CONFESSOR OF THE HOUSE

Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich says he blew it, trying to govern the country from Capitol Hill. It was “inexcusable” for him to have “cavalierly underrated the power of the president.” Just as bad, he says, was his confusing the enthusiasm of conservatives after the 1994 congressional election with an urgent mandate Also, he spent too much time working for what was desirable rather than for what was necessary. And, yes, he often hasn’t known when to shut up. Whining to reporters about having been forced to leave the president’s plane by the back door was “the single most avoidable mistake I made” as speaker, he says. But, of course, there were other blunders: failing to pay attention to the House dissidents who wound up plotting to overthrow him, and attempting to attach a Republican amendment on the census to a disaster-relief bill. As for the budget fiasco in 1995, Gingrich says he’s the one primarily responsible for all the political damage it caused Republicans

This is amazing stuff, and I’ve only scraped the surface of Lessons Learned the Hard Way, Gingrich’s confession of his first three years as speaker. Maybe there’s been another active political leader to come forward in the modern era and admit serious mistakes as boldly and candidly as Gingrich has. If so, I missed it. And that’s what makes Gingrich’s new book so interesting and fun to read: It’s one of a kind. Politicians normally go out of their way to make themselves invulnerable Troubles? Bumps in the road? Defeats? They’re all routinely blamed on someone else. Gingrich has done plenty of that sort of transferring the guilt — but not in this book. He not only accepts blame for mistakes that weren’t entirely his fault, like trying to do too much, too soon. He even credits those — Haley Barbour, Representative Bob Livingston, Tony Blankley, to name three — who warned him to avoid certain errors in the first place.

If there’s a strategy behind Lessons Learned the Hard Way, my guess is it’s going to work. If Gingrich aimed to please, he did. Liberals won’t ever warm to Gingrich, but conservatives who’ve been alienated by Gingrich’s pragmatism and lack of ideological zeal are likely to. The newly vulnerable Gingrich is simply more appealing than the old Gingrich who unself- consciously spoke of himself as a leader for the centuries, or the wonkish Gingrich whose first book as House speaker, the 1995 To Renew America, was one of the most boring and pretentious volumes of the late twentieth century.

What Gingrich seems to have discovered, as his poll numbers sank and President Clinton’s soared, is that the personal will of a single ambitious leader isn’t enough to prevail in Washington. To know this beforehand, all he had to do was ponder the presidency of Lyndon Johnson for a moment. It turns out there are rules that apply in national politics and policymaking, and any leader who ignores them or violates them is bound to get into trouble. Gingrich — and this is the point of the book — found out the hard way.

Some of the most commonsensical rules apply to dealings with the press, and Gingrich was oblivious to all of them. In the predawn hours after Republicans captured Congress in 1994, he granted an interview to reporters from the Washington Post and the New York Times and mused about the left-wing background of the Clintons. The Post headline the next day was: “Gingrich Lobs a Few More Bombs.” With that, “all my effort to reach out and establish a good working relationship with the President” was nullified.

The rule that applied? Actually, two did. First, “nothing good happens after eleven P.M.” Gingrich says, “What was once applied to teenagers . . . might equally refer to press interviews.” And second, “the elite press will never cover your message if you give them an excuse to cover anything else.”

His complaint about being shuffled off the back of Air Force One after a trip to Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral in Israel taught him another rule: “The press is always ready to pounce,” particularly on a conservative. The day after he complained, the New York Daily News labeled him “Crybaby” in a banner headline. Only after numerous media attacks, however, did Gingrich learn ” what was most important about conservative dealings with the press,” which is that the media aren’t really all that important. “We have to learn to speak over the media, around them as well as through them, to reach our true audience, who are the ordinary people of America,” Gingrich says.

The hardest rule for Gingrich to swallow was that Clinton has an automatic advantage in press coverage so long as he’s fighting with a conservative. Ken Starr and Linda Tripp would do well to keep this in mind. For one thing, Gingrich says, “the White House media operation trumps any effort of that kind by the Congress.” Though Washington correspondents may enjoy keeping various Clinton scandals alive, “when it came to policy the media were bound to be with him.” Reporters often pick on Clinton mercilessly, Gingrich notes, “but when conservatives are the opponent, they will enthusiastically volunteer to be his echo chamber.”

There are limits to Gingrich’s candor. He says Representative Bill Paxon of New York, who joined the plotters against Gingrich in 1997, is “a terrific talent,” a friend, and someone who has “a great future in politics.” I suspect Gingrich’s honest view of Paxon, who is leaving politics altogether this fall, is far harsher. So, too, his take on the conservative press. “Our troubles with the self-deceiving liberals were oddly enough compounded by the problems we were also experiencing in 1997 with certain conservative journals of opinion and editorial columns,” he says mildly. In truth, he’s known to be infuriated with conservative writers who attacked him for the budget deal with Clinton, a deal he still claims was achieved “largely on our terms.”

Gingrich occasionally slips into politician’s cant. He endorses a “dialogue about our future” that will produce “goals for a generation.” He says Republicans must be “entrepreneurs of social policy.” But Lessons Learned the Hard Way is mostly devoted to his failures and how similar ones can be avoided in the future. It helps, he says, to ignore the buzz in Washington. Margaret Thatcher “had a firm rule that she would not read anything negative about what she was up to because it might weaken her morale and distort her judgment.” Ronald Reagan had a “similar knack” for ignoring his critics. Gingrich is eager to emulate them.

His goal is to get Republicans back on offense in Washington. Gingrich understands the peril of “permanent defense.” It’s what happens when “you rule an issue out of order because it makes liberals uncomfortable.” It’s what would have happened if George Bush in his 1988 election campaign had dropped the Willie Horton issue.

Liberals, says Gingrich, understand the need to stay on offense: They ” never take no for an answer.” Any conservative leader, he says, “could learn a lot” by studying Democratic senator Ted Kennedy’s “ability to get hit, attacked, dismissed, and smilingly keep moving forward.” Gingrich has already done so. Thus, it’s time for him to stick to the rules, emulate Kennedy, and tell us in his next book about the great conservative victories he will have achieved.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.