Interesting History Lesson For Newt....

Newt says he's a historian. Here's a lesson about the political master teaching Newt...

Marianne hints in the Esquire profile that Clinton may have been much better informed about her husband’s extracurricular activities than she was — and that he may have used that information to his advantage one night in 1998.

One night, Marianne says, Bill Clinton called from the White House. She answered the phone and the president asked if he could please speak to her husband. Could the Speaker come over immediately? After he hung up, Newt summoned his driver and went in the back door to the Oval Office. During that meeting, he would tell her later, Clinton laid it out for him: “You’re a lot like me,” he told him.

Whatever else happened at that meeting, Newt Gingrich was muzzled in the critical run-up to the ‘98 midterms. Three weeks before the election, Gingrich got a visit from Kenneth Duberstein, a senior Republican who had served as chief of staff to Ronald Reagan. “He says, ‘What’s going on? We’re gonna lose seats if something doesn’t change.’ ” Marianne jumped in, too. “I asked Newt, ‘What are you doing? Why aren’t we out there blasting them?’ “

This was his true turning point, she believes. As his personal failures and his political contradictions closed in on him, she began to entertain fears about his fundamental decency.

She was, of course, to be proved right.

After the Republican losses in 1998, then-Rep. Bob Livingston (R-LA) pressured Gingrich to resign as Speaker, threatening to run against him if he did not. (Students of political history will recall that, 6 short weeks later, Livingston himself withdrew as speaker and left Congress 6 months after that in the wake of revelations of his own marital infidelities.) Gingrich left Congress in early 1999.

So the GOP's options are this guy, the vulture capitalist who hides his money in the Caymans, Senator Man on Dog, and the crazy, old guy.