Greensboro
The longer you watch Newt Gingrich, the less you know about him. He creates a striking first impression as the self-declared Man of Destiny, but over time the clarity of that self-made Newt dissolves, and a humbler, more modest, and more enigmatic Gingrich drifts into view. If you formed your impression of Newt Gingrich at the dawn of the 104th Congress, when the magazine covers were rife with his caricature, it is likely that everything you know about Gingrich is wrong.
The leaders of the conservative movement have now fallen out of love with the speaker, and he with them. “Movement conservatives are wonderfully critical in a way that bears almost no relationship with political reality,” Gingrich says now. “It seems to make them feel good.”
The split is deeper than any policy disagreement. It goes to demeanor. Conservatives prize the vigorous virtues — the virtues of a leader who is self-disciplined, robust, loyal to friends, and fierce against foes. Gingrich lauds those virtues too, and so at first glance promises to be an American version of the Iron Lady. But in fact, Gingrich is a much more mercurial figure than Margaret Thatcher. “He’s a very emotional man,” says Republican whip Tom DeLay, stressing the quality that recurs in conversations about Gingrich. House Republicans were initially surprised by this, but then came to accept Gingrich’s sudden bursts of emotion. As he spoke at a caucus meeting in the spring about how the Republicans had become a family, Gingrich’s eyes suddenly welled up with tears, and the room fell uncomfortably silent. In August he cried at a meeting with Washington Post editors while contemplating Jack Kemp’s love of his children. And there was at least one moment during the budget crisis when he sobbed uncontrollably under the strain, hugged and comforted by his wife and Rep. Steve Gunderson — an episode that was later described in detail on the Post’s front page.
“That’s so unlike my own way . . .” one Republican intimate trails off while trying to solve the puzzle of Gingrich’s emotional openness. Conservatives are a reticent bunch, normally contemptuous of emotional display and overt sentiment. In conservative talk about Gingrich, even among those who still admire him, you can hear unspoken doubts about the speaker’s manliness. The traits that would humanize the speaker with Barbara Walters raise concerns among conservative elites.
Those doubts were reinforced during the 1995 budget negotiations themselves, when conservatives discovered that Gingrich is far from the ruthless extremist the newsweeklies had made him out to be. Gingrich, as he himself later confessed, “melted” in Clinton’s presence. Conservatives say he was soft in those meetings, too eager to seek the middle ground and to trust in the good faith of the other side.
But the most serious strains have surfaced since the budget ordeal. Gingrich fell from public view in the spring (though he remained active within Congress), and when he emerged, many conservatives were hoping for a return to what he called “permanent offense.” The idea was that the country is still basically hostile to government, and that if Gingrich would hammer away on his visionary themes, regardless of short-term polling, then eventually the country would grow at least to respect him. Right-wingers were looking for Gingrich to remain the chief articulator of conservative ideas.
What they got instead was a strategy that the activists and writers deride as “Dare to be Dull.” Gingrich’s conservative critics say that the strategy was engineered by Gingrich’s secretive political adviser, Joe Gaylord, who emerges in the conservative demonology as Gingrich’s Dick Morris. Gaylord, according to his rivals, believed that the economy would tank in 1996 and that if Gingrich lay low, Clinton would get the blame. A hard-headed political operative and thus thoroughly poll-driven, Gaylord was interested in getting Gingrich’s approval ratings up. His advice dovetailed with the pressure from congressional colleagues to be relentlessly upbeat. “I would talk in terms of positives. Use fewer attack lines. Just constantly be positive. Be a little happier. Joke more, advises DeLay. And Gingrich agrees: “I think you should stay positive. It’s good for television. You should smile.”
The Deaveresque strategy manifested itself in a number of ways. There were several high-profile media appearances of an entirely non-political nature, the most notorious of which came when Gingrich found himself struggling with a squealing pig as Jay Leno looked on, aghast. There was also, with the help of pollster Frank Luntz, a vigorous search for phrases that would make the Republican record sound as unobjectionable as possible. Suddenly the daring thinker with the 50-year time horizons was tailoring his language to the poll results of the previous week. (“We tested it,” he boasts after one of his speech lines goes over especially well.) Instead of talking in his dazzling way about great historical trends, Gingrich tried to use language to inoculate himself against his liberal critics. His Republican convention speech was anodyne. At the Williamsburg debate with other congressional leaders, he followed the gentle Luntzian script.
