ShareThisWASHINGTON - No Republican has claimed the mantle of Ronald Reagan with more unabashed relish than former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
"We created 16 million jobs," Gingrich claimed in South Carolina this month. "I helped Gov. Reagan become President Reagan," he told Floridians last week. Gingrich said his wife, Callista, considers herself "a cross between Nancy Reagan and Laura Bush with just a slight bit of Jackie Kennedy tossed in."
The claims have provoked a ferocious battle among conservatives over Gingrich's claims to a central role in the "Reagan Revolution" that gave birth to modern conservatism.
Alarmed by the possibility of a Gingrich victory over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, several conservative leaders and former Reagan officials have denounced Gingrich's claims as fantasy. Defending himself in Thursday's GOP debate in Jacksonville, Gingrich cited a 1995 speech by Nancy Reagan saying her husband had passed the conservative torch to him.
Lou Cannon, Reagan's biographer, said Gingrich's role in the Reagan presidency was "practically nonexistent."
"Here's a guy who doesn't rate a line in Reagan's memoir and whose only line in the Reagan diaries is a reference in which Reagan is saying that his proposal is not a good idea, which it wasn't," Cannon said in a telephone interview from his home near Santa Barbara, Calif., referring to a Gingrich proposal for a budget freeze.
"We were foot soldiers in the Reagan army," said former Rep. Vin Weber, a Minnesota Republican who worked closely with Gingrich in the minority during the first two years of Reagan's presidency in 1981 and 1982, when the core of Reagan's economic program was enacted.
"I was just there to help out, and that's true of Newt, too. ... The notion that he played any part in forging the Reagan Revolution is just reinventing history."
The most blistering critique has come from Elliott Abrams, Reagan's assistant secretary of state, who wrote in the National Review last week that Gingrich "spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides, and his policies to defeat communism."
Gingrich's allies said his role in the Reagan years may have been small but Reagan knew who he was.
"Newt has good reason to recall the Reagan years; he was part of it," said Annelise Anderson, a former Reagan deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget who is now at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. "Newt Gingrich was a creative and thoughtful young backbencher in the Reagan years. Reagan was aware of him. ... We were all much aware of Newt Gingrich."
On policy, Reagan was not a pure conservative by today's standards. Facing a Democratic Congress, he raised taxes three times and signed into law an expansion of Medicare that was later repealed, said Daniel Mitchell, an expert on supply-side tax policy for the libertarian Cato Institute.
Gingrich championed welfare reform and a balanced budget in the 1990s during the Clinton administration, but later supported an individual health care mandate, efforts to combat climate change and other conservative apostasies.
Lee Edwards, a scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation who has written a Reagan biography and a book on the conservative movement, places Gingrich in a pantheon of four conservatives, with Reagan, Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater.
Edwards said Gingrich earned that spot for leading House Republicans to victory in 1994, but faulted his performance once in office. He said Gingrich lacks two of Reagan's core attributes, "prudence" and "wisdom."
On style, he finds little similarity between the two men. Reagan was "much more engaging, much more charismatic, much better at connecting with people than Mr. Gingrich is," Edwards said. "Reagan was always very, very self-deprecating and very modest about his achievements," while Gingrich's posture tends to be, "I'm very, very smart. Look at me."
E-mail Carolyn Lochhead at clochhead(at)sfchronicle.com. For more stories visit scrippsnews.com
Must credit the San Francisco Chronicle
