One of the most difficult problems faced by Newt Gingrich in appealing to religious voters is his record of adultery and three marriages. His campaign insists that it was his first wife, Jackie, not Gingrich, who wanted the first divorce. However, recently released papers contradict that claim and indicate it was Newt Gingrich who wanted the divorce.
The campaign previously insisted that “it was (Jackie Gingrich) that requested the divorce, not Newt.”
That first divorce was particularly because Jackie was reportedly dying of cancer and rumors suggested that Newt actually served the divorce papers the day after her cancer surgery — Gingrich denies the claims as does their daughter.
CNN was told the divorce papers were sealed but it later found the documents.
Friends of both Gingrich and his first wife contradicted Gingrich’s claims about who wanted the divorce.
The papers show that Newt Gingrich filed a divorce complaint on July 14, 1980, in Carroll County, saying that “the marriage of the parties is irretrievably (sic) broken.” Even more interesting is that Jackie filed opposing the filing — a curious response if she wanted the divorce or, as the campaign claimed today, she asked him to file the papers. She added that “[a]lthough defendant does not admit that this marriage is irretrievably broken, defendant has been hopeful that an arrangement for temporary support of defendant and the two minor daughters of the parties could be mutually agreed upon without the intervention of this court . . . All efforts to date have been unsuccessful.”
Jackie Gingrich has never spoken to the media on the allegations. However, in 1985, she stated”He can say that we had been talking about it for 10 years, but the truth is that it came as a complete surprise.”
The bigger concern for evangelical voters is that Gingrich was already in a relationship with a 28-year-old congressional aide at the time. He later married the aide, Marianne Ginther Gingrich, and then divorced her 19 years later for another, and younger, congressional aide whom he married soon after his divorce. The third wife, Callista Bisek Gingrich, is now campaigning for him.
I have previously written how candidates like Gingrich who are running on faith should not complain when asked about their own commitment to faith. In this case, Gingrich clearly violated (repeatedly) an oath to God in a different ceremony. With the declining separation of church and state, such questions are likely to increase.
How relevant should that be to voters? Would it be equally relevant if he was not campaigning for religious voters?
Source: CNN
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Tony C, The NYT article and the Frumm piece are newer. Paul is finally getting the attention that he has asked for.
I wonder why female politicians don’t have this problem.
I’m not trying to be snarky … I have wondered about this for years. As the number of female politicians attaining elected/appointed office grew, I kept waiting for the sex scandals to be revealed. Yet, relative to their numbers, the instances are very few.
Strange.
As to the question of Gingrich’s clearly violating (repeatedly) an oath to God or the oath to his newest bride (however you want to look at it), it proves the man’s word is not his bond on either a sacred or secular level.
As for Paul … I do think his word is his bond which makes some of his utterances downright scary.
@Swarthmore: The article you linked, if you read it, just quotes the newsletters that went out under Ron Paul’s name. They actually do not prove anything, nobody thinks he wrote those newsletters. The article Puzzling posted has a more balanced view that does not assume Paul subscribed to the views in the newsletters.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/12/26/1048987/-Gallup:-Obamas-numbers-inch-up
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/12/news-bulletin-ron-paul-is-a-huge-racist.html
@rcampbell: My concerns with Ron Paul are the same as my concerns with most libertarians, he seems to have blind faith in free markets despite the repeated evidence that they don’t work. In general, free markets fail when it comes to powerful conflicts of interest.
So yeah, although I despise what got passed in the name of healthcare reform, it is pretty obvious to me that in the health insurance industry the conflicts of interest (making a profit or paying for care) led to massive abuse and tricking people into thinking they were covered until they discovered too late they were not.
The same is true of the housing bubble, there was a fundamental conflict of interest when the first lenders could earn a profit by approving loans to people that could not afford them, and even trick those people into thinking they could, when the approval guaranteed them a profit by selling the crap loan.
My worry about Paul is that he has a firmly-entrenched wrong-headed view of how the economy works, and how it should work.
