Beck calling Gingrich a progressive is off-base

Former cable TV host and noted conservative Glenn Beck threw down the race card recently, proving once again that everyone is eligible to play in that game: All it takes is a mouth.

But Beck stuck the racist label on the conservative Tea Party movement. Predictably, its members are hopping mad, and you don’t have to be a Tea Partyer to see why.

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Colbert I. King

King writes a column -- sometimes about D.C., sometimes about politics -- that runs on Saturdays.

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In an interview this month with Fox business news host Andrew Napolitano, Beck laid into Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich, calling the former House speaker a “progressive” proponent of big government in the same mold as President Obama.

Taking note of the fact that Tea Partyers support Gingrich over Obama, Beck said: “So if you’ve got a big-government progressive . . . in Obama [and] . . . one in Newt Gingrich . . . ask yourself this, Tea Party. Is it about Obama’s race?”

Pressed by Napolitano on the question, Beck doubled down. “It must be about race. I mean, what else is it? It’s the policies that matter.”

Thus, posits Beck, if you are a conservative and prefer Gingrich to Obama, your decision must be driven by racism.

Ah, where do we go from here?

First, resist calling Glenn Beck nasty names. That gets us nowhere.

To stipulate at the outset, there are people who oppose Barack Obama because of his race.

But Beck’s theory is wrong on two major counts.

First, people can prefer a candidate who shares Obama’s policies to Barack Obama himself and not be racist. Second, and equally important, whatever Newt Gingrich may be, he is no progressive.

Consider, under Beck’s line of argument, what to make of Democratic voters in 2008 who supported the candidacies of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sen. Joe Biden, Sen. Christopher Dodd, former senator John Edwards, Rep. Dennis Kucinich, New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and former senator Mike Gravel to then-Sen. Obama.

Policy-wise, there wasn’t much of a difference between Obama and his Democratic rivals; they all were considered left of center. But if there were no major policy differences among the candidates, then by Beck’s lights, supporters of Obama’s Democratic opponents made their decisions based on race.

That’s absurd.

In picking a candidate, ideology isn’t all that counts. Familiarity with the candidate can make a difference. So, too, shared experiences and values, similar upbringing, sound bites, etc. Birds of a feather can still fly apart. It isn’t always about race.

But Beck’s consignment of Gingrich to the progressive camp is equally off-base, and he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it.

Show me the progressive who applauded Gingrich’s 1994 “Contract With America” that steered Republicans to control the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. Cite the progressives who cheered as Gingrich assumed and executed the role of commander in chief in the impeachment of Democratic President Bill Clinton?

Gingrich a progressive?

Hear the voice of Gingrich over time, as Washington Monthly chronicled in January:

“The mother killing her two children in South Carolina vividly reminds every American how sick the society is getting and how much we have changed. I think people want to change and the only way you get change is to vote Republican.” Gingrich said this in 1994, a few days before the midterm elections, after Susan Smith drowned her two young sons.

“I want to say to the elite of this country — the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite, I accuse you . . . of being afraid to talk about the mess you have made” and “afraid to take responsibility for things you have done, and instead foisting upon the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don’t have the courage to look at the world you have created.” Gingrich said this in 1999, after Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed 13 people at Columbine High School.

After Seung Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, Gingrich weighed in against liberals for supporting “situation ethics.”

These few remarks of Gingrich’s underscore the obvious: that the Georgian who would be president is not now, nor has he ever been, a progressive. And unless there is a miraculous change in his DNA, he will never become a member in good standing in the progressive moment.

Au contraire, Mr. Beck. Newt Gingrich is at one with the Tea Party. And he’s one of yours.

kingc@washpost.com