It’s past midnight, and the beefy man in room 112 of the Best Western Motel in Keene, N.H., says he has a problem. He will turn 52 this week. He’s powerful, famous and soon to be wealthy. And yet, he says, he isn’t sure what to do with the rest of his life. He has shed hi s coat, tie and shoes, and props his stockinged feet on a coffee table as he munches grapes and muses about his future. “I’ve participated in great events,” says Newt Gingrich, citing the GOP takeover of the House, the “Contract With America,” a raft of bills passed in a few weeks. “I’m aware that I don’t need to be president.”
Really? Then what is he doing in New Hampshire, trailed by a horde of media, conducting a heavily advanced four-day royal progress through the First Primary state? “I really believe in teaching,” he declares as he reaches for a Diet Coke. “I’m the most didactic modern politician in America.” All he wants is for everyone to read his “management document,” a nine-point plan for guiding us to peace, prosperity and freedom.
Leave it to the speaker t o invent a new way to run for president, You come to New Hampshire as a visiting professor, declare a serene absence of ambition and confess a touch of midlife crisis. Bring your bug spray and your portable Mencken: Newt is on the campaign trail.
Somewhere between P. T. Barnum and Lady Thatcher resides a soul drawn to center stage by a love of attention and by a manifest sense of destiny–the destiny that may require him, after all, to lead us “To Renew America” (hardcover edition coming to bookstores soon). So Newt went north last week to watch moose, raise campaign cash for Republican congressmen and toy with the possibility of a presidential candidacy. But while he claims reluctance, others see all the coyness of a rutting moose. “As a politician, he’s permanently in heat,” marvels Democratic consultant Robert Shrum. “If Newt Gingrich climbed Mount Everest, his first question would be ‘Isn’t there another mountain even higher?.’”
Whether he runs or not, the Gingrich phenomenon is significant. It illuminates the state of the GOP presidential race, the conservative movement and the nature of our wired, overly caffeinated politics. There is a nervous sense among Republicans that the GOP field isn’t as strong as it should be at a time of their ascendancy, The conservative Roundheads yearn for Oliver Cromwell in the Oval Office; they haven’t found him just yet.
Gingrich has defined the way you grab attention in a channel-surfing society. You become the Great Explainer: a multimedium of books, floor speeches, TV shows–un-abashed as a self-help guru on cable. You define every issue as a life-and-death struggle to save America. You offer your vision of secular redemption packaged in handy points (nine in Newt’s case, from balancing the budget to leading the world in trade). And if you run for president, you ignore the rules about waiting your turn, being “seasoned.” You just do it: in their face, in a hurry, obnoxious, but watched.
The New Hampshire trip took all the chutzpah Gingrich possesses. He’s been House speaker for a grand total of six months, the first Republican to hold that position after the party wandered for 40 years in the congressional desert. For all the many votes it cast and hours it worked in the First Hundred Days, the GOP Congress has yet to enact laws that would reform welfare,’ slow the rise of spending or cut taxes. Gingrich’s own numbers are toxic. In the latest NEWSWEEK Poll, he loses badly, 52-33, in a trial heat with President Clinton. Bob Dole beats the president 49 to 40. Among Republicans, 53 percent say they’d like Dole to get the GOP nomination; Newt finishes a distant second with 11 percent. “Who cares about polls?” says Gingrich, who evidently does. “Where was Bill Clinton in the polls in June of 1991? He was nowhere.”
So besides “teaching,” what was Gingrich doing in New Hampshire on the same weekend, by coincidence, as the president? One goal was to show that early polls are indeed meaningless. You do that by drawing crowds. At a chamber-of-commerce event in Nashua, he drew a thousand dinner guests and wooed them with his expansive, futuristic rhetoric. He got a break when Clinton casually offered to meet him in New Hampshire. Gingrich gleefully accepted, and the two were scheduled to meet for a joint Q&A session with senior citizens on Sunday. Clinton may have wanted to elevate the GOP’s most controversial figure. But sharing the stage with Gingrich is a tough way to make a living.
Gingrich enjoys the childish pleasure of annoying the presumed powers that be among the COP elders and media. “He’s having fun,” says Bill Bennett, another multimedia figure and friend. Gingrich wants to increase his leverage especially in the Senate as the real voting begins this summer. In the “other body,” where four COP members are running for president, Gingrich would like senators to ponder the theoretical possibility of a President Newt before they pass the bills he sends them. Gingrich loves to dominate every scene and every debate. Since the end of the First Hundred Days, the speaker has been suffering from his own form of attention-deficit disorder: he hasn’t been getting enough.
Then there’s cold cash–Gingrich’s, not the Treasury’s. “I’m afraid this mostly is about money,” says one of Newt’s closest, and now estranged, friends. Rupert Murdoch’s HarperCollins soon will publish Newt’s semi-autobiographical gloss on the college lectures he delivered last spring. The initial printing of “To Renew America” is a whopping 525,000. His publisher is assembling a 25-city promotional tour. Gingrich this week comes out with “1945,” a semi-steamy historical thriller that features a “pouting sex kitten” German spy. Free copies of the book were conveniently placed on the press bus in New Hampshire. Hollywood is expected to bid on the rights.
