A week after trashing the Paul Ryan plan as "right-wing social engineering" on Meet the Press, Newt Gingrich appeared on CBS's Face the Nation on Sunday, where host Bob Schieffer began the whole show with this Gingrich line: "He announces for President and his own party goes nuts." As in insane. But Schieffer not only revisited Newt's Medicare mess -- "I have not heard one single Republican come to your defense" -- he spent several minutes dwelling on Gingrich's large credit account at Tiffany's and pushed him around about his marital infidelity: "And what about your personal life, and your personal behavior. Are people supposed to just put that aside?"
This is another classic double standard for CBS. Just remember Steve Kroft on "60 Minutes" accepting Bill Clinton saying he 's "caused pain" in his marriage in 1992. He never suggested it was rude to expect people to "just put that aside." And why is Schieffer already pounding Gingrich's "bizarre revelation" on expensive tastes in jewelry, but Kroft never asked Obama in five interviews throughout the 2008 campaign cycle about Obama buying a $1.6 million house in Chicago with a crook named Tony Rezko? As for Schieffer, perhaps he'd like to recall how he cooed over the supposedly blissful marriage of John and Elizabeth Edwards on August 26, 2007:
SCHIEFFER: Your book is absolutely wonderful...
Mrs. EDWARDS: Thank you.
SCHIEFFER: ...and it is so – it's a loving love story.
Mrs. EDWARDS: Yes.
SCHIEFFER: Beautifully told, it seems to me. You all had your 30th wedding anniversary. I continue to go back to this business of finding out that you had cancer. Do you have any regrets about deciding to just go ahead and live your life as you've done on this campaign?
When Gingrich said the American people have to decide "Am I now a mature person who has in fact come to grips with life and would be an effective leader," CBS summarized the video on its Face the Nation page with this:
Gingrich: Up to voters to decide if I'm mature
GOP 2012 candidate acknowledges mistakes, says American people have to decide whether or not he is a "mature person" now
This is not exactly how they'd summarize a Bill Clinton interview -- if they ever dared to ask a question about his sexual immaturity. Check out the jewelry exchange/Schieffer lecture:
SCHIEFFER: Before we go to break, I want to ask you about this bizarre revelation that came up last week that your wife in 2005-2006 filed a financial disclosure because she was working for the House Agriculture Committee that revealed you owed between 250,000 [and] a half-million dollars to a jewelry company. What was that about, Mister Speaker?
GINGRICH: Well, first of all, it was about obeying the law. She filed a dislcosure. It's been sitting there for five years. We're private citizens. I work very hard. We have a reasonably good income...We don't do elaborate things.
SCHIEFFER: Did you owe a half-million dollars to a jewelry company at one point?
GINGRICH: We had a revolving fund.
SCHIEFFER: Well, what does that mean?
GINGRICH: It means that we had a revolving fund. That it was -- it was an interest-free account.
SCHIEFFER: I mean, who buys a half-million dollars worth of jewelry on credit?
GINGRICH: No, it's a -- go and talk to Tiffany's. It's a standard no-interest account.
SCHIEFFER: How long did you owe it?
GINGRICH: I have no idea but it was paid off automatically. We paid no interest on it. There was no problem with it. It's a normal way of doing business.
SCHIEFFER: It's very odd to me that someone would run up a half-million-dollar bill at a jewelry store.
GINGRICH: Well, go talk to Tiffany's. Al I'm telling you is -- we are very frugal. We, in fact, live within our budget. We owe nothing.
SCHIEFFER: What did you buy?
GINGRICH: We owe nothing -- Well, it's my private life.
SCHIEFFER: Well, I understand.
GINGRICH: And I understand, I'm just suggesting to you.
SCHIEFFER: I mean you're running for president.
GINGRICH: Right.
SCHIEFFER: You're going to be the guy in charge of the Treasury Department, and it just sticks out like a sore thumb.
Gingrich protested: "I am debt-free. If the U.S. government was debt-free as I am, everybody in America would be celebrating." This is not a smart move if you're running for president -- but perhaps Gingrich had no intention of running for president five years ago. CBS was plucking this out just like the opposition research that it is. Even so, shouldn't expensive tastes in jewelry (or other appearances of wealth) be more of a "sore thumb" issue in a Democratic primary?
