Newt Gingrich Loses The Nurses

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Newt Gingrich said today that the tougher times in his life (you know…those times) made his life similar to that of a nurse.

America’s Registered Nurses beg to differ.

In an interview with Iowa Public Television Wednesday, Gingrich was asked to expand on a line he debuted at the oddest debate of the cycle, last month’s evangelical Family Leader forum in Des Moines. Gingrich mentioned he had looked to the 12 step program used by groups like AA to help move on from the less savory elements of his personality in the late 1990s, when sex scandals and bombast helped push him out of politics for a time.

“Were you drunk on power?” Gingrich was asked in Wednesday’s interview.

Gingrich:

No, I think I was exhausted. I think it was a sense of — it wasn’t hubris, which is what drunk on power would imply. It wasn’t that i felt I was bigger. It’s that I was so tired and I tried to do so many things that I felt empty. It’s a common challenge that nurses have, because they spend all day taking care of other people and at the end of the day — I think I got to a point where I was overreaching and doing more than I could sustain.

This is similar to the line Gingrich famously used earlier in the campaign when he said the workload he imposed on himself out patriotism led him to cheat on his wife.

The nurse comparison stuff was newer, and nurses TPM contacted didn’t care for it one bit.

“I just saw the comment and thank god I wasn’t driving when I saw it,” said Karen Higgins, a intensive care RN at Boston Medical Center and the co-president of the National Nurses United union, which represents 170,000 nurses nationwide.

Nursing is tiring work, Higgins said — but the comparison ends there.

“I’m exhausted 80% of the time,” she said. “I would never turn around and say my bad behavior is excused because I’m exhausted.”

Cathy Glasson spent 20 years as an intensive care nurse in at the University of Iowa medical complex in Iowa City. She’s now heads SEIU Local 199, which represents 2,000 nurses at the university.

“Nurses everywhere work long hours, yes can it be stressful absolutely,” Glasson told TPM when asked if she sympathized with Gingrich. “Does it lead to marital problems? I have never seen that.”

Nurses “know how to prioritize,” Glasson said. “We can’t let things slide just because we’re at the end of 12-14 hour shift.”

Higgins said she “truthfully resents” that Gingrich would suggest his life has ever resembled a nurse’s. “To even equate [his life in the 1990s] with what we do on a daily basis is outrageous,” she said.

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