Who Let the Dogs In? (17 page)

Nelson printed her words verbatim. Gingrich was furious and wrote a letter to Nelson’s editors saying it never happened, that it was irresponsible reporting. He demanded that Nelson be fired. Then he apologized to Speaker Foley and said his aide’s actions were “unforgivable and destructive.” But he did not fire her.

In December 1995 Gingrich, citing an unnamed source during his appearance on
Meet the Press,
said that “up to one fourth of the White House staff have used drugs in the last four to five years.” Gingrich, a master of the non-apology, said afterward, “It was a comment which produced a larger effect than I intended. In retrospect, I should not have said it. I’ve got to learn to be very specific about what I’m trying to accomplish. I stand by precisely what I said on
Meet the Press.
”

Since becoming Speaker, Gingrich has called Democrats “sick,” “corrupt,” “thugs,” and “liars.” Also, a party “that despises the values of the American people,” “cultural masochists” who enjoy bad news, “the enemy of normal Americans,” and guilty of “multicultural, nihilistic hedonism.” Various stories that have offended him are “socialist,” “maniacally stupid” (that one was aimed at
The Wall Street Journal
), “a joke,” “mean, spiteful, nasty,” “a despicable hit piece by a person who has virtually no values.”

But can he take it? In March 1995 he told the National Restaurant Association, anent the ethics charges against him, “Frankly, it hurts. It hurts to see people cheat, and it hurts to see the cheating reported as hard news.”

In the same speech, he said, “I am so sick of the way the game is played by the news media and the way the game is played by the Democrats in this city that it is, frankly, all I can do to stand in there. They are misusing the ethics system in a deliberate, vicious, vindictive way, and I think it is despicable, and I have just about had it.”

Last April he told
Face the Nation,
“I am very bitter about this. I am the only political figure of your lifetime who has been held to this incredible standard.”

In October Gingrich reportedly said at a town meeting in Roswell, Georgia: “No one can get up every day and take the kind of totally dishonest cheap shots that we take and not wonder sometimes why you keep doing it. Frankly, I’ve thought about quitting because of the vicious, routine smears Marianne and I have to put up with.” He loves to say “frankly.”

Gingrich’s tongue is almost as famous as Bob Packwood’s. His funniest moments come when he takes a stand precisely contrary to an earlier stand (in some cases, only hours later) and is just as belligerent on the one side as he is on the other.

Before the 1994 election, Alice Rivlin, head of President Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget, wrote a memo outlining a number of options for cutting the deficit while still finding ways to invest in programs such as job training. One option was cutting Social Security benefits to the wealthy. Gingrich promptly raised an enormous furor, claiming that the Clinton administration was planning to cut Social Security. Oh, what a heinous thing!

He was, of course, totally undeterred by the fact that he himself proposed a bill in 1986 that would have cut off Social Security for everyone in the entire country.

Great comic moments frequently follow his occasional vows to keep his tongue under control. In 1985, when
The Washington Post
said he was probably the most disliked member of Congress, Gingrich replied, “That was the old me—abrasive and confrontational. You’ll see a change now. I am no longer the person I once was. I can be much quieter, much more positive.”

That, of course, was before Jim Wright, Tom Foley, or Bill Clinton.

After being sworn in as Speaker in January 1995, Gingrich made a conciliatory speech, stating, “We are here as commoners together, to some extent Democrats and Republicans, to some extent liberals and conservatives, but Americans all. I would say to our friends in the Democratic Party that we’re going to work with you.”

Later the same day, he called Democratic tactics “dumb,” “partisan,” and “pathetically narrow.”

Even more hilariously, after months of robustly Gingrichian rhetoric, he then turned and accused the press of dwelling on the negative and “trying to get a catfight started.”

“In order to conduct a thorough and credible investigation, the special counsel needs unlimited subpoena power,” said Gingrich during the investigation of Speaker Jim Wright. Now, of course, the special counsel who is investigating Speaker Gingrich must be carefully limited in authority.

Taiwan, term limits, and campaign finance reform are more issues Gingrich has seen from both sides, but Gingrich doesn’t do anything so pedestrian as waffle or retreat. He is emphatic, no matter if he contradicts himself. Ambivalence is not Gingrich.

He can also be incredibly reckless in defining the differences between what he always posits as the conservative opportunity society versus the welfare state. An obscure and, by Washington standards, inexpensive program called Supplemental Security Income goes, literally, to poor, crippled children. It’s not easy to attack a program that helps poor, crippled children. Were it not for the stipend that helps economically marginal families care for their children born with spina bifida, cystic fibrosis, and other diseases, the kids would have to be dumped into public institutions, where the cost of their annual care would run way over what their families now get to help pay for wheelchairs, ramps, etc. Gingrich told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that poor people are not only coaching their kids on how to fake disabilities, but also beating them if they do not succeed. “They’re being punished for not getting what they call crazy money or stupid money. We literally have children suffering child abuse so they can get a check for their parents.”

There simply is no evidence for such a claim. Some shaky reporting based on unreliable sources had raised some questions about the SSI program, which also covers children with severe mental problems, and this was seized on by the right to discredit the program. Media reviews have since gone back and discredited both the reporting and the sources (who never alleged what Gingrich did to begin with).

