern Strategy he could hardly have been unmindful of Lyndon Johnson’s famous observation, made when he signed the Civil Rights Act:
The important point, lost to people like Gingrich, is that Johnson signed the bill knowing fully well that he was giving the South to the Republican. He signed it anyway, because it was the right thing to do, a motivation entirely foreign to the Republican party. But, for purposes of our discussion today, we must only ask ourselves, wasn’t it this quite famous quote to which Gingrich was alluding when he went over the top yet again on health care?
If it makes the Dems feel any better, if Gingrich is right, they haven’t lost nearly as much as they lost back then. Mostly they’ve lost old white men, who they didn’t have in the first place.
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