Gingrich Worries About GOP Chances in Nov.

Former U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich is shown in this file photo. The Republican Party is in serious danger of losing political ground in November elections if it does not enact reforms that eliminate waste and hold the federal bureaucracy to higher standards, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said on Sunday. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)

Now this is an interesting story. From Yahoo News:

WASHINGTON - Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, an architect of the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, says incumbents sometimes forget they are in office to change the government, not to be changed by it.

And he is worried that the GOP is in for a bad time in the fall elections.

"When you get poll after poll telling you basically the same thing, you have to respect the right of the American people to say they want change," Gingrich said on "Fox News Sunday."

An AP-Ipsos poll this month found that just 30 percent of the public approves of the job performance of the GOP-led Congress. By a 49-33 margin, the public favored Democrats over Republicans when asked which party should control Congress. That was the largest margin the Democrats have enjoyed in AP-Ipsos polling.

"I think it's very dangerous to stay on defense when you get these kinds of numbers," Gingrich said. "I would hope they would take a real message to the American people, which is not about general direction. It's about performance and it's about specific components of what they're doing."

Gingrich was critical of the failure of immigration legislation in the Senate to reflect what he called the nation's desire for border control and other stringent measures. He also questioned the extent of the hurricane recovery in New Orleans.

"It's going to be really bad by September when we go back and have a one-year review and we realize how much of New Orleans is not fixed," he said.

"I am saying that if the president would aggressively look at the failures of performance of the bureaucracy and lead the Congress toward changing the bureaucracy, that the country could, in fact, get very excited again about the opportunity to make government work," he said.

There is just one problem with Gingrich's analysis here--neither the Bush White House, nor the rubber-stamp Republican Congress have the cajones to analyze the problems facing this country, and provide the necessary policies to fix these problems. The Bush White House is more concerned with marketing spin, rather than looking at policies to fix the problems of Iraq, Katrina, the budget deficit, the debt, immigration, health insurance. And what policies the White House does produce are the same tired programs they been marketing for the past five years--and the American public has been rejecting those tired policies. And what has Congress been doing? They've been nothing but a rubber-stamp for the president. The big problem with Congress is that they've failed to step up as a check against unfettered presidential power. They have failed to provide any oversight against the corruption and scandals coming from the White House. Congresssional Republicans have also been embroiled in their own scandals and corruption with the Jack Abramoff probe, and Tom DeLay's scandals. The Republicans and both Congress, and the Bush White House have been content on enriching themselves, their corporate interests, and their rich elites, rather than governing for the good of the whole country. That is the primary issue in this election.

Gingrich hopes that the Congressional Republicans and the Bush administration can change. I doubt that. There has been too much crap going on with the Republicans for the past five years. They have dug themselves deep in this hole, and I don't believe they have the ability to change their own ways for the good of the country. What I see in this election is more PR-spin, perhaps even a greater amount of fear mongering by the Republicans in claiming if the Democrats take over Congress, then they will impeach Bush while America is still at war. In fact, there is still the issue of Iranian nuclear weapons development--how much do you want to bet the Bush administration will attack Iran just before the November elections? Start a third war, and hope the American public will rally around their wartime president on election day?

None of these strategies will provide options to fix the problems this country faces. None of these strategies even provide a reason for the American public to keep these Republicans in control of all three branches of government. Gingrich has a right to be worried.

The Republicans were more interested in enriching themselves rather than governing. They fiddled while the country is burning.