The Tiffany scandal rocking the Republicans

Six-figure bill: Newt Gingrich and wife Callista owed up to half a million dollars to jeweller Tiffany
12 April 2012

Looking back on the Obama presidency, it will be interesting to calculate how many of its days have been dominated by natural or man-made disasters - oil spills, the current flooding of the Mississippi, the tornados that have had their hooks into Oklahoma this week, and the fierce one that cut a mile-wide swathe through the town of Joplin, Missouri, killing at least 122 people, along with the international disasters, the earthquakes, the eruptions, the tsunami. The list is inexorable.

Rather smaller on the human map, but nonetheless telling for the fate of the presidency, have been those individual catastrophes - the death of Senator Ted Kennedy, for instance, and the loss of his seat to a Republican; the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords earlier this year in Tucson, for which the rhetoric of Sarah Palin was made - rightly or wrongly - to take some moral blame.

Smaller still in the scale of human folly have been those tragi-comedies of personal weakness, such as the fall of Congressman Eric Massa, Democrat, of the 29th Congressional District of New York, an ex-Navy man whose taste ran to playing tickling games with male employees and who continued such navy larks on Capitol Hill until some gasping intern decided enough was enough.

Not long after, another New York district, the 26th, was hit by the most foolish scandal (and the swiftest resolved) of all time, when its Republican representative, Chris Lee, was found to have sent a bathroom photograph of himself, shirtless, to a woman he was cruising on Craigslist, telling the truth about his name, but lying as to his marital status and job. The chest and abs were not astounding but perfectly presentable for a man in his forties. The photo went straight to the gossip site, Gawker, and the district was soon looking for a replacement.

We're talking about western New York, not far from Canada and including the suburbs of Buffalo, the most reliably Republican area of the state. Some weeks ago the parties began to realise that, with a vote potentially split by a local Tea Party candidate, the Democrats had more than a chance. Money was poured in, especially on the Republican side, and it soon became plain that the Republicans had a problem, and that problem was Medicare.

Medicare is one of two areas of the American healthcare system that most resemble the European welfare state. The first is the Veterans Health Administration, which covers to varying degrees anyone who has served in the military. The second is Medicare, which is for the elderly, and is a highly popular entitlement, expensive though it may be to run. Since the recession, there has been a popular clamour for spending cuts, but it has seldom been clear what would constitute a popular (and significant) cut.

In Congress, the chairman of the House Budget Committee is Paul Ryan, one of the key figures in Republican economic strategy. He recently prepared a budget, supported by nearly all members of the House, which envisaged, in the near future, the replacement of Medicare with a voucher system - effectively a privatisation of Medicare. No sooner had he done this than critics, including members of his own party, began to sense that messing around with Medicare was going to be electoral poison to them.

One man who said so publicly was Newt Gingrich: the Ryan plan, he said, was too radical: it was Right-wing social engineering and it went too far. But Gingrich was pounced on by his party, and immediately backtracked. Not only did he not believe what he had just said. He went on to warn Democrats that if they tried to use his words against him, they would be lying, because he had already unsaid what he had said. Indeed, he told Rush Limbaugh on radio that he had not been talking about Paul Ryan's plan when he said what he said (the words he later unsaid). In that case, Limbaugh drily retorted, why did you apologise to him?

While Gingrich was making an ass of himself, the Democratic candidate in District 26, Kathy Hochul, was hammering out the same theme as Gingrich Mark One: messing with Medicare was too radical. The Ryan budget explicitly links the shifting of an extra financial burden on to the elderly with future tax cuts for the wealthy. So it was not hard for a Democrat to argue that this was inequitable, and to raise fears about the shrinking value of the vouchers the Ryan system envisaged. And at a national level the Democrats made it clear, rubbing their hands with glee, that they would not allow Gingrich to walk back his frank misgivings about Ryan.

In the special election prompted by the vanity and mild exhibitionism of Congressman Lee, Congressman Ryan's budget proved the poison pill anticipated. Kathy Hochul won handsomely. The Democrats went on to hold, the next day, a Senate vote on the Ryan budget, which nearly every Republican senator felt obliged to support.

As for Gingrich, he was not only stuck with the task of supporting Ryan till further notice. He had been brilliantly leaked against, no doubt by his political friends. It was stated that in the recent past Gingrich and his wife Callista had run up debts of between a quarter and a half a million dollars at Tiffany, the jeweller. This didn't look good in a man calling for fiscal prudence, but Gingrich explained that there was nothing imprudent about it - the account was a normal, revolving, interest-free account, which had been paid off in a timely manner.

An interest-free revolving account, for a six-figure sum, at Tiffany? The minds of many began to revolve. What had Tiffany been lobbying for when they were chummying up the Gingriches in this way? And what had Newt and Callista got out of it that the rest of us couldn't, or wouldn't? And how presidential is that?

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