But I might vote for Paul anyway if he wins the nomination, I would rather wreck the economy than give Obama or any Republican another four years in which to consolidate their new monarchical powers and gutting of the Constitution. I do think Ron Paul is a constitutionalist, and IMO almost any amount of pain is worth restoring the civil rights we have had taken from us.
No more right of habeas corpus, the President can have you assassinated at will, or imprisoned indefinitely, without charges and without an attorney. No first amendment rights, the government can shut down your website at will. It records every email you send and phone call you make. You can be searched without cause, and routinely are at airports and on buses. You can be arrested for recording an encounter with a police officer. You no longer have the right to protest on public property. Police tase and pepper spray people with impunity for engaging in entirely legal protest, taking entirely legal video, or any number of other entirely legal activities.
So I don’t know what scares the other half, but I can live with what scares me if it offers even a remote chance of restoring our civil rights. If we give four more years to another corporatist that will just completely ignore the Constitution, as both Bush and Obama have done in equal measure, then I doubt the Constitution’s slide into irrelevancy can be stopped.
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/12/grappling-with-ron-pauls-racist-newsletters/250206/
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/26/us/politics/ron-paul-disowns-extremists-views-but-doesnt-disavow-the-support.html?hp
A) Given the ethics violation that bounced Gingrich as Speaker, it appears he violated his oath of office as well as personal oaths.
B) Perhaps Dr Paul knows all too well who the writer was but doesn’t want to besmirch the junior Senator from Kentucky. Just a guess, but he comes off otherwise as a pretty smart guy. The lapse is uncharacteristic.
C) Tony C’s adverse reaction to “about half of what he (Paul) truthfully wants to do!” is, I think, consistant for folks on both sides of the aisle. Each side would gladly accept half while the other half of his beliefs scare the hell out of them. No miltary interventions? Yay! No Department of Education? Boo! Medical marijuana? Good call, Dr. Paul. No healthcare insurance reform? WTF!
Newt Gingrich: I Screwed Around On My Wives Because I Love This Country So Much
@Elaine: I doubt he is being honest about that either; although it does appear they were written by others, I find it hard to believe he wouldn’t know WHO wrote them (he says he does not).
I don’t think he is lying about what he wants to do as President, I do not read or watch everything he says but I have seen plenty and haven’t seen him back down or reverse field on any political or policy stance just because it is unpopular.
http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2011/12/watch-ron-paul-talk-up-his-newsletter-in-1995-video.php?ref=fpb Not that honest….
Tony C.,
I think Ron Paul isn’t being honest about the newsletters that were published under his name back in the 1990s.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/twitter/archive/message.php?message=151331185820307457&date=12/26/2011 Interesting tweet about Paul.
@1zb1: No better than Romney, no better than Obama. The only candidate in the current crop that seems to not be lying is Ron Paul, and the problem there is I wouldn’t want him to implement about half of what he truthfully wants to do!
http://www.frumforum.com/ron-paul-codger-crank-or-bunco-artist
I don’t see Newt’s problem any greater then Romney’s to appeal to them given his hypocrisy. Oh I forgot, religious voters don’t really care about hypocrisy since most of them are filled with it.
gosh, tony. you’ve said it all.
“How relevant should that be to voters?”
It shows, once again, that the man is a liar…and unethical. That’s relevant to non-religious voters too.
To my knowledge, there is no legal way to hold a political candidate to their campaign promises once they have won the office, they can do as they like until the next election.
Thus, anything that speaks to the integrity of the candidate is fair game for consideration in whether they can be trusted to keep their campaign promises after the campaign is over.
Of course this matters, whether he is courting religious voters or not. Take all the salacious bits out, the upshot is that Newt lies, Newt cheats, Newt blames others when he is at fault, and Newt has a track record of not caring who he hurts or what he promised, he will apparently say anything to get what he wants, and his campaign is meaningless because it is all just a con of whatever he thinks might trick you into voting for him, the only thing you can be sure of is that Newt will do whatever benefits Newt.