Newt Gets It - Does Anyone Else?

Writing in today's New York Post,former Speaker Newt Gingrich takes the current crop of Presidential candidates of both major parties to task for failing to address the central issues currently facing us. Reading this, I am struck yet again by how clearly and forthrightly Newt states his case and the elements of that crisis. Here is a man who has clearly thrown caution to the wind and is speaking his mind.

But I am most struck by how clearly Newt gets it.

Whatever his personal failings or poor qualities as a candidate, the fact is that Gingrich is the only--literally the only one--major American political figure who both acknowledges that we are in a crisis and correctly identifies the contours of that crisis. Gingrich writes:

Contrary to what candidates in either party may think, the political dividing line in America doesn’t run between the GOP and minorities. For most Americans, it’s not even found between Republicans and Democrats, or the red-versus-blue-state invention of the media.

The real division is between hardworking, tax-paying Americans - of both parties and all races - and an entrenched, permanent governing system in Washington and state capitals designed to serve its own needs and not the needs of the American people.

Over the 42 years since the beginning of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the increasing power of public employee unions, the growth of the bureaucracies, the rise of lawyers, the development of complex regulatory legalism, and the entrenchment of an elite establishment that imposes political correctness have combined to create this permanent governing class system.

And the values of this permanent government are not those of the Americans who pay the taxes and the union dues that support it. Its bureaucracies value process more than achievement; its lawyers value rules over results; and its politically correct elite value avoiding embarrassment more than telling the truth about failure.

Newt gets it. Does anyone else?