“Even before he was sworn in, he was making noises about going after Diggs,” said Craig Shirley, a Republican consultant and biographer whose book “Citizen Newt” will be out next spring. “From the very first, he stood out as someone willing to shake things up.”
There was no other way, Gingrich explains now, to shock a pulse into the comfortably comatose Republican caucus, long a cowed minority.
48 visits to Iowa
$2.9 million raised
$64,240 spent on ads
Wonkbook: Gingrich and Romney have the same problem
“You had a leadership that was exhausted and defeated by Watergate,” he said. “They weren’t prepared to fight.”
Thus began his greatest disruption, his years-long siege to take over the House. It was the ultimate combination of brains and brazenness.
He launched a sustained harangue on C-SPAN against the culture of corruption in the entrenched majority. And he filed ethics charges against three more Democrats, including Speaker James Wright over his use of book sales to skirt financial restrictions. Wright resigned in 1989. Eight years later, Gingrich himself would be reprimanded, and fined $300,000, for misleading an ethics committee investigation about his use of a college course for political fundraising.
In 1994, after Gingrich’s “Contract With America” had Republicans nationwide reading from a single set of conservative talking points, the party won its first House majority in 40 years. Gingrich was rewarded with the speakership. Immediately, with a deft blend of combat and compromise with President Bill Clinton, he began to pile up a remarkable record of conservative achievements, including welfare reform and a string of balanced budgets.
But sometimes when Gingrich hits the plunger, what blows up is Gingrich. Jack Howard, Speaker Gingrich’s director of policy, remembers a 1995 meeting in which Gingrich said he was prepared to shut down the government if Clinton didn’t give more ground in budget talks.
“We all thought it was pretty radical,” recalled Howard, a lobbyist at Wexler and Walker. “But we thought we had the high ground in terms of the issue.”
When Clinton didn’t blink, the shutdown turned into a PR disaster.
After just four years, disenchantment with Gingrich’s style brought an end to his remarkable run with the gavel. He survived a coup attempt by members of his leadership team but resigned from Congress after Republicans lost seats in the 1998 election.
His caucus was burned out by the nonstop crisis and the off-the-cuff bombast that detonated in the middle of a news cycle. Gingrich’s brain needed a 10-second broadcast delay.
“He couldn’t walk to his car without people peppering him with questions,” said Christina Martin, his press secretary at the time. “What he started to learn was you don’t have to say something every time you walk through Statuary Hall.”
Can Gingrich separate his two selves, the brainy and the ballistic? His daughters and former aides say his grandchildren, his marriage to Callista, 45, and his conversion to Catholicism have made him less prone to pull the pin.
“I do not think the Newt Gingrich of the 1990s is the Newt Gingrich of 2012,” Martin said. “I think he is more mature. He’s a bit more tempered than he has been in the past.”
But his run for the GOP nomination started with signs that there would be no new Newt. He infuriated conservatives by characterizing Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposed Medicare overhaul as “right-wing social engineering.” Since his political resurrection, he has challenged child-labor laws as “truly stupid” and dismissed Palestinians as an “invented” people.”
But still, in the chaotic political environment that is Gingrich’s natural habitat, he is on top, a surge built on his debate performances and the GOP electorate’s hunger for someone to shake things up.
Last month, he began a campaign swing with a boisterous tea party rally in Florida and ended with a murmuring seminar of graduate students at Harvard.
“If we plan correctly, by the time President Obama lands in Chicago [on Inauguration Day 2013], we’ll have dismantled about 40 percent of his government,” the GOP’s disrupter assured the cheering crowd outside a Jacksonville shopping mall. A man waved a sign reading, “Yes We Can Defeat Obama’s Socialist Transformation of America.”
One day later, in Cambridge, Mass., the only sign was the tasteful stenciling on the wall, “John F. Kennedy School of Government,” and Professor Gingrich was lecturing young academics on his theories of American exceptionalism.
“I disagree with everything he said,” said Harvard Law graduate student Jennifer Devlin. “But he handles himself brilliantly. He’s clearly very intelligent.”
Yes. He has heard that before.
Campaign 2012 tools
The Post Most: PoliticsMost-viewed stories, videos and galleries int he past two hours
Featured Blogs & Columns
Loading...
Comments