Should a politcian's past count?

Newt Gingrich would have us put his past behind him and consider what he has to offer us today.  OK.   If someone made some stupid choices as a young man and has matured and changed.   Or if someone's political philosophy has evolved, leading to changes in policy positions.    Fair enough.   A certain amount of that shows a person willing to listen, to learn, and to grow.

But what about basic character and temperament?    How much can we expect those basic traits to change?    Some.   Do we have evidence that Newt has changed deeply at that level?   Despite his very public embrace of Catholicism, I have my doubts.   It's just too facile, too expediently timed, touted too much (going on TV with James Dobson to confess and be blessed), and it's all too in synch with his old modus operandi.

We should be wary of what seems too facile and too expedient.  And here is where my problem with Newt comes in.    There is plenty of evidence of his continuing grandiosity, his ruthless ambition, his messiantic delusions, his manipulative posturing, and his towering vindictiveness.   Do we want to take a chance on someone like this and give him the power of the presidency, including the Red Phone at 3 AM?

The Washington Post yesterday contained an article by Jerry Markon, who has been exploring the Gingrich archives housed at the University of West Georgia.   Here's some of what he found:

When Gingrich was in the House, his chief of staff noted at a 1983 staff meeting that his boss frequently derided Reagan, along with then-White House Chief of Staff James A. Backer III and Robert H. Michel, the House Republican leader.

Gingrich “assumed that he’s the whole Republican Party,” said the Gingrich aide, Frank Gregorsky, according to a transcript of the meeting. “He knows more than the president, the president’s people, Michel, Baker. He calls them stupid all the time, and I think that’s going to get him into big trouble someday” . . .

An examination of the papers collected over nearly three decades reveals a politician of moderate-to-liberal beginnings . . . who moved to the right with an eye on political expediency — and privately savaged Republicans he was praising in public. Even as he gained a reputation as a conservative firebrand, the documents show Gingrich was viewed by his staff primarily as a tactician . . . with little ideological core.

The files offer a candid glimpse of the former House speaker a man who could be charming and self-effacing one moment, ambitious and grandiose the next, an admittedly disorganized manager who viewed his role as nothing less than saving the Western world.

“When I say save the West, I mean that,” Gingrich said in a 1979 address to his congressional staff, preserved in the files. “That is my job. . . . It is not my job to win reelection. It is not my job to take care of passport problems. It is not my job to get a bill through Congress. My job description as I have defined it is to save Western civilization.”

Ouch !!!    Is this the man for that job?   I don't think so.

Ralph