But Newt isn’t in it mainly for the money. These days, ideas and slogans–plus the star power to give them visibility–drive politics. “He’s framed the debate for the last year,” says adviser Jeff Eisenach. “Why should he stop now?” The speaker glories in his effortless ability to upstage the official GOP presidential field. In Florida recently, three declared candidates–Phil Gramm, Lamar Alexander and Pete Wilson–forked over $100,000 each for the privilege of addressing a state GOP gathering. Newt was invited as a noncandidate celebrity, paid nothing and stole the show. “I’m Technicolor,” he says with a shrug.
Yes. But is he running? Gingrich is certainly willing to be in the company of those who say he should. Chief among them are insiders who orbit Empower America, which includes Bennett, strategist William Kristol and former HUD secretary Jack Kemp. Think of them as the Traveling Wilburys of GOP conservatives: senior, serious, accustomed to being revered. They currently don’t have a favorite candidate, or at least one who seems to he going anywhere. Phil Gramm is stalled. Pat Buchanan is too nasty. They don’t trust Dole. “Everyone out there is off by a little–or a lot,” says Bennett, who spent Memorial Day weekend lounging around a Palm Beach swimming pool with Gingrich and talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. (“We’re talking a lot of water displacement,” Bennett laughed.) What Newt is saying, privately, is this: if Dole falters, and if no one else catches on, the speaker will allow history to work its will.
Newt isn’t eager to disparage the declared candidates, but has no trouble containing his enthusiasm about them. “It isn’t a field with an Eisenhower or a Reagan,” he says, winding down after along day of not campaigning in Portsmouth, Manchester, Nashua and Keene. “But it may be enough.” Gingrich will finally decide, he says, in the fall – and will run only if “there is no other path left open to me.” How will he know? “If it’s clear that we are going to lose, or that the likely nominee would start a civil war in the party.”
For now, everyone else is regarding Newt with the amused tolerance of a parent waiting for his kid to end a tantrum. Dole and his advisers think that Gingrich helps their cause, by sowing more doubts about the rest of the conservative field. Others think Newt’s personality will do him in. “A certain humility is required for this game,” says Angela (Bay) Buchanan, who is running her brother Pat’s campaign. “That’s not Newt’s strong suit.” Still others think he’ll make noise but eventually just go away. That was the patient, condescending strategy of his predecessors, Democratic Speakers Jim Wright and Tom Foley. And we know what happened to them.
In a race between Clinton and Dole, 40% would vote for Clinton, 49% would vote for Dole
FOR THIS NEWSWEEK POLL, PRINCETON SURVEY RESEARCH ASSOCIATES TELEPHONED 755 ADULTS JUNE 8-9. THE MARGIN OF ERROR IS +/- 4 PERCENTAGE POINTS. THE NEWSWEEK POLL (C) 1995 BY NEWSWEEK, INC.
NEWSWEEK POLL
69% think if Speaker Gingrich runs for president his candidacy would create conflicts of interest on issues and disputes with President Clinton
THE NEWSWEEK POLL, JUNE 8-9, 1995
The differences between Newt and Dole are more than personal: they represent competing visions of what it means to be a Republican leader. Newt sees politics as an outside game of vilifying Democrats and “educating” average citizens. Dole sees politics as an inside game of making deals and getting laws passed. Newt’s people think Dole’s operation is too moderate and “doesn’t get” the need for radically shrinking government. (The current American Spectator savages Dole’s office, overseen by chief of staff Shelia Burke. as “relentlessly feminist.”) Dole’s people see Newt’s people as immature school kids who are misguided. badly intentioned and could marginalize the party by alienating mainstream voters “And Newt’s in the fifth grade.” says one GOP insider close to Dole.
Now they need each other as they try to reconcile the House and Senate plans to balance the budget by 2002-so they have forged a fragile detente. At one recent brainstorming session, Newt told advisers he had to “run things by Dole” before they proceeded – and he kept his word. Dole, meanwhile. knows that it’s Newt’s ideas that are stirring COP hearts, so he must move Newt’s way to win the nomination. Dole also realizes that the more voters get to know Newt, the more Dole looks statesmanlike by comparison.
Just kidding: The strains between them still show, Last week, as they began private budget talks in Newt’s office with GOP Chairman Haley Barbour, they needled each other – in fun, Dole had gently criticized the lame soft-porn prose in Newt’s upcoming novel, “1945.” Newt held up the New York Post headline about the razzing–DOLE RIPS NEWT’S SEXY NOVEL–and teased back. “You’re helping your political campaign,” Newt said, “and helping me sell books.”
The budget talks were polite but settled nothing. Newt said he’d like to have $260 billion in tax cuts. The Senate calls for $170 billion in cuts, and Dole told Newt that was only one issue–they also have to honor the Senate’s commitment to defer the tax cuts until real progress is made in balancing the budget. “It’s going to be a train wreck,” one GOP senator predicted. But Newt and Dole do agree on one thing: they have to forge a deal that will pass both houses–or they’ll both lose credibility.
