Republicans make life especially difficult for Black Republicans. The racially tinged statements that come from Limbaugh ("Michelle Obama's "uppiti-ness") or  Coulter ("our blacks") leave people speechless.

Kiron Skinner , an African-American foreign policy wonk, has joined the Gingrich campaign as an advisor. Ms Skinner tries to cover for Gingrich's push to roll back child labor law's for poor Black/Latino children by stating the following:

What he asked is how do we grow a culture of responsibility, a culture of saving and investment, when you don’t have that in the home. It wasn’t to finger poor children, or suggest children who come from more elite backgrounds perform better," said Skinner. "It was about how to provide a template when children may come from a home where someone doesn’t carry a briefcase or isn’t a blue collar worker. That’s what he was speaking to. It's leading to a national conversation: How do we help people dropping out of the system very, very early?"

Did anyone but Skinner get that message from Gingrich's words? Gingrich's previous solution was to place black children in orphanages as a part of the Contract With America:

Newt Gingrich, the soon-to-be Republican Speaker of the House, was eager to flex his muscle. Minor controversy erupted over remarks he made about welfare reform and orphanages. Some Republicans had suggested that the nation could reduce welfare rolls by placing the children of welfare mothers in orphanages. The idea was to prohibit states from paying welfare benefits for two groups of children: Those whose paternity was not established and those born out of wedlock to women under 18. The savings, according to this proposal, would be used to establish and operate orphanages and group homes for unwed mothers.

The GOP has a major problem when it comes to dealing with the black community and black Republicans have decided that they will not have any role in challenging the GOP's biased rhetoric.

For the GOP prison is a better option than education and orphanages are better option than working to repair families. The GOP does believe in government intervention when it means that blacks lose freedoms.

I love how Gingrich's story about his Freddie Mac involvement is that he was using his vast powers as a historian to warn Freddie's executives about the mortgage bubble.  Because, I tell ya, when I need a complex pool of bundled home and consumer loans properly valued, I take it right to a historian, particularly one who writes popular histories and counter-factual novels with lurid sex scenes.

The other day I was talking complex derivatives and CDS exposures with Doris Kearns Goodwin and I made a freaking fortune.  She told me some anecdote about how Lincoln and his cabinet didn't get along, on purpose, and so I shorted the Zimbabwe dollar using a synthetic index traded only through a dark pool in Luxembourg.  What insight these historians have!

That was a good book. Nice post.

My take on Gingrich is that he is a powder keg with a short fuse. And I think his mercurial speaking style and his lashing out are best understood as defense mechanisms---all of which hide a world of vulnerability.

Right now I am sort of focused on the topic of anxiety, and this has led me to look at anxiety and its role in politics.  Anxiety is the cousin of fear and its corresponding emotion of panic, in my opinion.  Fear is focused on a specific threat that is believed to be happening or will happen (e.g. another terrorist attack).  Anxiety is either focused on a specific threat that might happen (the plane I'm on might crash as opposed to I know we're going to crash!) or the possibility of some threat yet unknown to emerge (the impending doom on the horizon). 

For many in the white population of this country, the black community represents a source of anxiety.  They are seen as a threat, but in what exact manner that threat will occur is ambiguous at best most of the time.  This makes it much more difficult to discuss, as opposed to say the threat of illegal immigrants taking away jobs which is seen as happening right now.

At one time in my academic days, I focused on historical and contemporary South Africa during Apartheid.  There was a heighten state of anxiety among the whites - everything seem calm on the surface.  The black South Africans were by and large complying with the rules of the country.  But the whites knew there was something under surface - and how it was going manifest someday was unknown.  A sort of impending doom, the end to their way of life.  This "end to a way of life" anxiety is what grips many like Newt and those who feel aligned with him.

Exactly how it will all unfold is not known.  But they sense.  It's right there beneath the surface.  A riot waiting to happening - kind of like the ending scene in Do the Right Thing.  Of course, if one asked these American whites to articulate what exactly that "way of life" is, they would probably stumble over their words and make no sense.  All they really know is that gnawing anxiety doesn't go away and they look to those like Newt to make it go away.