NO CONFIDENCE

Don’t believe it.

The GOP leaders themselves don’t. Like many rank-and-file members, Armey, DeLay, Boehner, and Paxon are all fed up with Gingrich, and they aren’t just exasperated with the speaker’s erratic, insular leadership. Over the past six months, Gingrich has deeply alienated each of his deputies by his decisionmaking and his behavior toward them. Even Boehner and Paxon, former Gingrich acolytes who owe their positions of power solely to him, have lost faith in his ability to lead.

Boehner, the first to bolt, is bitter because Gingrich has blamed him for failing to distill a crisp, popular GOP message. Paxon is disillusioned by Gingrich’s lack of discipline and loyalty, particularly the way he has undercut Armey, his chief lieutenant. Paxon was outraged that Gingrich overruled Armey and allowed a floor vote on May 21 on a highway spending bill that, if successful, would have blown up the budget deal with President Clinton. It lost by only two votes.

Though it is highly unlikely that Gingrich’s men will attempt a coup in the midst of a struggle with the White House over spending and taxes, they are desperate for Gingrich to step down, the sooner the better. Their worst fear is that he will linger as speaker through the summer, then drag them down with him should Republican members revolt against his leadership at the end of the congressional session this fall and depose him. Given Gingrich’s unpopularity, the four leaders believe it unlikely that a majority of House Republicans will want him as their honcho and spokesman in 1998. “If Newt were popular now, would this be going on?” says Rep. David McIntosh of Indiana, who represents House sophomores in leadership meetings. “No.” Gingrich is the most disliked politician in America, and there’s no sign that his numbers are improving.

None of Gingrich’s top colleagues believes he has a prayer of surviving as speaker past 1998. Gingrich disagrees. “Odds are very high,” he told me, that he’ll be speaker in 1999 and beyond. Gingrich even argues that the turmoil over the disaster-relief bill — Republicans noisily flubbed an effort to force Clinton to accept two GOP amendments — was “useful.” It had the effect of “putting cold water in your face and saying we need to restructure.”

Asked if criticism of his unsteadiness in pursuing a consistent message was fair, Gingrich said: “Sure.” So he’s prepared to “listen a little more to the members.” His strategy is to court rebellious younger Republicans like Mark Souder of Indiana and Mark Neumann of Wisconsin in an attempt to divide and conquer House dissidents. He’s also met with Joe Scarborough of Florida and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who were the ringleaders of a group that held an anti-Newt gripe session at the Capitol on June 17.

When Gingrich showed up earlier on June 17 for the first gathering of House Republicans since the debacle over disaster aid, he immediately changed the subject. He tried to sound like the old Gingrich, a man with a plan. For the next few weeks, he said, the message would be balancing the budget, saving Medicare, and cutting taxes — nothing else. By sticking to that, instead of flitting from issue to issue, Republicans would get the upper hand with Clinton. Two days later, though, the plan veered off track when Gingrich decided to stick with a scheduled floor vote on extending most-favored-nation status for China. A few hours before, he had been leaning the other way; he agreed with Gary Bauer of the Family Research Council that it would be a mistake to debate the rancorous MFN issue, which badly splits Republicans, before the July 4 recess. Then pro-MFN business groups muscled Gingrich and he knuckled under. The MFN vote is slated for June 23 — in the middle of a week that was supposed to unite the Republicans on taxes.

Dissatisfaction with Gingrich reaches far beyond his four senior colleagues. Christopher Cox of California, the chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, has been grousing about Gingrich for months, insisting he’s not a real conservative. McIntosh says “it was the decision to compromise at the beginning of this term rather than push for our agenda” that soured him on Gingrich. Jim Nussle of Iowa, another one-time Gingrich disciple, has tired of the speaker’s inability to stick to a single message. He (and others) also expected Gingrich to make Nussle head of the House Republican Campaign Committee. Instead, Gingrich picked a Georgia ally, John Linder. Now, Nussle is running as the anti-Gingrich candidate to replace outgoing representative Susan Molinari as vice chairman of the Republican conference.

