Former House Speaker/maybe future presidential candidate Newt Gingrich delivered a warning to incumbents after Utah Republicans ousted Sen. Bob Bennett — change the system or you might suffer the same fate.
I caught up with Gingrich after a speech he delivered to the annual RNC gathering of state party chairs, hosted this year just across the Potomac from D.C. in Maryland. As he mingled with party chairs in a hotel ballroom, I asked him about Bennett’s ouster by angry conservatives in Utah.
“It’s a sign of the anger of the American people,” Gingrich said. I asked him if there was a lesson for other incumbents to learn from Bennett’s fate. “Any politician that wants to be reelected had very clearly be the candidate for change,” he replied.
Gingrich endorsed Bennett before the state convention and said that he considered the deposed Senator a “good guy” with a solid conservative voting record. But he said that Bennett should have done more to “take on Washington” and make it clear to the angry right back home that he was part of the solution, not the political establishment.
“Some of the votes he cast angered people,” Gingrich said. He cited Bennett’s vote for TARP as an example of what went wrong.
Gingrich also slammed the program in his speech to the state party chairs, which focused mostly on the scary things that will happen if Republicans don’t win. But there were several moments where Gingrich outlined how Republicans need to refocus their message to reach out to the angry right.
Gingrich said programs like TARP were one problem, because they “bailout rich people” for “making dumb decisions.”
He said he sees the same problem with the financial reform bill currently under debate in the Senate, which Gingrich said would create an atmosphere where businesses think they can take risks and call on to government to bail them out when they go wrong.
“You can’t have capitalism on the way up and socialism on the way down,” Gingrich said.