Through summer and fall, Gingrich’s spirits and approval ratings improved, but conservatives still complained about his tendency to swing wildly between attempts to appear cuddly (often with animals) and fits of purposeless anger. He seemed unable to refrain from attacking the media. He placed calls to conservative television pundits to repeat his charges of media bias. His conversation returned incessantly to the perfidy of David Bonior, his chief Democratic tormentor on the ethics charges. Some conservatives wondered about his resilience, and the thinness of his skin. He seemed to many to be on permanent defense.
Defensiveness in public was accompanied by defensiveness on Capitol Hill. Congress approved a minimum-wage hike without much protest, and there were concessions galore on the 1997 budget. And so began the debate in right-wing circles on whether Gingrich had ever really been conservative. “He’s randomly conservative,” says a senior congressional Republican. “He has no conservative instincts,” says another House member. “He’s conservative, but not in any conventional sense,” says a longtime colleague. “I knew a lot of people were going to get their heart broken with him. He believes in what is expedient,” a movement leader tells his friends. Paul Weyrich was willing to wrap up the anti-Gingrich view on the record in Rolling Stone: “Newt’s a brilliant fellow who is very able to excite people and motivate them, but he believes in very little, so most of his views are negotiable. Newt creates scenarios for himself, and he becomes morally certain that they are going to play out. Then when it doesn’t happen, he goes into a blue funk.”
Conservatives are still willing to be dazzled. A brilliant foreign-policy speech last month before the Center for Security Policy had rightwingets reminiscing about their feelings for him before the Great Disillusion. But by now most conservative elites consider themselves to be in a tactical alliance with Gingrich and nothing more. Others speculate on a leadership challenge if the Republicans keep the Congress with a reduced majority.
“My job is to do everything I can to reelect a majority while movement critics attack us for not having been pure enough to make sure we lost the majority,” Gingrich counters, with anger in his voice.
It’s cold for an October day in North Carolina, and the golfers on the first tee at the Forest Oaks Country Club are jumping up and down to get warm. This club is a stop on the PGA Tour, and the parking lot is filled with cars bearing Republican bumper stickers, and probably would be even if some of the local congressmen weren’t holding a fund-raiser here. Inside, businessmen and eminences are milling about. Each country club has its own pecking order, and at the top of this one is a big, athletic-looking man in a pink golf shirt and bright green sweater, bragging to a klatch of younger executives how much he’s enjoying retirement.
There are four Republican congressmen circulating in this most Republican of environments. Three of the congressmen seem to rank below the guy in the bright green sweater, but when the speaker of the House arrives he becomes the center of the room. A minister offers a blessing — “Lord, we gather here together not, as the dominant media culture would have it, to starve the poor, kick the elderly . . .” — and then the speaker gets up to the podium. His speech is orthodox Republicanism. Taxes are too high. The federal bureaucracy wastes money. Drugs are a menace. We should expand the death penalty. There’s no Third Wave vision here, no big theories about the march of history or grandiose historical parallels. On the contrary, the speaker is willfully pedestrian. On everybody’s chair is a mimeograph showing two checks for $ 1, 261, one made out to “My Family,” another made out to “The IRS.” The speaker asks which check the 100 or so members of the audience would rather have. That’s about as abstract as the economic portion of the speech gets.
He holds up a bucket and tells the story of how the Democratic leadership had government workers delivering ice to congressional offices even though the refrigerator had been invented 80 years before. “You could always find the ice bucket,” the speaker jokes. “It was melting right next to the refrigerator.” A table of senior citizens erupts in laughter. The stories of government waste are concrete and lowbrow: a few thousand here and there wasted to subsidize a congressional shoeshine stand, parking spaces for lobbyists, a congressional beauty parlor, and the congressional post office. The Republicans ended that. Efficient government is a theme that goes back before Sam Snead’s first win at the Greensboro tournament. It’s a very successful speech — familiar, comfortable, yet delivered with passion, and the crowd applauds enthusiastically, as the speaker wraps up and heads out the door.