Some rank-and-file discontent within the majority party is normal. What is unusual — and far more significant — is the deep distrust of the party leader by his closest colleagues in the leadership. For public consumption, of course, GOP leaders say there’s no serious disunity. In a written statement denying that he had refused to defend Gingrich at a press conference on June 17, Armey said he and the speaker “continue to work as effectively together as we have for the last 4 years.” That was hardly a ringing endorsement, but it wasn’t meant to be believed by reporters anyway. The statement said Armey hadn’t spoken up for Gingrich in answer to a question because he “was halfway out the door with my back turned.” This wasn’t true, as reporters were well aware. Armey had been rising from his seat and was still making eye contact with reporters when he was asked if he thought Gingrich was doing an effective job. “You all have a good day now,” Armey responded. All he had to say was yes, and there would have been no story. He didn’t, intentionally.

What was Armey up to? He wasn’t just zinging Gingrich for the way the speaker scapegoated him at a June 12 meeting for the disaster-bill fiasco. Armey “sent a message back to Gingrich that enough is enough,” an associate says; there is to be no more jerking Armey around, blaming him, overruling him, not consulting him. Armey buttressed the message by declining three other opportunities at the press conference to defend Gingrich. And he spoke kindly of a planned gathering of anti-Newt dissidents. “To sit down and think it through and plan out how you are going to move forward, I think, is always a very useful thing,” he said.

What’s more, he and whip Tom DeLay met with two dozen House conservatives on June 11 and all but encouraged them to raise Cain on the House floor. At least that’s how the dissidents understood it. DeLay says they “heard what they wanted to hear.” All he and Armey were doing, DeLay explained later, was spelling out options; one option just happened to be creating chaos on the floor to block spending bills they don’t like.

Months before Armey and DeLay, Boehner gave up on Gingrich. (Proud of being a team player, he continued to defend Gingrich publicly.) “He pretty much checked out” in January, another member of the leadership says. The precipitating event was Gingrich’s decision after last fall’s election to yank responsibility for “communications” from Boehner and centralize it in his own office. Boehner agreed it should be centralized — you know, all GOP press secretaries working in sync — but in the House Republican Conference, which Boehner chairs. He not only lost the argument, he suffered a worse fate: Gingrich never announced the shift, and so, when things went bad, Boehner remained the butt of complaints about poor communications. He felt Gingrich was deflecting blame on him, and Gingrich was.

Boehner’s falling out with Gingrich culminated a year of growing discontent. Elected in 1990 from the suburbs of Cincinnati, Boehner caught Gingrich’s eye early on. After Republicans captured the House in 1994, Gingrich engineered Boehner’s election as conference chairman, the fourth-ranking post in the GOP hierarchy. He managed this by promising to install Boehner’s chief rival, Bob Livingston of Louisiana, as chairman of the appropriations committee. Besides running the conference, Boehner would work with interest groups in the GOP coalition and handle communications.

There was one problem. Gingrich himself did most of the communicating, often in what a Boehner aide calls “brain farts.” As Republican popularity sank in late 1995 — after the government shutdown and Gingrich’s whining about leaving Air Force One by the back door — the speaker wouldn’t take the rap. There were leaked complaints about shortcomings of Boehner’s shop. Then, in January 1996, Gingrich told the Hill, a Capitol Hill weekly, that he would put House Budget Committee chairman John Kasich in charge of communications. Boehner learned of this when he read about it. Confronting Gingrich as they stood on the balcony outside the speaker’s office, Boehner insisted he had always been a team player. “This is unfair,” he said. Gingrich backed down, but Boehner’s confidence in him was shaken, only to be finally shattered a year later.

Like Boehner, Paxon was groomed by Gingrich for a leadership position. He was elected in 1988 from Jack Kemp’s old district in upstate New York. Four years later, Gingrich put him in charge of the Republican campaign committee, a critical job. After Republicans won the House in 1994 and kept control in 1996, Gingrich elevated Paxon to chairman of the leadership meetings. Swiftly, Paxon began to gag on some of Gingrich’s decisions. The one that rankled most was Gingrich’s capitulation in April to Bud Shuster of Pennsylvania, the pork-mad chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee. Shuster first approached Armey with his scheme to bring a $ 32 billion highway bill to the floor. Armey said no way; the bill would bust the budget agreement. Shuster appealed to Gingrich, who had supposedly left day-to-day matters like this to Armey. Without consulting Armey, Gingrich acceded to Shuster.

