Robert Michel, known as an old-guard Republican who practiced civility and bipartisanship, authorized Gingrich and his allies to make these speeches as he realized it would wound the reputation of Democrats. The corrupt Democratic majority became a central theme for all Republicans. Then came the presidential campaign.
Bush promoted the scandal to the public during his campaign. While mudslinging was always part of elections, Atwater was someone who took the art to new lows. Like Gingrich, he was willing to say and do just about anything in order to win. While Gingrich elevated partisanship over governing at every turn, Atwater did the same with campaigning. Whatever the costs to our institutions and ability to govern, so be it if the outcome was partisan victory.
As a result of his campaign against the Speaker, Republicans elected Gingrich to be their Minority Whip in March In a stunning upset against Ed Madigan of Illinois, a favorite of the party guardians, Gingrich won with a broad coalition.
Even moderates such as Olympia Snowe of Maine went against their centrist political disposition to empower Gingrich because they believed he was their path to power. Once he secured the vote, Gingrich was officially part of the leadership team. The leadership supported Gingrich by promoting a full-scale attack on the way that House Democrats maintained their power through corrupt practices and a manipulation of rules. This was a choice that the GOP made.
Most senior Republicans, until that time, had avoided such a path. When figures had emerged who pursued this style, such as Senator Joseph McCarthy in the s, they were ultimately checked rather than elevated into the leadership. From the creation of interstate highways to the passage of civil-rights legislation, the most significant, lasting acts of Congress have been achieved by lawmakers who deftly maneuver through the legislative process and work with members of both parties.
On January 4, Speaker Gingrich gaveled Congress into session, and promptly got to work transforming America. Determined to keep Republicans in power, Gingrich reoriented the congressional schedule around filling campaign war chests, shortening the official work week to three days so that members had time to dial for dollars. There had been federal funding lapses before, but they tended to be minor affairs that lasted only a day or two.
The gambit was a bust—voters blamed the GOP for the crisis, and Gingrich was castigated in the press—but it ensured that the shutdown threat would loom over every congressional standoff from that point on. Over the course of several secret meetings at the White House in the fall of , Gingrich told me, he and Clinton sketched out plans for a center-right coalition that would undertake big, challenging projects such as a wholesale reform of Social Security.
Never mind that Republicans had no real chance of getting the impeachment through the Senate. He thought he was enshrining a new era of conservative government.
In fact, he was enshrining an attitude—angry, combative, tribal—that would infect politics for decades to come. In the years since he left the House, Gingrich has only doubled down. Mickey Edwards, the Oklahoma Republican, who served in the House for 16 years, told me he believes Gingrich is responsible for turning Congress into a place where partisan allegiance is prized above all else. He noted that during Watergate, President Richard Nixon was forced to resign only because leaders of his own party broke ranks to hold him accountable—a dynamic Edwards views as impossible in the post-Gingrich era.
Newt has been a big part of eroding that. But when I ask Gingrich what he thinks of the notion that he played a part in toxifying Washington, he bristles. These days, Gingrich seems to be revising his legacy in real time—shifting the story away from the ideological sea change that his populist disruption was supposed to enable, and toward the act of populist disruption itself.
On December 19, , Gingrich cast his final vote as a congressman—a vote to impeach Bill Clinton for lying under oath about an affair. By the time it was revealed that the ex-speaker had been secretly carrying on an illicit relationship with a young congressional aide named Callista throughout his impeachment crusade, almost no one was surprised. Gingrich declined to comment on these allegations.
Detractors could call it hypocrisy if they wanted; Gingrich might not even argue. The CNN moderator grew flustered, the audience erupted in a standing ovation, and a few days later, the voters of South Carolina delivered Gingrich a decisive victory in the Republican primary. One of the hard things about talking with Gingrich is that he weaves partisan attack lines into casual conversation so matter-of-factly—and so frequently—that after a while they begin to take on a white-noise quality.
His smarter-than-thou persona seems so impenetrable, his mind so unchangeable, that after a while you just give up on anything approaching a regular human conversation. But the zoo appears to have put Gingrich in high spirits, and for the first time all day, he seems relaxed, loose, even a little gossipy.
When Trump first began thinking seriously about running for president, he turned to Gingrich for advice. Over breakfast at the downtown Marriott, Trump peppered Newt and Callista with questions about running for president—most pressingly, how much it would cost him to fund a campaign through the South Carolina primary.
This would be a lot more fun than a yacht! Once Trump clinched the nomination, he rewarded Gingrich by putting him on the vice-presidential short list. For a while it looked like it might really happen. Gingrich had the support of influential inner-circlers like Sean Hannity, who flew him out on a private jet to meet with Trump on the campaign trail. But alas, a Trump-Gingrich ticket was not to be. There were, it turned out, certain optical issues that would have proved difficult to spin.
In fact, according to a transition official, Gingrich had little interest in giving up his lucrative private-sector side hustles, and was never really in the running for a Cabinet position. Gingrich disputes this account. In Washington, the appointment was seen as a testament to the self-parodic nature of the Trump era—but in Rome, the arrangement has worked surprisingly well. Meanwhile, back in the States, Gingrich got to work marketing himself as the premier public intellectual of the Trump era.
Ever since he was a young congressman, he had labored to cultivate a cerebral image, often schlepping piles of books into meetings on Capitol Hill. He is not a natural booster for the economic nationalism espoused by people like Steve Bannon, nor does he seem particularly smitten with the isolationism Trump championed on the stump.
There is no room for compromise. Trump has understood this perfectly since day one. I ask Gingrich whether he, as someone who follows Washington crap rather closely and does not have kids to drive to soccer, worries at all about the mounting evidence of coordination between Russians and the Trump campaign. Gingrich guffaws. I tell everybody: We live in the age of the Kardashians. This is all Kardashian politics. Noise followed by noise followed by hysteria followed by more noise, creating big enough celebrity status so you can sell the hats with your name on it and become a millionaire.
When I point out the apparent dissonance, Gingrich is ready with a counter. A few hours after parting ways with Gingrich, I take my seat in a cavernous downtown-Philadelphia theater, where more than 2, people are waiting to hear him speak.
He reminisces about Time making him Man of the Year in , and spends several minutes describing the technological advancements in private space travel, a favorite hobbyhorse of his. At one point, he pauses to lavish praise on the restaurant scene in Rome; at another, he simply starts listing impressive titles he has held over the course of his career.
He is dabbling in geopolitics, dining in fine Italian restaurants. As he nears the end of his remarks, Gingrich adopts a somber tone. For a moment, it sounds almost as if Gingrich is on the brink of a confession—an acknowledgment of what he has wrought; an apology, perhaps, for setting us on this course.
Biden will inherit overlapping crises of public health, the economy, racial injustice, the climate and democracy. Even in more serene times, incumbent presidents typically suffer losses in the House midway through their first term.
When [Bill] Clinton won, we picked up 54 seats two years later and when [Barack] Obama won, we picked up 63 seats two years later.
Control of the Senate, meanwhile, hinges on two runoff races in Georgia early next month. If Republicans preserve their narrow majority, will Biden be able to work with the majority leader, Mitch McConnell? And Mitch will be happy with either outcome. There is a historical rhyme here with the s when Gingrich led a Republican majority against a centrist Democratic president in the shape of Clinton. There may be lessons from that experience for both sides.
He signed welfare reform, he signed capital gains tax cut, he signed four balanced budgets. Could Biden, who is making overtures to Republicans and giving little voice to the left in his cabinet, pay a similar price?
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