What the Obama 'Machine' Looks Like to Newt Gingrich

By John H. Richardson (**this is an Esquire piece in August of 2010 or 2011, not sure which, but interesting regardless**)

When Newt Gingrich started using the phrase "secular socialist machine" to describe the Obama administration this spring, I had just interviewed Mickey Edwards as part of my reporting for a long profile in Esquire. As a Republican congressman from Oklahoma from 1973 to 1993, an advisor to Ronald Reagan, chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, a founding trustee of the Heritage Foundation, national chairman of the American Conservative Union, chairman (for five years) of the Conservative Political Action Conference, and foreign policy advisor to George W. Bush during the 2000 campaign, Edwards had an intimate and unusually privileged view of Gingrich's rise to power.

Here, before I get to some more of the truly unsettling things the former Speaker of the House laid bare in our interview, are some of the startling things Edwards told me:

My biggest concern is that Newt is very good at self promotion, and one of the problems with that is sometimes people who are that way — they don't think enough about the consequences of what they do and what the fallout is.... I never felt that he had any sort of a real compass about what he believed except for the pursuit of power.

When you're in Congress, you should be guided by a set of principles. Seeking power alone is not a good enough principle. And the way he did it was essentially to reshape, from the standpoint of Republicans, our whole system of government; rather than 435 individual house members dealing with the issues on the table using your best judgment in the interest of your constituents, he did it more as party against party.

In The Contract With America, two items were unconstitutional on their face: the line-item veto and term limits. He really didn't care whether they were constitutional or not.

He reshaped it all. This is a war, he said, and it's our party against their party. I think we've seen the results of that. I'm a believer in conflict because I believe in the democratic process, but when you do that solely on your-club-against-my-club, you're eroding our whole democratic process. /snip

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/newt-gingrich-quotes-on-obama-081110#ixzz1jvLaIWfU