Paxon was appalled. He thought Gingrich should have stuck by Armey and should have told Shuster: Try to bring that bill to the floor and I’ll oust you as chairman. That wasn’t feasible, Gingrich told me. Shuster would have been “stronger if we’d tried to stiff him.” He’d have gotten his bill to the floor anyway and perhaps won. Paxon doubts that. Besides, Shuster could have been promised increased highway spending later. “Reasonable people can look back at that” and reach different conclusions, Gingrich says. Shuster lost 216-214 on May 21, but only after a herculean lobbying effort by Armey and DeLay. Had Shuster won, DeLay said, the consequences would have been dire. ” It would have blown the budget agreement to shreds,” he said. “It would have shown we couldn’t keep our word. We’d have gotten a terrible black eye.” All this was averted, no thanks to Gingrich. But Paxon hasn’t felt the same about the speaker since.

The disaster-relief bill produced the final fracture in Armey and DeLay’s already tortured relationship with Gingrich. On June 12, Gingrich abruptly announced at a meeting of the GOP conference that a deal had been worked out with Clinton. Actually, it was a total capitulation. Neither rider Republicans had attached to the bill — one to keep the government from shutting down this fall, the other to block census “sampling” — had survived. None of the other leaders had been consulted or even informed of the deal. ” Everybody was left out of the loop,” says a GOP leader. “Newt did this entirely on his own, entirely.” Worse, Gingrich blithely explained to the conference that he shouldn’t have delegated so much during the flap over the bill. This infuriated Armey, among others. By suggesting he’d been largely uninvolved, Gingrich gave himself an alibi and steered blame to Armey. Later that day, Armey, DeLay, Boehner, and Paxon voted against the bill in a spontaneous repudiation of Gingrich.

Had Gingrich really been uninvolved in the day to day disaster-relief bill? His four colleagues don’t think so. According to their version of events, Gingrich signed off from the beginning on adding the two amendments. True, he expressed doubts about this strategy. But he didn’t try to block it. On May 20, he went along with a backup plan to drop the government shutdown provision, which Clinton had attacked, but retain the ban on census sampling. On May 21, he sought to get both provisions dropped, but Armey refused. Gingrich relented. On May 22, Gingrich again advocated dropping the provisions at a leadership meeting, and once more backed down. However, just before that meeting, he told the Associated Press that Republicans were willing to drop both amendments, hardly an effective negotiating ploy. And at one point, Gingrich vowed to send the bill to the White House before the Memorial Day recess. That never happened. On June 10, Gingrich agreed to a new strategy of sending Clinton a slimmed down bill ($ 2 billion or $ 3 billion, not $ 8 billion) with only the census amendment tacked on. Finally, at the June 12 conference, he suddenly announced full surrender. His explanation: “If you are losing, it’s good to stop. It’s a useful principle.” I asked Gingrich who had actually negotiated the truce with the White House. He didn’t answer. DeLay says he doesn’t know either, but would like to. He hasn’t raised the matter with Gingrich.

Can Gingrich recover? Not by blaming the press for the disaster-relief fiasco. Gingrich insisted the media coverage was “a case study in the sociology of panic. This entire flap has been a news media overreaction to an exaggerated report of an anonymous event that didn’t occur.” But there isn’t a single GOP leader aside from Newt who primarily faults the press in this case.

Gingrich’s last best chance — not of recovering, but merely surviving — may be taxes, the fundamental conservative issue. If he preserves a conservative tax cut, he survives. But if Republicans think he’s caved in to Clinton, he’s gone. That’s also what GOP leaders think. “If it’s perceived Newt gives in on that, both the base and the members will say the leadership has to change,” Mcintosh says. Gingrich claims he has no intention of dealing away any major provisions. What bothers Armey, DeLay, Boehner, and Paxon is that this is what Gingrich always says.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.