HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH has Medicare, the budget, the debt limit, and the fate of government as we know it in America on his plate this fall. But his thoughts have already wandered to next year. “In January, after consulting with all the presidential candidates and [Republican national chairman] Haley Barbour, we announce the spring offensive,” he says. The issues: privatization, more block grants, immigration reform, curbs on affrmative action, tax reform, the death penalty for narcotics wholesalers, making English the nation’s offcial language. And those are just for starters.

This is obsessive agenda setting, for sure, but Gingrich has a political objective in mind: staying permanently on offense in Washington. Why is that so im- portant? Because, as Bill Bennett once said, if you’re not on offense in Washington, you’re on defense. And if you’re on defense, you can forget about enacting your program. The problem is it’s hard to stay on offense for a sustained period. No political figure has managed this since President Franklin Roosevelt in the New Deal era sixty years ago (and even he was often on the defensive by his second term). Now comes Gingrich, who believes it will take six to ten years for Republicans to replace, not merely reform, the welfare state and the status quo in Washington. That’s if all goes well, which means staying on offense.