Gingrich at these moments is very far from the professorial pose and the lecturing style that have proved unpopular. After the event, he climbs into his van with his daughter Kathleen (who owns some coffee shops in Greensboro) and his one traveling aide. His spirits are high, as he bounces from one Republican fund-raiser to another. And from the conversations and reception at the country club, you’re reminded once again that while Gingrich may have his troubles with conservatives, among rock-ribbed Republicans he is a success.
It’s ironic. Gingrich set out to launch a conservative revolution. But his successes so far have come as a pre-ideological Republican. He set out to be Thatcher, but has succeeded so far as a superior Bob Dole. He has reorganized the way the House works, reduced waste, clarified decision-making, and, within the confines of the House, has been a brilliant legislative manager. ” Moving legislation was much harder than we expected,” says retiring Republican Bob Walker, who was part of the leadership team. “We had to spend enormous amounts of time putting together coalitions; all of us were astounded by the difficulty of it.”
Gingrich is simply unmatched as a tactician. Much of the work is mundane: how to keep everyone informed about upcoming decisions; how much power to give to committee chairmen, how much to give to task forces; when to intervene in appropriations disputes and when not to; how to balance the influence of the conservatives and the moderates; when to reward loyalists with conference committee assignments and punish dissenters by withholding foreign travel. Congressional Quarterly summed up his success at these things: “He in fact has evolved into one of the most effective speakers of modern times.”
Within the halls of Congress, Gingrich seems driven more by the management ideas of Peter Drucker than the free-market theory of Adam Smith or, to move from the sublime to the ridiculous, the fatarista of Alvin Toffier. He takes his various management formulas seriously and is immensely proud when one of his “After Action Reviews” detects an error in his own management technique. ” We went back and did an After Action Review and learned we weren’t communicating very well,” he says, with the air of an engineer who has triumphantly solved a problem. Colleagues know that he will not necessarily come down on the conservative side of intra-Republican disputes. He preserved certain types of agriculture subsidies — peanuts, for example — to help vulnerable Republicans. And often he will sacrifice his views for the sake of getting some larger piece of legislation passed.
Riding in the van in North Carolina, I asked Gingrich to describe an instance in which his conservative convictions had guided him through a legislative morass when he could have been distracted by political expediency. Gingrich pointed to the conclusion of the legislative term:
“A good example is our decision to get out by the 27th of September. We use a planning model of Visions, Strategies, Projects, and Tactics and a leadership model of Listen, Learn, Help, and Lead, and we made the decision at the Vision and Strategy level in late June that one of the key criteria for keeping Congress was to get out of session by September 27, and that the worst for us was to be in a fight over a potential shutdown and be in session in October. We paid $ 6 billion in ransom on the premise that in any circumstance you would pay $ 3 billion. . . . Our conservative critics don’t have a clue how hard it is, and they keep nagging us, Why don’t we pick a fight over $ 100 million at the margin that will keep us in session an extra week and risk losing control of Congress? That’s a very good example of long- range vision versus tactical considerations. This was truly a strategic victory, to get out of session.”
In fact, of course, it was just the reverse. The decision to agree to $ 6 billion in increased spending was a triumph of short-term political considerations — the desire to campaign for reelection — over long-range vision — reducing the size of government. Gingrich probably made the right decision. A concession on spending meant his members would have an extra week in their districts to campaign. But his description is an example of how he has become a much more traditional speaker than anyone could have predicted, of the way logistics and political necessity are necessarily foremost in his mind, at the occasional cost of ideological purity.
His nimble footwork in Congress has made him much more popular there than he is in the country at large. At the start of the Congress, when the conservative revolution was riding high, he was protective of the Republican moderates. This year, with the moderates happy, he has been careful to do all he can to help vulnerable conservatives. The people who have done the most to canvass the mood of the Republican caucus say that Gingrich’s status as speaker is secure if the Republicans retain a majority. Despite some talk among conservatives, there will probably be no leadership challenge.
