John Fund shares with National Review Online readers his concerns about former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s admiration for the two Roosevelt presidents.
Together those two presidents embodied the Progressive Era and the New Deal, developments which dramatically expanded Washington’s powers and radically changed the expectations Americans had of government.
Just last week, Newt made clear his desire to emulate the two men when he told Newsweek magazine that, in handling intractable problems such as poverty, “we’re gonna experiment and experiment and experiment until we break through.” When Newsweek’s Peter Boyer dryly noted that this might “not please the ear of a small-government conservative,” Gingrich didn’t flinch: “It makes me, in some ways, like the two Roosevelts.”
Such talk drives many conservatives to distraction. In early December, Larry Kudlow of CNBC confronted Newt with his constant invocations of Teddy Roosevelt by pointing out that the man bolted the GOP in 1912 to run as a third-party presidential candidate, wanted to raise taxes, and was an inveterate regulator and a “government activist.” Kudlow went so far as to bluntly ask: “Are you actually the conservative candidate that so many people are hoping you are?”