Word: gingriched
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...heist of the year--the delivery of a $50 billion tax break for tobacco companies? Now a prime suspect has emerged: former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour. Two Republican Party officials told Time last week that Barbour, now a millionaire tobacco lobbyist, had gone to House Speaker Newt Gingrich and majority leader Trent Lott and persuaded them to slip a giant gift to his clients into the must-pass balanced-budget agreement just minutes before it was inked. For weeks it looked as if the two g.o.p. leaders had pulled off a classic fix: looting the general Treasury...
Sadly for Gingrich and Lott (but not for Barbour, who gets paid no matter what), a couple of goody-goody freshmen had to go and ruin everything. Calling the move "midnight madness" that "shines and stinks like a mackerel in the moonlight," Democratic Senator Richard Durbin and Republican Susan Collins exposed the tax credit, which would have offset industry costs in the now ill-fated tobacco deal, to the light of day. No one came forward to defend the stinker once it was yanked from its protective package, so it went down, 95 to 3, in the Senate...
...didn't Lott and Gingrich spread the blame by giving up Barbour? After all, he makes big bucks--$50,000 a month--fronting for the industry. But fingering Barbour would force the two leaders to choose between pleading stupidity (We were tricked into it) or venality. And neither Lott nor Gingrich is inclined to annoy tobacco's top ambassador in Washington, who controls thousands if not millions of dollars in political contributions. In the past 18 months, Republicans have pocketed $1.9 million from tobacco. (Democrats got $300,000.) Barbour makes Roger Tamraz, the star of last week's campaign-finance...
...Gingrich's staff has chosen to plead something between stupidity and disloyalty. An aide says Gingrich defended the tax break because he didn't really understand its political liability. When staff members sat him down and explained it, Gingrich felt, one says sadly, "betrayed...
...other words, even as Americans are told that they could change their lives if they just lost that extra poundage, the public perception of Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich seems to have been unaffected by their weight loss. Clinton is still popular. Gingrich is still unpopular. As another American President once said, "Life is unfair." That President, of course, had his own vacation compound on the Cape and was slim to begin with...