Newt Gingrich goes to spouse school

Politico

Newt Gingrich goes to spouse school

The former House Speaker is getting a crash course in dinner parties and decorating to prepare for Callista Gingrich's ambassador stint.

By ANNIE KARNI 08/20/2017 06:45 AM EDT

Image from article, with caption: Callista Gingrich, nominated to be President Donald Trump's ambassador to the Vatican, and her husband, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, leave following a visit with Trump at Trump Tower on Nov. 21 in New York City.

Excerpt:

Last week, Newt Gingrich sat in a classroom surrounded by 11 women and one other man, furiously jotting notes.

In the weeklong intensive, where classes ran from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. with only a short cafeteria lunch break in between, the former House speaker and onetime presidential candidate received a crash course in a new role: invisible spouse.

When he moves to Rome with his wife, Callista Gingrich, to become husband of the ambassador to the Holy See, the ubiquitous Fox News talking head will have no official diplomatic role abroad, beyond being generally presentable and essentially not heard from.

It will be a challenge for an outspoken sometime-booster, sometime-critic of the Trump administration, who said he does not plan to terminate his contract with Fox News.

But like former President Bill Clinton during his wife’s two bids for the presidency, Gingrich will be taking on the secondary role of booster after a public life spent demanding the limelight. Aware that this new, less celebrated role will take some getting used to, Gingrich eagerly enrolled himself in what he referred to, excitedly, as “spouse school.”

The program, run by the State Department and hosted on the Arlington, Virginia, campus of the Foreign Service Institute, was started in the 1950s, when it was referred to simply as the “Wives Seminar.”

Over the years, a State Department official said, it “has evolved into a variety of training and orientation programs for foreign affairs family members.” Today, topics include: “expectations and personal goals for your time overseas,” “post morale,” “the official residence,” “navigating a public diplomacy role,” “legal issues and ethics” and “stress management.”

The course is “designed to provide participants practical information to make informed decisions for personal growth and public service in their new roles,” the State Department official said.

But the inchoate role of ambassador’s partner — nothing is actually required of them — hasn’t changed so much over the years. It’s still mostly about entertaining and keeping a low profile.

Gingrich — a fixture of Washington who famously campaigned for president on a platform, in part, of colonizing the moon — doesn’t exactly fit the prim mold for the job. But he said he’s eager to try something new.

In a series of back-to-back 75-minute lectures he described as “tiring,” Gingrich and the 12 other spouses of waiting-to-be-confirmed ambassadors were educated on some basic rules of the road. “You always have two fridges,” Gingrich marveled in an interview with POLITICO, “one for personal food, one for entertaining, so you’re not eating out of the taxpayer refrigerator. I didn’t know that.”

The group was instructed on ground rules for entertaining. “If you invite eight or 10 ambassadors over for dinner,” Gingrich said, “there’s protocol for who sits where. A protocol officer who helps you think through everything.”

These are the kinds of concerns that will now fall under Gingrich’s portfolio — a new gambit for the onetime author of the austere, government-shrinking “Contract for America,” who will now sit in one of the most cushy and cosseted government roles of all. ...