The Speaker of the House finds himself in an almost unprecedented position these days. Without changing his views, his strategies, or his tactics one iota from his triumphant first hundred days; while holding fast to the principles that helped elect the first House Republican majority in four decades; and with a record of relentless legislative achievement that has, in just one year’s time, made him the most remarkable legislative leader of the second half of the 20th century, Newt Gingrich has become widely unpopular.
This is not supposed to be the way things work in Washington, the good- government types have always told us. Fulfill your promises, speak your mind, be resolute, and you are a Perot voter’s dream come true. You are supposed to decline in popularity when you talk out of both sides of your mouth, when you do things because the polls tell you to, when what you want diverges from what the voters want. When, in other words, you are Bill Clinton.
But just as it is no longer the case that crime doesn’t pay, it’s also a lie that sticking by principle turns you into James Stewart in the eyes of a grateful nation. Far from it, in fact. Conviction politicians are often reviled by a mainstream culture that pays obeisance to the idea of integrity but that is itself usually driven by its opposite — cronyism, cowardice, and peer pressure. That was true of Winston Churchill in the 1930s; it was true of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s; and it is now true of Newt Gingrich in 1995.
What all three have in common is a single-mindedness, a willingness to live and breathe their ideological convictions 24 hours a day. This quality can turn them into remote, confusing figures for ordinary citizens, in whose lives politics plays a minor role. Unlike the people they must get to vote for them, conviction politicians burn with the knowledge that everything is political — that every decision they must make, every thought they think, is laden with ideological meaning. Most people don’t live their lives that way. They do not breathe such ideologized air, and they find people who do somewhat off-putting: too intense, too serious, too humorless. So a conviction politician is often not a particularly well-liked one.
What’s more, the conviction politician is usually a polemical figure, opposed to the prevailing cultural attitudes of the day. And those who choose to live by those prevailing cultural attitudes recognize an enemy when they see one. Unlike the conviction politician, they are warmly wrapped in a consensus like a baby in bunting, supported by the assumptions of the newspapers they read, the lunch conversations they have, the columnists they admire, the books they buy, and the documentaries they watch on public television. Their reaction to a politician who comes along and challenges every comfortable assumption they have ever made — a politician who insists not only that he knows how to do things better, but that every idea they unquestioningly accept has made things worse — is a tantrum of disbelief, scorn, and rage.
That is what Newt Gingrich has done to the political class that dominated America before the 1994 elections. He stands up and daily tells its members they are wrong. He tells them their idea of compassion toward the poor is destroying the ability of the poor to emerge from poverty. He tells them that their idea of using government to protect people from the misbehavior of the private-enterprise system has led to the creation of large public bureaucracies from which we now need salvation. He tells them their ideas about personal liberation and the centrality of the self have had evil consequences.
This is what he tells them, and they fear and hate him for it. They would like to destroy him, and they know they have a better chance to do so by exploiting the distrust of the non-political classes for such a figure than by confronting his ideas. And they find any opportunity they can to rally non- political Americans to their side. Let Gingrich say that the ghastly murder in Illinois, in which a pregnant mother’s belly was cut open and the eight- month-old fetus inside untimely ripped from his mother’s womb, was yet another example of the soul-sickness created by the culture of welfare dependency, and the earth opens up. He’s making political hay out of a ghastly crime! scream the liberals, and this naturally has an effect on the non-political class, which prefers its politicians nice. Score one for the prevailing consensus.
And yet just two weeks later, the murder of Elisa Izquierdo in New York is taken by the very people who claim to have been repulsed by Gingrich’s comments as an opportunity to blame her death not on the welfare culture, but on cutbacks in spending on child services. In effect, they were blaming Gingrich and his policies — policies that have yet to be implemented, by the way — for the death of a child killed by her own crack-addict mother, who was granted custody by the very bureaucracy that now complains about cutbacks.
