Two writers, same joke

Last Thursday I wrote of …

… Gingrich’s call in 1988 for the Republicans to leave Reaganism behind and move boldly into the future of … neo-Rockefeller Republicanism (?), Tofflerian Future Shockism (?), a high-tech restoration of Me Tooism (?), or whatever it was that was on his ever-restless mind at the moment.

In her WSJ column that came out on Friday, Peggy Noonan writes:

But the point is Newt senses the lay of the land. If a new and modern strain of Rockefeller Republicanism looked like it was about to take hold, he’d see the virtues in that. Right now the growth area looks like it’s in opposition to elites and establishments. So that’s where he is.

No larger point here. It’s just funny that Noonan and I both thought of the same joke, in almost exactly the same words (i.e., that Gingrich might readily embrace “neo-Rockefeller Republicanism,” or a “new and modern strain of Rockefeller Republicanism”) to illustrate Gingrich’s promiscuous and erratic intellectual nature.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 29, 2012 03:58 PM | Send