Bob Walker says Gingrich’s coming task is to build more bipartisan coalitions: “He has to be seen as speaker of the whole House. As he puts forth working groups and task forces, he has to reach out to Democrats who share the basic approach.” Which may be easier than anyone would have imagined a year ago. In closing out this session, Gingrich gave a final speech that was meant as a bookend to the speech he gave on the opening day. At its end, the House rose and gave Gingrich a standing ovation. All of the Republicans stood, and so did about 90 percent of the Democrats.
“There was this sudden spontaneous standing ovation that went on for over two minutes,” Gingrich remembers, “which is a very long time if you’re the one standing there watching it. I was astonished by it and the truth is I don’t know why it happened.”
Gingrich’s van pulls up at a stop and a group of local reporters are huddled around for their scheduled press availability. The speaker steps up to the microphones and hoists the ice bucket in the air and gives his ice- bucket spiel. Then he lifts the paper with the two $ 1,261 checks and does his “My Family” or “The IRS” bit. That done, a local TV reporter finally gets to ask why it is that the Republican message doesn’t seem to be getting through.
“Because you lie about our record,” Gingrich declares.
Gingrich is far more flexible than Thatcher. He is less ideological. He is more emotional and mercurial. But in one regard he really is her American counterpart: He just can’t resist going into enemy territory. If he sees a stronghold or institution that is hostile to him, he does not simply avoid it, as most people do. He charges at it with a battering ram. He may or may not be a believer in orthodox conservatism, but he is a believer in conflict. Gingrich seems to see politics as Thatcher did, as a series of campaigns against corrupt institutions. For Thatcher it was the unions, the Argentines, and the Eurocrats. With Gingrich, it’s the media, the union bosses, and David Bonior. Notice, though, that Gingrich’s current fights are not matters of high ideology. He’s not brawling with the unions over some workplace policy; it’s simply that they’re spending $ 35 million to try to take away his majority. These are street-level fights for power.
To him, it’s war, two armies bent on each other’s destruction. George Will recently criticized Gingrich for relying on military metaphors, but Gingrich defends his military mode of thinking about politics: “When I’m thinking about a campaign, I plan a campaign. In that world that’s how I think, and I think my track record is pretty good.”
And he does describe politics in totalistic terms. “I was literally thinking of Wellington this morning, because we are entering the crisis of this campaign. . . . I wouldn’t assume we’d keep a majority. I am very worried by the size of the union effort. I think this is sort of Armageddon. This campaign is much tougher and much more dishonest than I expected. They’re spending far more money than has ever been spent in American history.” Gingrich’s view of the other side is indeed apocalyptic. “People like Bonior hate me. It’s personal. Anything they do to me is legitimate because I’m the man who took away their power. . . . They lie . . . They made a deliberate decision to break the law.”
Once, Gingrich was known as a Republican who courted media heavyweights. But now he relentlessly bashes reporters, to their faces, not only for bias but for sloppiness and incompetence. Jackie Koszczuk covers Gingrich for the Congressional Quarterly and is the author of the most sophisticated and balanced of the recent profiles. Yet in composing it, she had to overcome Gingrich’s adversarial tone during their interview. “By the end of it I felt very attacked,” she says. “He made his dim view of my profession known.”
Gingrich wants nothing less than to undermine the media’s legitimacy. His media-bashing, he says, “educates the public so they are much more skeptical of the press than they were ten years ago. Every time the press is biased or unfair in its treatment, if you don’t say that’s biased and unfair people think that’s normal. You have an obligation to report to the public their bias.”
Thatcher was secure enough in her person that she could survive these brutal political fights and a life of constant vilification by her enemies. New York mayor Rudy Giuliani has a skin tough enough so that he can retain his equanimity even while he is picking one street brawl after another. But many of Gingrich’s friends wonder whether he has the same personality.
For one thing, Gingrich is not as blase about media criticism as Thatcher was (she almost never read the newspapers). Instead, his conversation is littered with protests at press barbs. (“George Will had a snippy column about me using the ice bucket. He probably would have denigrated Lincoln with the log cabin. He doesn’t get it.”) And he and his staff do seem to use press coverage, as most politicians do, as a way of keeping score. When the Democrats got better press during the budget crisis, that was judged a political defeat.
