Newt's financial mismanagement

Huffington Post has completed an investigation, reported today as:

"Newt Gingrich Leaves 30-Year Trail Of Debts, Lawsuits And Bankruptcies In His Wake"

While declaring himself a model of fiscal discipline, which he would bring to the presidency, the true story is that this has rarely been true for the organizations he has founded -- and often abandoned.   Despite the injection of more than $11 million by billionaire Sheldon Adelson, Newt's current campaign is barely meeting expenses.

Interviews with former colleagues and review of official documents reveal

"a striking pattern of financial mismanagement at the political and nonprofit groups that Gingrich has created, steered and abandoned over the past 30 years. .

.

"Since 1984, Gingrich has launched 12 politically oriented organizations and initiatives based in Washington. Of those, five have been investigated by the Internal Revenue Service and the House Ethics Committee, another five closed down with debts totaling more than $500,000, and two were subject to legal action.

"According to former colleagues and subordinates, Gingrich burns through money by repeatedly expanding his plans and ignoring warnings from staff about the finances of his projects. Now, the same pattern is threatening his presidential campaign.

"'The best way to say it is that Newt has no brakes and no rear view mirror,' observed one former adviser. . . . 'he never pulls back, and he never learns from the past.'"

Even more damning perhaps is the picture that emerges of Newt as setting up these organizations so that any financial failure does not attach to him personally.  When they don't work out, he just moves on to some other new big idea, leaving others to deal with the financial failure.  The Huffington Post article goes into much detail with examples of this.  A former colleague says

"Newt leaves all of his colleagues with bags of dead cats.  Not just one dead cat.  Bags of dead cats."

That's bad enough, but there's worse.  John Richardson, who interviewed Newt's second ex-wife for a devastating portrayal of him in 2010 for Esquire, has written a follow-up article based on his further talks with Marianne Gingrich.   He says this:

The real story isn't that Gingrich committed adultery . . .  over and over and over again. The real story is that Newt Gingrich is so deeply conflicted and strange, so erratic and unreliable, so scheming and secretive, that he's way too much like a character out of Dostoevsky than a politician should ever be.

Ugh.  And Nate Silver gives him an 85% chance of winning the Republican primary in Georgia.  I'm tempted to cross-over in the primary next week just so I can vote against him.

Ralph