He has made mistakes. Of course he has made mistakes. Gingrich talks too much, although it would be nearly impossible for any human being whose words are examined with a microscope for an entire year to avoid saying things he shouldn’t have said. You can disagree with many of his more high-flown ideas, as Charles Krauthammer did in the first issue of THE WEEKLY STANDARD. You can cavil with his strategy — we remain uncertain that it was necessary to make Medicare reform so central to the Republican agenda this year. But what is most impressive to us is that, with all the pressure on him, Gingrich has refused the temptation to sue for peace and “grow in office”: that is, allow his views to soften and his agenda to falter so that his press will improve. He has been, and continues to be, the most forceful advocate for, and the most effective leader of, the Republican Revolution.
And so the attacks will continue. And so his poll numbers will remain low. The question is: How are Republicans responding to the attacks? So far, not all that well. There was the example of Florida Rep. Mark Foley, a freshman, attacking Gingrich in a Dec. 8 Washington Post article. “Newt Gingrich didn’t elect me to anything,” Foley said, adding that “everyone remembers that he attacked the ethics of Speaker Wright, and now all this is just coming back to roost.” Elsewhere in this issue, Linda Killian explains that the Republican freshmen are dissatisfied with Gingrich — in part because some of them worry that he is a compromiser, a sellout!
There’s something stomach-turning about these Johnny-come-latelies, who have never had to deal with the harsh realities of serving as a minority member of the House, who have not spent 15 years working to secure a Republican majority, now cavalierly impugning the motives and ideas of the one person who most deserves credit for devising a long-range strategy that helped them become members of Congress, and part of a majority at that.
But even if they are just being independent-minded, the freshmen ought to realize what is at stake in the assaults on Gingrich. The attacks on Gingrich are attacks on the Republican revolution, pure and simple. The effort to delegitimize Gingrich follows precisely the same pattern the Democrats invented during the Reagan years: What they cannot win at the polls, they try to accomplish through character assassination and, if that doesn’t fly, the intervention of the legal system.
He is about to fall into the grasp of a special counsel. Now we can only hope that counsel does a fair job, because no really honest person can take the ethics charges against him all that seriously. At worst, they boil down to campaign-finance and tax-exemption infractions. These are not criminal violations; they are not even ordinary civil violations; they are violations of the convolutions of the lax code and our bizarre political-money system. Virtually every major presidential campaign has had to pay fines for the sorts of infractions Gingrich is accused of masterminding at GOPAC; nobody has ever talked ominously about impeaching Clinton, or Bush, or Reagan over such pettiness. Why, then, Newt? Because it’s not about GOPAC; it’s about the Republican revolution.
And, as former Times Books editor-in-chief Tom Lipscomb told the House Ethics committee earlier this year, Gingrich’s book deal was on the level — Marcia Clark just got almost the same amount for the memoir she’s going to write of her experience prosecuting the O.J. trial, for God’s sake. And Gingrich gave up the deal, in any case. Maybe he was imprudent, but unethical? That’s absurd, and anyone with five minutes’ experience in the world of publishing knows it. So why is Newt still getting hammered over a book with 600,000 copies in print — one whose sales will gross in excess of $ 10 million ? Because it’s not about the book deal; it’s about the Republican revolution.
Gingrich may have been imprudent with the book deal. He may have been reckless with GOPAC. His punishment for such imprudence and recklessness is that he may never be president of the United States, which, for someone as ambitious as he, is a pretty potent punishment. But if Republicans stand by and allow the attacks on Gingrich to go unanswered, or even become complicit in them, they may find themselves subject to a harsh punishment as well: for the revolution that Republicans believe in, the revolution they need to consolidate and deepen in the next few years, may be delegitimized along with Gingrich.
This is what is at stake in the assault on Newt Gingrich; and the response to that assault will be a test of Republican mettle. For if Republicans and conservatives lack the courage and cool-headedness to repulse this assault, they probably don’t deserve the chance to bring about the transformation of American politics and public policy to which they say they are committed.