One way to gauge Gingrich’s commitment to “changing the way Washington works” is to look at what he has done with his own office. The budget for the Speaker’s office has gone up 40 percent since Gingrich took over, to $600,000 a year. In addition to hiring a House protocol officer, Gingrich hired John Garbett, a Hollywood executive who formerly worked with Steven Spielberg, to coordinate media coverage for the House. His hire as House historian was “unfairly” criticized by the media for being pro-Nazi (a truly “bizarre” misunderstanding). He retained the $25,000 Speaker’s slush fund that he had previously criticized and hired the coauthor of the miserable novel
1945,
Albert Hanser, as a $60,000-a-year consultant performing ineffable services (or at least unidentifiable duties) for mankind.

In theory, Gingrich believes in devolution and the decentralization of power. In fact, the organizational changes he made in the House gave him an unprecedented degree of power: He has systematically broken down old independent centers of power, including the seniority system. Given that he’s been in Congress for eighteen years, his reluctance to push for realistic term limits, the Contract with America notwithstanding, is understandable. On campaign financing, the root of the rot in American politics (“You got to dance with them what brung ya”), Gingrich has not sought reform but has cashed in.

The most striking evidence of Gingrich’s allegiance to the old Washington concerns money. Baskets and buckets and trucks full of money. Majority Whip Tom DeLay, a former bug exterminator from Fort Bend County, Texas, is now Gingrich’s lead moneyman. He’s known as “The Hammer” for his tactics. Of which subtlety is not one. DeLay greets lobbyists with reports that show how much the lobbyists or their PACs have contributed to Democrats in the past. The message is that it’s time to switch sides. One letter DeLay sent to PACs on behalf of a winning Republican candidate’s postelection fund-raiser said, “You now have the opportunity to work toward a positive future relationship. Your immediate support is personally important to me and the House Republican leadership team. I hope I can count on you being on the winning team.”

DeLay said: “We’re just following the old adage of punish your enemies and reward your friends. We don’t like to deal with people who are trying to kill the revolution. We know who they are. The word is out.”

No one ever claimed the Democrats were simon-pure when in power, but veteran Washington observers agree they have never seen anything like the gold rush now taking place. The gusher of gelt now flowing to the Republicans comes from those who want to cut timber in protected forests, to drill for oil in environmentally sensitive areas, to get breaks on leasing or buying government land, to avoid taxes, and to avoid regulations for health and safety. Subsidies and tax loopholes for corporations, called corporate welfare, remain sacred while AFDC may be chopped into pieces. This is the old Washington with a vengeance.

Gingrich is not presiding over these festivities without some signs of stress. He has gained what appears to be in the neighborhood of thirty pounds since he became Speaker, and his political touch is occasionally wildly faulty. The most notable lapse was his juvenile snit about how “bizarre” it was that he had to exit by the back door of Air Force One after Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral. Nor did shutting down the government prove to be a political plus for the Republicans.

In a now-famous speech given to college Republicans in 1978, Gingrich observed, “One of the great problems in the Republican Party is that we don’t encourage you to be nasty.” Or maybe not. The current nastiness of American politics has many fathers—political consultants and negative campaign ads among them. But Newt Gingrich is a leading force in the nastification of politics. More and more studies show that the upshot of the polarization and meanness of contemporary politics is that fewer and fewer people are willing to participate. And that is the death of democracy.

May 1996

The Impasse

W
HEE
! SPIN CITY.
Who’s responsible for shutting down the federal government and quite possibly sending the financial markets into a hopeless tizz?

“You hit me first.”

“Did not.”

“Did too.”

“Did not.”

“Did so.”

We live in a great nation. Amen.

Actually, taking the popular, fail-safe, appearin’-as-wise-as-a-treeful-of-owls, plague-on-both-their-houses position here is as gutless as it is easy.

The who-to-blame conundrum is just not that tough a nut to crack, although it appears to have sent the Washington press corps back into the most timid form of objectivity: “We only report what other people say; we do not find the facts.” For example, here’s a dandy story from the Associated Press, reporting on how we got into this pickle: “Clinton said Gingrich promised in the spring to force a budget crisis, if necessary, to impose the GOP will.” Now, how much effort does it take to determine that House Speaker Newt Gingrich said exactly that, at several times in several places? He did, he did, as we Texans say.

Don’t know if you were privileged to hear Gingrich on Saturday blaming the entire impasse on President Clinton, but it was a bravura performance. He sounded exactly like Oliver Hardy saying to Stan Laurel, “Here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.” Unable to restrain himself, Gingrich also took several cheap shots at Clinton for having gone off to play golf after announcing that he wouldn’t sign a continuing budget resolution draped with extraneous matter, including a Medicare premium increase. The idea of Clinton golfing (!) at such a time almost rendered the speaker apoplectic; the implication was that this president (a word that Gingrich manages to invest with contempt) is a lazy do-nothing.

Now, there are many things for which Clinton can be criticized, but not working hard enough is not one of them. His famous fifteen-hour days are a matter of both record and legend. As a matter of negotiating technique, when you have to resolve a critical issue with an unfriendly adversary, it is not wise to start out blaming everything on your opposite number and then to take cheap shots at same. This is ill-advised. Unproductive.