Leadership Quote by Newt Gingrich

Obama the job creator, but only for his enemies: Gingrich’s line is a neat little piece of partisan judo. It steals a Democratic talking point, flips it, and lands it on the chin with names instead of numbers. “At least three jobs that I know of” pretends to be modest, even empirical, while smuggling in the punchline: Obama’s presidency, Gingrich implies, is so politically noxious it’s become a hiring program for Republicans.

The specificity does the heavy lifting. Bob McDonnell, Chris Christie, and Scott Brown weren’t random GOP officeholders; they were headline-grabbing winners in the early Obama era, each powered in part by backlash to Washington. McDonnell and Christie rode the 2009 wave that signaled Tea Party energy and Democratic vulnerability; Brown’s 2010 Massachusetts upset punctured the aura of a filibuster-proof majority and exposed the fragility of Obama’s coalition. By listing them, Gingrich turns electoral moments into a causal chain: Obama governs, voters recoil, Republicans get promoted.

Subtext: this is less about employment than legitimacy. Gingrich is trying to define Obama’s presidency not by policy outputs but by the political turbulence it generates. It’s a message to donors and activists: your anger is productive, your opponents are overreaching, history is tilting our way. The joke also absolves the GOP of having to propose a jobs agenda of its own; the “proof” of Obama’s failure is already walking around with governors’ mansions and a Senate seat.

It’s cynicism with a grin: unemployment as a prop, democracy as a scoreboard, and governance reduced to the market value of resentment.