Newt Gingrich: Dead Man Talking
Newt Gingrich came to face the reporters, his cheeks reddened like a man who had lingered too long in the shower. His eyes still puffy with sleep, Gingrich circled the room, shaking hands limply, offering flat hellos, greeting some people twice absent-mindedly. The occasion was the Sperling press breakfast, a Washington, D.C., Stations of the Cross, at which important figures regularly submit to a group grope by the Capitol press corps.
In late June an overflow of nearly 40 reporters turned out, positioning dozens of tape recorders around the long breakfast table to capture the speaker of the House’s zingers. The last time he had appeared at the Sperling breakfast, back in November amid the budget impasse and government shutdown, he’d made a fool of himself –– complaining self-importantly that Bill Clinton had not let him ride up front on Air Force One. The nation giggled at Gingrich’s vanity. The Republican revolution that Gingrich had mobilized was collapsing in mirth and recriminations.
For some months afterward, the speaker literally disappeared from the action –– ridiculed by Democrats as “Phantom Newt” –– and seldom showed up on the House floor for debates. He turned legislative management over to other GOP leaders and retreated into introspection, presumably rethinking his grand strategic assumptions. Now he’s baaack, embarked on rehabilitation, and the Sperling breakfast was one step in Gingrich’s self-recovery program.
Gingrich’s new message: He is not a revolutionary. A few days before, he explained to the New York Times: “I don’t see myself as a radical in any historical terms. I see myself standing on the shoulders of the two Roosevelts, Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan.” The concept of “revolution” has disappeared from the nation’s headlines, and from Gingrich’s own political patter.
What the assembled reporters heard instead was one long, hyperbolic whine: about Bill Clinton’s “astonishing” manipulations of truth, about the labor bosses’ big money and their “outrageous abuse of power,” about the Democrats’ campaign to “destroy” Gingrich’s character with frivolous charges of unethical behavior, about the liberal biases of the press. Life is unfair. But Gingrich promises to soldier on.
Reporters stopped taking notes while Gingrich rattled off the familiar defense of his party’s tactics: Republicans weren’t actually cutting anything –– not Medicare, not school lunches, not college loans, not public broadcasting, not environmental protection. This false impression resulted from a “systematic eight-month campaign of deliberate misinformation.” Labor unions, trial lawyers and left-wing activists financed an attack campaign, the cost of which, during the course of the breakfast, Gingrich variously estimated at $35 million, $60 million and $200 million.
Godfrey Sperling Jr. of the Christian Science Monitor, the host of the gathering, gently tried to nudge Gingrich to a new subject –– the Clinton-Dole contest –– but the speaker’s sour tone did not improve: “Is Dole a less affable, less sociable person than Bill Clinton? Yes. Does that define the future of American history? I don’t think so.” Clinton is like Nixon, Gingrich predicted, and the White House’s legal troubles will end like Watergate, resolved by a jury of 12 citizens, not by public-opinion polls or elections.
“If you’re only interested in government as the pure manipulation of public opinion, then you have to look on Clinton and [his principal adviser, Dick] Morris as a fascinating team,” Gingrich allowed. “If you have any interest in government as an extension of real behavior by a free society, then you have to have a little bit of worry that here is a team which seems to have almost no connection between fact and fantasy. Just as a matter of how a free society governs itself, that’s a little dangerous.”
What was missing from this discourse, however, was any hint of self-criticism. In his months of private self-examination, Gingrich evidently did not turn up anything in his own performance that might explain the collapse of the conservative crusade or his own raging unpopularity. Toward the end of the breakfast, I offered him another chance to reflect on these matters. Did he have any second thoughts, I asked, about framing the right-wing agenda as “revolution” in government?
“Sure, sure, I have a lot of second thoughts,” Gingrich replied, but then he abruptly deflected the notion of self-blame by claiming triumph in Clinton’s steady march to the right. The revolution, Gingrich did concede, had been misunderstood, especially on school lunches and public broadcasting.
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