The gods of the Republican House of Representatives are angry, and the trembling mortals are attempting through ritual to win back heaven’s favor. There has been a human sacrifice. The virgin on the altar, Bill Paxon of New York, went under the blade with a smile, as ceremony requires. “You have your head,” the deposed chair of the House leadership meetings said beseechingly last week. “Enough’s enough.”
Just in case it’s not enough, Paxon’s colleagues held a three-hour encounter session in room HC-5 of the Capitol’s basement — a meeting equal parts show trial, Tony Robbins management retreat, Oprah Winfrey marriage-in- crisis spectacle, and easy-virtue yuppie tent revival. Coup plotters confessed their sins and begged absolution. It was granted. “Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them,” quoth Newt Gingrich from the Bible at the beginning of last Wednesday’s late-night parley. “Mind not high things, but condescend to men of low estate.” This was Romans, Chapter 12. The speaker skipped right past those parts of the epistle where St. Paul deems “whisperers” and “backbiters” to be “worthy of death” and where, saith the Lord, “vengeance is mine; I will repay.”
Then Gingrich changed costumes, from apostle to relationship therapist, and listened intently as dozens of his patients took a turn at the microphone to buck themselves up and bask in the warmth of collective emotion. It’s like when I was breaking up with Cher, announced Sonny Bono; things sometimes go horribly awry — but then they get better.
In fact, House Republicans now urgently insist they are better already. All is well. Their group grope in the Capitol was “laughter and tears, anger and drama,” said Rep. Jennifer Dunn. “People bared their souls and we began the dialogue.” Said Rep. Jim Greenwood: “We needed the catharsis.” Said Rep. Tom Coburn: “We have had a good healing.” Gingrich, for his part, was once again proud of his “family” — or his “team,” or whatever other metaphor he chooses to adopt for the nation’s majority political party. Their love-rest, he gushed, was “fabulous” and “wonderful.”
Their love-fest was embarrassing and scary.
No one can take seriously Gingrich’s contention that his party’s recent troubles are merely a temporary outbreak of backbench juvenilia — no more significant, as he put it, than “two people arguing over which cookies to bake.” For one thing, House Republicans remain bitterly divided. As Fred Barnes explains below, Gingrich’s base of support has weirdly shifted to the moderate wets and establishment committee chairmen of the House. The revolutionaries in the House class of ’94 are peeved about this development, and sufficiently concerned about the political retreat it implies to have considered dumping Gingrich from his chair.
It almost happened. Because it almost happened, and because of how it almost happened, the elected House Republican leadership is discredited — having lost the trust of one another, of the speaker, and most important, of Republicans around the country. The current leadership may be able to limp through a budget deal and into the fall like this. But they will still be hopelessly lame, and they will stay that way until a genuinely “cathartic” upheaval takes place.
For the House Republican party is not simply divided over matters of strategy and ideology. Those can be resolved in the way parties always resolve such issues — through argument, compromise, and adept management. No, things are far worse than that. The House GOP now resembles a decadent royal court, with Newt Gingrich cast as Louis XIV at Versailles. He is a monarch at once all-important and ineffectual. And he is surrounded by courtiers scheming for personal advantage — and for the attention of the throne.
Consider the “fabulous” and “wonderful” Wednesday-night meeting itself. Gingrich did not want to convene it. His moderate “allies” in the House defied him and insisted on it — led by Rep. Ray LaHood, who was chief of staff to House minority leader Bob Michel until Gingrich forced Michel into retirement in 1994. The moderates demanded a meeting not on grounds of principle, but simply as a means to humiliate their factional enemies. And what of those enemies, the conspirators against Newt, who feared the prospect of this meeting for the purge it might have brought? One week they want to decapitate the speaker. Next week they are delighted to gather in his honor. Emerging from room HC-5, would-be dissident Rep. Steve Largent said the party had recaptured that special “Contract With America feeling,” and he was now content. Rep. Matt Salmon, until recently among the loudest of the Gingrich scalp-hunters, said he was “very, very satisfied.”
Satisfied by what? Nothing happened — except that the entire House Republican party gathered together to agree, volubly but insincerely, that Newt is the Sun King and that they are happy to remain orbiting about him, jealous for the shine of his glorious rays.
Newt Gingrich’s past accomplishments cannot be gainsaid. Republicans might not have won a House majority without his spectacular skill at organizational activism. And there was nothing inevitable about the party’s current degeneration into emptiness and self-destruction.
But in retrospect, it cannot be denied that the signs of corruption were always there. If the House GOP lurches hysterically from emergency to emergency, it is at least in part because Gingrich taught them to behave that way back in the salad days of GOPAC, with all that talk of “changing the world” through “transformational events.” If the revolutionaries of 1994 are given to conspiracy, it is at least in part because Gingrich taught them that, too, urging a study of guerrilla tactics and “infiltration” and Mao. And if the insurgents cannot any longer see anything but Gingrich when they look in the mirror . . . well, that was also the spirit of ’94. They were to “think like Newt.” They were to “speak like Newt.”
So now they are Newt. The House GOP is now a party of one, and that one man, for all his talents, is a deeply flawed leader. At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, running the government, is Bill Clinton, a man lighter than air who nonetheless somehow manages to look and sound — compared with Gingrich — as though he is anchored to the ground. Newt’s party, by contrast, is a balloon that floats with the wind. An old-fashioned coup can’t fix this problem; newfangled psychobabble can’t fix it either.
At some point — well before the election campaign of 1998 — House Republicans will have to stop thinking of themselves as the children of a (dysfunctional) family, or as patients in a group-therapy session. Instead, they will have to remember how to act like elected officials: men and women who owe fealty to their constituents and to the principles they campaigned on. They are in danger of frittering away, through fecklessness and silliness, the majority that voters gave them in 1994 and again in 1996. If they are to retain that majority, they will have to clear their heads first, and then clean house.
David Tell, for the Editors
