Gingrich takes swipes at both parties at Yorba Linda talk

Hillary Clinton wasn’t far from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s mind when he spoke Wednesday night at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library & Birthplace.

After all, a woman styled after the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination for president is the subject of Gingrich’s book, which he was in Yorba Linda to promote.

“Duplicity: A Novel” is a political thriller co-written with former Washington Post reporter Pete Earley that follows the nation’s first female president as she handles the aftermath of a terrorist attack on the U.S. embassy in Mogadishu during a presidential election.

During his talk, Gingrich took aim at Clinton and the Democratic Party, but he saved plenty of ammunition for Republican presidential aspirant Donald Trump, the U.S. Congress and the general state of politics today.

“Trump is the natural product of the Kardashian era,” he said to guffaws.

“There’s a technique where you can measure the reading level of a speech and what level a person speaks at,” said Gingrich, a former history professor at West Georgia College. “Most politicians give speeches at seventh- or eighth-grade levels. Trump’s is at fourth grade.”

Mocking Trump’s voice, he went on, “‘This is going to be a great country again, because it’s going to be great, the changes are going to be huge, and you’re going to love them.’ What part of that do you oppose?”

But the former speaker — himself a former presidential candidate — said he has “a lot of respect” for Trump and Ben Carson, the top candidates for the Republican nomination for president, citing their credentials in business and medicine.

“It is harder to become a world-class neurosurgeon than it is to become a U.S. senator,” he said. “It takes more brain power and you do more real things.… But in Washington, neither of these two guys count because none of their experience is in the things that Washington validates.”

The rise of the “outsider” candidates in the Republican primary, he explained, has to do with an increasingly polarized public and a right wing that is “totally fed up.”

“I can’t think of any time in our history where we’ve had anything like this,” he said of the dominance in the polls of Trump, Carson, Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz, whom he called “an outsider who’s accidentally in the Senate.”

Meanwhile, establishment candidates such as Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush and John Kasich — all of whom Gingrich lavished praise on —are “caught in this time warp where people say, ‘You’ve been in office? All right, next person.’ And they haven’t found a formula to start a new conversation.”

Gingrich had no prediction for which Republican would come out victorious. “We’re still a long way away from the nomination,” he said.

This shake-up in the GOP also explains recent turmoil among House Republicans after Speaker John Boehner announced that he was leaving the post as well as Congress, said Gingrich, lamenting the loss of Eric Cantor, Boehner and Kevin McCarthy from leadership positions.

“What’s going wrong is profound and different than what we’re used to dealing with,” he said.

Gingrich barely alluded to his own time in the speaker’s seat. His tenure was marked by accusations of ethical lapses and a leadership challenge that prompted him to resign. He left the House in January 1999.

But whatever internal strife the GOP is dealing with now, he said, is nothing compared with the problems in the Democratic Party, which he called “so whacked.”

“If I had come in here and said there were two debates, one was a bunch of old white people, the other was an African American, two Latinos, a very competent woman CEO, you would assume, historically, that I was describing the Democratic Party,” Gingrich said.

In going after Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described socialist Democrat who also has his eye on the presidency, Gingrich got his biggest laugh of the night: “His idea of a real offensive against ISIS would be to ship them Vermont maple syrup.”

ISIS is a reference to the militant Islamic State, the Al Qaeda breakaway faction that controls large swathes of Iraq and Syria. It is also referred to as ISIL.

But speaking on the eve of Clinton’s congressional testimony about the 2012 Benghazi attacks, Gingrich reserved his harshest words for the former secretary of State.

“If you want to understand why the American people believe there’s widespread corruption, watch the Clinton campaign,” he said. “How you could have this much baggage and think you could become president is just an astonishment.”

Clinton’s ongoing scandals, he speculated, could even bring Vice President Joe Biden into the presidential race, despite Biden’s announcement earlier in the day that he would not seek the Democratic nomination.

“The last 14 minutes of his 15-minute event were designed to say, ‘If Hillary collapses, I’m happy to jump in,’” Gingrich said. “‘It wasn’t that I’m never going to run, it’s that I can’t get in now.”