Something I don’t understand—Newt has a lifetime ACU rating of 90 yet is labeled a Rockefeller Republican.
Are the ACU ratings bogus?
ACU covers only some votes and only covers his time in office. He has become much worse since then.
When Rockefeller was running for president, Newt supported and campaigned for him. Newt, in his own words, says he was a Rockefeller state chairman of the South. In other words, he is an original Rockefeller Republican. That is how Newt gets the label — Rockefeller Republican.
When Newt was in his GOPac and Contract salad days, Rolling Stone (yeah, really) ran a profile article on his career -- from a liberal POV of course -- that pointed out that Newt had originally, in the early 1970's (when I lived there) run in his Cobb County, Georgia, Congressional District (District 3 back then) as a Rockefeller Republican (aka "Me Too'er" for their unwillingness to challenge FDR's popular Socialist programs), that era's version of a "kinder, gentler" conservative. Newt lost to the more conservative candidate.
The point Rolling Stone was trying to make to their hoper-doper Lefty readership was that Gingrich's midcareer conservatism might fade, that he was an opportunist above all (in their opinion), and that things might happen later on that would give liberals something to be glad, or at least relieved, about. Newt might, in other words, "grow" in office, to use that special liberal lexicon of conservative moral and political compromise, decay, and failure.
Looks like they were right, judging by the fact that many on the Right now have a similar perspective of Newt the politician after the last 10 years.
The ACU voting averages only count certain votes people cast while in office, so that Newt's record will reflect more his Contract days as Speaker and his bombthrowing conservative firebrand career before that. The averages change slowly, year by year, and they tend (in my opinion) mathematically to mask the impact of a politician's decision to "run to the middle" as Orrin Hatch, John McCain, and now John Thune have all done as people have begun to whisper the toxic words "national office" in their ears, with the suggestion that they need to reposition themselves for the greater purpose and blah, blah, blah.
Newt called Romney a "Rockefeller Republican" when he himself had been the Southern Regional Director for Rockefeller's campaign way back in 1968.
I don't know about the ACU or his voting record, but chutzpah like that shouldn't pass uncommented on.