"You start with people with a socialist bias that you shouldn't earn money," the former House speaker tells USA TODAY. If you do, he says, "you're automatically suspicious of having done something bad."

Newt Gingrich explains why he thinks so many people are dismayed by his $1.8 million influence peddling deal with Freddie Mac:

Sure, it's the socialists. Including, as Alexander Burns points out, noted socialist George Will:

Gingrich’s is an amazingly efficient candidacy, in that it embodies almost everything disagreeable about modern Washington. He’s the classic rental politician. People think his problem is his colorful personal life. He’s gonna hope people concentrate on that, rather than on, for example, ethanol. Al Gore has recanted ethanol. Not Newt Gingrich, who has served the ethanol lobby. Industrial policy of the sort that got us Solyndra – he’s all for it. Freddie Mac, he says, hired him as a "historian." He’s not a historian. Hire Sean Wilentz, hire Gordon Wood if you want a historian.

And then there's Washington Examiner columnist Tim Carney. Carney is obviously a socialist because he accuses Gingrich of lying about his lobbying:

When Newt Gingrich says he never lobbied, he's not telling the truth.

Gingrich brushes off the criticism, saying Republican voters just don't care about any of it. And at least so far, the polls are on his side. According to the latest Reuters poll, not only has Gingrich surged to the top of the GOP field, but nearly half of Republican voters say they don't care about Gingrich's ties to Freddie Mac and just one-third said it lowered their opinion of him.

It's easy to understand why Republican voters don't care about Gingrich's influence peddling: Unlike George Will and Tim Carney, they aren't socialists.