Leadership is not necessarily innate; it can be learned. No one ever tried harder to master the art of command by sheer dint of study than the garrulous speaker of the House. His speeches are a stream of historical clichs. He has compared his legislative strategy to Grant’s Wilderness campaign, the Napoleonic wars and the design of Ford’s Mustang (““pure intuition’’). He has likened himself to archetypes as varied as Vince Lombardi, the Duke of Wellington, Thomas A. Edison, Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle.
Too eager: The collapse of the GOP revolution over the past two years has many causes and players. President Clinton deftly moved to the center. Gingrich’s troops came to Washington too eager, it turned out, to dismantle government. But the Republicans’ grandiosity can be perhaps best understood by Gingrich’s sweeping attempt to transform himself into one of the legendary figures he has so long admired. His human shortcomings made his efforts heroic – but they also doomed his chances.
With his petulance – his use of words like ““traitor’’ and ““grotesque’’ to describe his opponents – the speaker has helped drive voters away from the Republicans. Less than two years ago, Gingrich’s party seemingly stood on the verge of realignment; pundits were comparing the 1994 elections to those of 1930, when the Democrats seized control of the House during the Great Depression and did not let go for 60 of the next 64 years. Now 1994 is being likened to 1946, when the Republicans won the Congress after World War II – only to lose it again two years later. The speaker’s approval ratings are in the low 20s, and the GOP majority in the House could be in doubt. The Republicans gath- ering in San Diego, Gingrich admits, are in a ““funk.''
But the speaker does deserve credit for war-gaming the GOP takeover in the first place. Freshmen who are now distancing themselves from him won their seats by listening to tapes prepared by Gingrich’s political-action arm, GOPAC, teaching them how to ““talk like Newt.’’ Insiders like Bob Dole didn’t seem to share the revolutionaries’ passions. It was Gingrich who understood, perhaps better than anyone, that by 1994 Americans were sick of the whole thing: the gridlock, the bureaucratic bloat, the special interests.
In retrospect, it is clear that Gingrich overestimated the voters’ zeal. They are not as ideological as Gingrich believed, or hoped. Yes, many baby boomers are hung over from the ’60s, sad about their broken marriages, repelled by a leering pop culture. But that doesn’t mean they want the Christian Coalition telling them how to live. By the same token, they distrust big government. But don’t even think about cutting the federal benefits and handouts received by one out of every two voters, whether it’s a home-mortgage interest deduction or a Social Security check.
Though Gingrich is often attacked as an opportunist, his own intellectual honesty helped trip him up. More than anything else, Gingrich wanted to dismantle the ““bureaucratic welfare state.’’ To do that, he understood, he had to attack Congress’s addiction to deficit spending. When he assumed power in 1995, he consulted CEOs who had downsized their own companies; they advised him to stake out bold positions and force others to follow.
So Gingrich developed a mantra (““zero in seven’’) to plump for a balanced budget by the year 2000. Not for any particular economic reason, but because it sounded ““mythic,’’ as he grandly put it. He spoke of ““shaping the battlefield’’ and instructed his CommStrat (communications strategy) staff to tell reporters that ““if they’re going to cover the Republicans now, they need a romantic view of history.’’ When the tough votes came, Gingrich quoted Ulysses S. Grant: ““We’ll fight it on the line if it takes all summer.''
Hokey, but it worked, partly because Gingrich softened his martial metaphors with feel-good aphorisms from management school (““listen, learn, lead’’). Under Gingrich the House passed a budget that truly restrained the growth of federal spending. By early fall, giddy with success, Gingrich was comparing himself to Wellington (““the Iron Duke’’) maneuvering against the French on the Iberian Peninsula in the early 1800s.
It was more like Napoleon on the way to Waterloo. About this time, Gingrich decided to go after Medicare – the Great Society program to provide health care for the elderly. Gingrich wanted to cut the rate of growth from 10 percent a year to 7 percent, for a savings of $270 billion – reasonable on paper, essential over time, toxic to politicians. (The speaker ignored the one word of advice he got from GOP Chairman Haley Barbour about touching Medicare: ““Don’t.’’) Bill Clinton was ready. The president decided to promise a balanced budget – and vow to protect Medicare for seniors at the same time. The numbers didn’t add up, but most voters got lost on the technical haggling over counting methods.
Clinton had help blowing smoke. In December 1994, in the wake of the GOP sweep, the president had placed his first phone call to ““Charlie,’’ his code name for Dick Morris, the consultant who had plotted Clinton’s first comeback in Arkansas in 1982. Morris, now a Republican, had a simple Medicare strategy for his old client. His advice to Clinton, as quoted in Bob Woodward’s ““The Choice,’’ was: ““You can shove it up their a.’’ Morris persuaded Clinton to spend $15 million of Democratic ““soft money’’ on ads attacking Gingrich for trying to ““eliminate’’ Medicare.
The battle was formally joined in November 1995. Congress had passed a balanced budget; Clinton vetoed it. The government shut down, and the ensuing standoff exposed Gingrich’s weaknesses. The speaker had allowed some of his hard-core troops to run loose, opening the GOP to charges of extremism. Majority Whip Tom DeLay, a former pest exterminator, led a fight to cut the EPA’s enforcement budget by 30 percent. Ways and Means chairman Bill Archer rolled back a popular anti-poverty measure, the Earned Income Tax Credit, but tried to cut taxes for corporations. And during budget talks at the end of the year, Gingrich famously whined about getting snubbed on Air Force One by Clinton on the way back from Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral – a tantrum that made the Republicans look more interested in protocol than in getting the government open again.
Sweet-talking: Meanwhile, in negotiations at the White House, Gingrich let himself be seduced by the president, an even faster-talking baby boomer. Clinton cajoled, teased and diverted his fellow wonk with policy arcana – and never blinked. ““I melt when I’m around him,’’ Gingrich confessed. Newt’s wife, Marianne, compared her husband to the ““Leave It to Beaver’’ episode in which a hobo sweet-talks the hapless pre-adolescent out of his allowance. ““You’re just being the Beaver,’’ scolded Marianne.
Gingrich eventually had to fold, and although the annual deficit is slowly coming down, the Republicans failed to pass a deal that would have balanced the budget in 2002 by ending most federal entitlements for the poor, slowing the growth of retirement payments to the elderly and eliminating hundreds of other programs. Gingrich was filled with self-pity – and self-awareness. ““I’m not a natural leader,’’ he admitted. ““I’m a natural intellectual gadfly.''
He’s right, though his ambitions remain heroic. One of Gingrich’s more obscure role models is Andrew Higgins, an eccentric shipbuilder who designed the Higgins boat, the sturdy, cheap, mass-produced landing craft that carried the Allied forces to the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. Gingrich wanted to be compared to Higgins as a man who had a simple, brilliant idea and the will to carry it through. Gingrich’s own place in history is more ambiguous. But even if his troops are driven back into the sea in November, Gingrich deserves to be remembered for his willingness to dare.
