Newt Gingrich is surging in Republican presidential polls, but he was still thrown last week by a tough question at a recent debate from CNBC's John Harwood.
"Your firm was paid $300,000 by Freddie Mac in 2006. What did you do for that money?" Harwood asked him.
Gingrich offered a tortured explanation — "And my advice as a historian, when they walked in and said to me, we are now making loans to people who have no credit history and have no record of paying back anything, but that's what the government wants us to do … I said to them … 'This is a bubble. This is insane. This is impossible' " — that opened him up to a torrent of criticism.
Some snarkily pointed out that Gingrich's doctoral dissertation in history was about Belgian education policy in the Congo, which hardly made him an expert on the history of U.S. housing policy.
Bloomberg News additionally reported that Freddie Mac paid Gingrich $1.6 million to $1.8 million over the years, far more than Harwood stated. It also cast doubt on Gingrich's claim that he was raising red flags about the decline of underwriting standards during the housing bubble.
Gingrich's campaign soon acknowledged in a statement that "Freddie Mac was interested in advice on how to reach out to more conservatives."
By the end of the week, interest in the Freddie Mac imbroglio seemed to be waning, but this was not necessarily good news for Gingrich.
The press had moved on another potentially damaging aspect of Gingrich's past — the millions of dollars paid by the health care industry to a think tank he founded.