Furthermore, Gingrich is an American, in many ways a quintessential American, and Americans want to be liked. In Britain they name their avenues after battles they lost; Thatcher could draw on a culture that prizes bloody- minded resistance. But Americans don’t live easily with unpopularity. Gingrich brazenly says he’s happy to live in national disfavor. He sometimes puts himself beside Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas as defiant conservatives who, in Dan Quayle’s words, wear media scorn as a badge of honor. He says he can wait for historians of the next century to rescue his reputation. But intimates doubt Gingrich is really able to go through life unpopular. They say he lacks an airtight group of family-like intimates that can serve as a fortress against the world’s opprobrium. “He relies on politics for his friendships,” says one friend. Another colleague illustrates Gingrich’s hunger for human contact by recalling that when Gingrich used to campaign he would pass out lapel stickers for admirers to wear reading “Friend of Newt.”
It’s impossible to imagine Margaret Thatcher handing out pseudo-intimate stickers reading “Friend of Maggie.” Gingrich may have Thatcher’s taste for conflict, but the struggle itself probably comes harder to him because he is not impervious to the arrows of combat. He is, in the end, a more normal human being.
Given how badly the media have described the speaker in the past, only a fool would venture forth and declare that he has now located the key to The Real Newt Gingrich. We know for sure that he is not the Scrooge-like figure described by the newsweeklies. That was a phantasm derived from reporters own stereotypes. But it remains terribly difficult to put together the fragments of Gingrich’s life in one coherent picture.
He may not contain multitudes, but he certainly contains a number of different and contradictory sides. There is the self-made image of the Great Historical Figure, and then there is the more complex, organic Gingrich. And you can never tell which side is stronger. Is he the conservative visionary or the opportunistic politician? The philosopher king or the legislative tactician? The five-step management guru or the instinctive decision-maker? The iron-willed streetfighter or the instinctive compromiser who wants to be loved?
If the Republicans lose control of the House, then Gingrich’s political career will be effectively over, and we will have wasted one of the most interesting political minds of our time. Or he may also be brought down by the remaining ethics charges against him, which are being taken seriously even by Gingrich’s political allies (despite Gingrich’s own dismissive rebuttals). The rumor mill is rife with gossip about sloppy accounting among the various enterprises that make up Newtworld. All in all, if the fall does come, his will be an old-fashioned story about hubris, but also a modern story about life in the media age. Gingrich became nationally famous all at once. The media were forced to come up with an instant identity for him. They came up with an inaccurate one, and in some way Gingrich fed their prejudices with his awful decision to sign a lucrative book deal and other blunders. Had fame come to him more slowly, then people would have come gradually to see his many sides, and they would have come to treasure him more.
But if the Republicans keep the House, then Gingrich will come back, for there is no untruer truism than Fitzgerald’s claim that there are no second acts in American lives. Gingrich will have natural advantages. A reelected President Clinton will want to pass some legislation, and given the fractiousness of the Democratic party, he will have to rely often on a legislative strategist of Gingrich’s caliber. The public will see Gingrich’s constructive side. And while some conservatives may doubt his loyalty to conservative principle, Gingrich is far more ideologically rooted than Bill Clinton. His pull on legislation will be substantial.
Then in 1998, if historical trends hold true, the Republicans will gain seats in the House, and Gingrich will see his stature enhanced. At that point it will be possible to see his speakership lasting a long time (assuming he ignores his silly pledge to termlimit himself). The odd thing for a self- described revolutionary is that Gingrich does worst when time is compressed, when a lot of things happen at once. At such moments, his passions come to the surface, his desire for conflict seems angriest, his brain is at its most hyperactive, and his skin is thinnest. Gingrich does best when time stretches out, over the long haul (as in the struggle to gain the majority). In those circumstances, Gingrich’s ability to see more broadly and imagine farther serves him well. And his ability to keep his focus on a distant goal while other people are distracted by temporary phenomena comes to the fore. If Gingrich survives this election, he will be able slowly to rebuild, and he will have the opportunity to dominate the coming era.
