The Political Interest

We've been here before, remember? It wasn't so long ago that Ronald Reagan won the White House with a simple message: Americans were overtaxed and overregulated and reeling under the weight of Big Government. To illustrate those themes, the Master invoked stories of welfare queens driving Cadillacs and buildings full of bureaucrats, each taking care of a single Indian. Reagan's facts were so routinely off-base that his staff quit trying to explain them. In 1982 the President spoke glowingly about British legal traditions. In England, he said, it used to be that "if a criminal carried a gun, even if he didn't use it, he was tried for first-degree murder and hung if he was found guilty." Informed that the anecdote wasn't true, Reagan's press secretary said, "Well, it's a good story, though. It made the point, didn't it?"

In outlook, in prescription and also in his penchant for shaving the truth by the clever manipulation of easily grasped images, Newt Gingrich is Reagan's true heir. To appreciate Newt's World, consider just a few of the bombs the new House Speaker lobbed as he issue-surfed through his Dec. 4 appearance on NBC's Meet the Press:

THE COMMONSENSE OUTRAGE: To swipe at oppressive government regulations, Gingrich produced a first-aid heart pump. "What I want the American people to understand," he said, is that this pump that was "invented in Denmark increases by 54% the number of people with CPR who get to the hospital with a chance to recover. The Food and Drug Administration makes illegal ((a product)) that minimizes brain damage, increases the speed of recovery and saves money." Using this pump is just "common sense," Gingrich insisted, implying that the FDA's intransigence costs lives.

In fact: The pump Gingrich displayed was invented by two Americans who licensed it to a Danish company that still hasn't applied to the FDA for permission to test it in the U.S. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, who mistakenly believed they could test the device without FDA approval, conducted some early trials in a hospital environment. The device seemed promising, but cardiologist Michael Callaham, who oversaw the trials, says later field tests on 859 patients "unfortunately showed the pump to be of absolutely no benefit." The FDA stopped the study, says Callaham, "but we talked with them about it for five months, during which time we went ahead with our trials, as they knew we would. So the process worked well enough. The FDA's job is to protect the public. They're appropriately tough. You don't want bad stuff on the market."

THE FALSE PANACEA: To Gingrich, and to Republicans generally, the more power left in state hands the better. State Governors, said Gingrich approvingly in his example, urge Washington to "send welfare back home," where they will "get people into work, and it will be dramatically less expensive."

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