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.
Gingrich has a strategy for this, one that’s worked flawlessly (with one exception) so far in 1995. Rep. Bill Paxon of New York, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee. calls it the “Gingrich permanent offense planning model.”
But planning is only one p!art of it. Ideas, repetition, and persistence are also necessary components. A constant flood of fresh ideas irequired to keep the public interested and the media busy. Repetition is needed to make sure the public actually hears the ideas. “You have to keep expla!ning to the American people what you did, why you did it, and what you hope the result will be,” says Frank Luntz, Gingrich’s pollster. Persistence — never relaxing as Ronald Reagan and his allies often did in ihe 1980s — is necessary to keep your foes from regroupig.
On offense, no detail is toO inconsequential to be addressed. For example, House Republicans and their aides have been urged to halt any interview or chat in which Medicare “cuts” are mentioned. They’re supposed to insist Republicans aim to save Medicare by “slowing its growth,” not by catting. Tony Blankley, Gingrich’s press secretary, and Ed Gilliespie, House Majority Leader Dick Armey!s spokesman, were assigned to badger reporters who wrote or talked about “cuts.” The calls paid off. InJuly, John Kasich of Ohio, chairman of the House Budget Committee, rushed into a meeting of GOP leaders, holding up a copy of the IVashington Post and whooping. “Look at it,” he shouted. “Look at it. They finally got it right.” A Post story on Medicare cited Republican plans for Medicare without mentioning “!cuts.” Kasich said he’d hounded the reporter, even called him at home. The Republican leaders applauded.
The 1995 experience has made Republicans all the more determined to stay on offense. Gingrich attributes their success to “the way we iphased the sequences.” The Contract with America took up the first three months, then the budget was paramount, now it’s Medicare. Each phase was planned meticulously. “Part of being permanently on offense is permanently planning,” says Blankley. With tle Contract completed, House Republicans went home for the April recess with a 75-page briefing book on the budget. For the August recess, they toted a briefing book on Medicare. When House Republicans leave Washington this fall, they’ll have a book on next year’s budget.
The one slip-up was in March on the school lunch program. Democrats pounded Republicans for “cutting” school lunches. (In truth, the GOP budget increased spending, but less than the Clinton administration wanted.) Gingrich and other Republicans were tardy in responding. “It was mismanagement,” Gingrich concedes. “We were still in cycle for finishing up the Contract. We underestimated how much the disinformation was penetrating … That may have saved us on Medicare. The experience of the Democrats’ willingness to lie blatantly and the willingness of the news media to carry the lies taught us to be dramatically more aggressive.” Almost immediately — this was late winter — Gingrich and his allies began planning for the Medicare offensive this fall.
The concept of the permanent offense came to Gingrich gradually. Years ago, when reading a book about Dwight Eisenhower, he was struck by the failure of the Allies to plan for the breakout from the Normandy coast after D-Day. The invasion was nearly stymied as a result. Then, in 1981, the Reagan administration let down its guard over the August recess and Democrats seized the agenda. “The Reagan administration never recovered,” Gingrich says. Finally, he read an interview with Bennett in Policy Review in 1988 that included Bennett’s memorable formulation about offense and defense. (Bennett also said there are no time outs in Washington.) Gingrich says his reaction was, “Boy, is that exactly right!” Gingrich’s model for the permanent offense is not FDR, but three Republican leaders at the turn of the century: Presidents William McKinley (1897-1901) and Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) and Republican strategist Mark Hanna. The struggle between these Republicans and William Jennings Bryan, the chronic Democratic presidential candidate, has “remarkable parallels to where the two parties are today,” Gingrich argues. “Bryan was a remarkably shallow but emotionally effective demagogue, maximizing class warfare and a sense of fear in order to avoid modernization.
McKinley, Roosevelt, and Hanna represented the rise of modern America. But they had to convince the people the only way you could get to a free lunch pail was to modernize.” In case you hadn’t figured it out, Gingrich has Clinton pegged as Bryan, himself as today’s version of the farsighted Republicans.
The McKinley-Roosevelt-Hanna crowd did two things Gingrich admires enormously. They dominated the agenda with ideas, issues, and policy initiatives, and they were extraordinarily disciplined in confronting Bryan. Their schemes for modernizing America, including the creation of a blue-water navy, produced a “constant wave of reforms” — precisely what Gingrich craves now.
And, he says, “they defined Bryan strategically, not tactically. Bryan would have won a mano-a-mano race with McKinley [in 1896]. He was a better candidate, more energy, better speaker. They drew a very deliberate contrast. What they were driving at was very simple: “No matter what Bryan says, no matter how ap- pealing he is, no matter how effective he is, he stands for the end of this country economically and you cannot afford him.'” To keep ideas flowing, Gingrich has more than 100 House members working on projects that may lead to legislation, published studies, position papers, articles, or books. Gingrich himself is a ornucopia of ideas. In his best-selling To Renew America, written last spring, he listed six strategic goals for America in the first chapter. Later, he and his advisrs worked up a “management memo” based on what Gingrich would like to accomplish in seven-and-a-half more years as House speaker. Three new strategic gohls — creating a benchmark for government excellence, suppressing violent crime and the drug culture, and ” leading the planet” — were added.
In the unlikely event Gingrich runs dry, he can call on Kasich, who says, ” Ideas give us energy… High energy doesn’t come from doing the same thing over and over. It comes from the excitement of new ideas and new approaches.” Kasich hhs assigned his staff to come up with “budget ideas for the 21st century.” Next year, he says, the budget may also stress pilot projects for testing new policies: “You’ve got to stay a step or two ahead of your opponen!s, even a few ahead of your own side.”
Gingrich has concluded the!easiest way to lose the offensive is by taking up peripheral issues: “What we need to do is not get sucked into little fights that don’t matter. We need to keep coming back to the big issues that truly define things.” Curbihg teenage smoking isn’t one of them. “It’d be silly for us to get into that fight,” he says. “Let President Clinton fight that stuff. My point to our guys is, “Thins fall no matter what Clinton talks about, you talk about balancing the budget while cutting taxes, saving Medicare with a better plan, and getting welfare reform that emphasizes work and family. If you talk about those, let him talk about anything he wants to. ‘”
There’s another problem — -the Senate. “It’s hard for one body to be on permanent offense while the other is on permanent stall,” says Luntz, the pollster. By balking at sweeping legislation that’s passed the House, the Senate is “undermining” the GOP. “If the Senate fails to pass the elements of the Contract with America, the House will pay the price,” Luntz warns. Republicans will lose seats. “Newt is powerless if enough Republicans aren’t returned to offce to control the House.”
Gingrich, for one, doesn’t think this will happen. Rather, change and reform will” spur more change and reform, and permanent offense will become, well, permanent. “It’s the treadmill theory,” says Luntz. “When you put an animal in a treadmill, getting it started is diffcult because you’re running against gravity. But once the treadmill begins to move, stopping it becomes diffcult. In politics, initial change is hard. Once change becomes expected, preventing it or stopping it becomes impossible.” Gingrich hopes so.
by Fred Barnes
