This week in 1995, a new GOP-controlled Congress was sworn in to office, the first time since the early 1950s that Republicans controlled both the House and the Senate. The sweeping conservative victory in the 1994 midterms had shocked liberals, but within weeks the media elite were fully engaged in disparaging the new majority as mean-spirited, racist, dumb and dangerous.
Journalists zeroed in on the incoming House Speaker Newt Gingrich, caricaturing him as a “Scrooge” and “the Gingrich who stole Christmas” (Newsweek) for suggesting modest reductions in the rate at which federal spending would grow in the future. Time’s Jack E. White approvingly relayed one Democratic Congressman’s smear that Gingrich’s plan would “actually cause black children to starve.”
Writing in Rolling Stone, PBS’s William Greider branded Gingrich “a…
