Wow! Newt Gingrich and Bill Bradley will be the speakers Friday night at Salina’s Chamber of Commerce banquet. What a political feast that will be!
Both men will speak and then invite questions. Pity the master of ceremonies who will have to say, “sorry, that’s all.”
Bradley was a senator from New Jersey from 1979 to 1997 and a candidate for president in 2000. Gingrich served in the House for 20 years, and was speaker from 1995 to 1999, serving when the Republicans took over the House in 1995 and promptly shut the government down to force spending cuts.
Gingrich was and is a small government radical. Bradley was, and presumably still is, a Democrat who believes government should take an active role in solving social problems. It would be difficult to find two mainstream political thinkers with more divergent views.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall in that hall Friday night.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
