Before agreeing on the Friday after the elections to step down as Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich attempted, with what has lately become typical ineptitude, to blame the media for the Republicans’ ill-success in getting congressmen and senators elected. This failure was widely thought to have been owed in part to the party’s excessive attention to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, and Gingrich said: “I don’t think we are nearly as obsessed as the press corps. Look at all the hours that Tim Russert spent on ‘Meet the Press’ this year on that topic versus the number of hours on Social Security… . I don’t think hour after hour of details about Lewinsky are very newsworthy… . It is a little disingenuous to spend all this media time on a topic and then turn and say why are these other folks obsessed with it.”

Of course it was instantly pointed out by a whole chorus of anti-Gingrichites that, as Howard Kurtz of The Washington Postput it, “the former history professor … seemed to be writing himself out of this particular chapter. Gingrich declared last April that he would ‘never again, as long as I am speaker, make a speech without commenting on this topic’ of the White House sex scandal.” At times Gingrich had an almost Clintonian capacity for self-contradiction, but without Clinton’s charming shamelessness about it. Yet the soon-to-be ex-Speaker was on to something, and his remark to his Republican colleagues on explaining the reasons for