Newt Gingrich, one of the author's of the current state of terrible affairs in American politics, made a well received speech urging a fundamental change in the election process. His solution is to give to the winners of both parties nominations, enormous television time (and hour and a half on Sunday nights for nine weeks before the election), in order to raise the level of political discourse.

Gingrich makes this proposal after doing an analysis of the current state of affairs in which he cherry picked all his facts. He made thereby a formidable presentation, because he got to arrange his set of facts in an environment entirely different from which he wants the candidates to debate. He spoke alone, had all the time he wanted, and nobody was present who would question his fundamental assumptions or point out the facts he ignored.

It is hard to dismiss many of his observations, such as the poor level of political discourse, the failing national infrastructure, the mess in education and on and on and on. If we examine (as did not happen) his dialog in the same fashion that he believes could happen in the proposed debates between the nominees of the two parties, he could have been questioned on whether the parties themselves can be seen as capable or trusted to actually carry out the fundamental changes our Nation needs.

He made a facile distinction between the part of society that works (business) and the part that doesn't (government). In this, he missed entirely the discussion of our founders that concerned itself with the question of what does government need to do. (see my comments below on Sicko).

When asked about campaign finance reform, again in this venue where he really isn't confronted with his own biases, he found reasons to disagree with public financing. If effect, he just continue to represent the same biases and assumptions as a conservative political operative that he did when he contributed to the present ruined state of affairs in America, while he was Speaker of the House.

In the main, he advocated a solution to poor political dialog, by putting it forward in a situation that was itself poor political dialog. Of course, he totally avoided even a hint of recognizing the fact obvious to most of us today, namely that money rules and unless we get the Lords of Finance out of our bedrooms, paychecks, banking accounts, grocery stores, health care system, educational system, military spending, foreign policy and legislative halls and on and on and on, nothing is going to get better.

It was a clever speech that meant nothing, and was entirely superficial in how it complained about other superficial political discussions.