Recently, I was able to go hear presidential candidate Newt Gingrich at Olde Main Brewery in Ames. There was a large crowd — larger than expected, according to Gingrich. He delivered this observation after arriving 45 minutes late. When there are five campaign stops during the day, however, one can be forgiven for being late to a speaking engagement.

When Gingrich finally got down to business, he started in speaking in an almost Obamaesque tone. He declared that Washington is out of control, that change needs to come and that it takes an entire generation to change Washington, not just one man.

A moment’s scrutiny of these opening lines shows how disingenuous Gingrich is being. He speaks as though he is a Washington outsider. Just the opposite is true: Gingrich was a member of the House of Representatives for 20 years. After an ethics violation forced him to leave Congress, he stayed a part of the Washington political elite as a member of think tanks, public-policy teams and other political entities.

At one point, Gingrich spoke about a “Tenth Amendment initiative.” He was vague about the specifics of this initiative, saying only that more legislative power would be transferred to the states under his presidency. I was able to personally ask Gingrich about this after the speech, citing the enormous legislative powers already accorded to the states. I reminded him that everything not explicitly outlined for the federal congress to do is reserved for the states by the Tenth Amendment, and that almost every interaction with law that people have on a day-to-day basis is in the form of state legislation. His response was that I should go “ask a state legislator how much power they really have” before moving on to the next person in line.

My contention is that Gingrich wants to form a confederation of states with a weak central government. This has been tried before under the Articles of Confederation, the disastrous system of government that only worked for only five years here in America before the Constitution was drafted.

Another one of Gingrich’s proposed initiatives is the elimination of the “death tax”, known to some as the estate tax. This proposal roused the audience in a way that nothing else in his speech did. I am not particularly sure why, as the repeal of the estate tax would affect only millionaires and billionaires. Maybe they were well-represented in the Olde Maine Crowd. The estate tax was created to affect only the super-rich, a measure against a concentration of wealth that would make America look like an aristocracy.