In 1994, Newt Gingrich became that rarest of creatures: a successful revolutionary. That's when his decades-long emasculation of the Democratic majority finally broke them -- as he always knew it would – and the Republicans, with Gingrich at their helm, retook the House for the first time in 40 years. Then, in 1998, he entered the next, and usually final, stage in the revolutionary's lifecycle: the humiliating fall from grace. His brand of unalloyed conservatism and partisan overreaching repulsed the country, and voters responded with the worst electoral drubbing any opposition party had received since Johnson walloped Goldwater in 1964. Gingrich resigned a few days later. And that, we thought, was the end of his story -- just another political tragicomedy.
But the silver-haired revolutionary from Georgia has never been genteel enough to follow convention. So now, nearly four election cycles later, he's angling for an incarnation rarely attained among his species: the triumphant comeback. And, thanks to the Republican Party's drift into crony capitalism, big spending, and general incoherence, he just might get it.
It has become de rigeur for presidential hopefuls to write a book. And so the first clue of Newt's angling for the top job can be found at bookstores everywhere. Winning the Future is classic Gingrich, a mix of radicalism, opportunism, and boyish futurism distilled into bullet points. In it, Newt calls for a recognition of God's centrality in American life, the privatization of most everything the government provides, and a reworking of our schools into something called “Patriotic Education,” a name Mussolini would just love.
Gingrich isn't one to underestimate the written word -- the whole mythology of his 1994 revolution is centered around a policy pamphlet he wrote and used to nationalize the congressional elections, the Contract With America. It should be no surprise, then, that his new manifesto is subtitled A 21st Century Contract with America. This is Gingrich, Part 2: Newt wants his revolution back.
Considering Republicans control the House, the Senate, the White House, and the Supreme Court, this might not seem the most appropriate moment for a conservative insurgency. However, a funny thing happened on the Republicans' way to power – they betrayed themselves, and, moreover, they betrayed Newt. The government is bigger than it has ever been, while the deficit threatens to swallow the budget whole. Entitlements aren't shrinking, they're growing, and the Republican majority's addiction to pork is making Rush Limbaugh's appetite for Oxycontin seem restrained.
Ten years ago, when Newt and his coterie of red-faced radicals returned Republicans to power, they branded themselves deficit hawks, sworn foes of entitlement programs, devotees of limited government. They wanted to abolish the Department of Education, cut Medicare spending, and pass a constitutional amendment ensuring an eternity of balanced budgets. That the restored Republican majority instead fired Newt, elected Bush, passed a massive expansion of the Department of Education, added a new entitlement onto Medicare, and turned a large budget surplus into a gaping deficit is a fairly cruel irony, a political joke matched only by their brazen rejection of the ethics standards they rode in on.
In addition to being a small government manifesto, the Contract With America was a broadside against Congress's culture of corruption. Before running down its 10 promised policies, it offered a list of eight reforms that Republicans promised would clean up Congress: independent auditors; term limits; less powerful committee chairs; anything that'd make the Democratic majority look like they'd been running a bureaucratized Enron. That fit; Newt's strategy against the Democrats had long been two-pronged: nail them as socialists, jail them as criminals. To that end, Gingrich and his deputies tagged a host of prominent congressional Democrats on ethics breaches both large and small, a campaign that culminated with the removal and prosecution of Dan Rostenowski. The rule of law had returned to Capitol Hill, and it was a band of pudgy, aging, wonky wordslingers who'd brought it back.
Yet contemporary Republicans have tossed out that bit of the Contract as surely as they've double-crossed its ideology. Tom DeLay sinks ever deeper into investigation and scandal. His longtime ties to corrupt lobbyists have left the Democratic Party gleefully picking Republicans at random for games of six-degrees-to-Jack-Abramoff. Scooter Libby's been indicted, and Ohio, home of the Republican Party's most crucial electoral votes, is embroiled in “Coingate,” a bizarre fundraising scandal that hinges around rare coin investments and reaches most every Republican official in the state. The Republican caucus has become a prison just waiting for bars.
That, as it happens, is exactly what its former leader's been saying. Since publishing his book, Gingrich has been barnstorming the country, particularly the early primary states, warning of worrying portents for a misguided Republican Party. “Tom DeLay's problem isn't with the Democrats,” he growled, “it's with the country.” When The New York Times asked him about Bush's fiscal policy and the growth of government, he bluntly replied that “Republicans have lost their way.” He's swinging to Bush's right on immigration, God, and education, all the topics that excite the conservative base. He's running, basically, as a radical conservative, just as he did in 1994. Meanwhile, conservatism has become weak, soft, blurry, and undefined. Bush has ignored its principles, DeLay has betrayed its ethics, and the Republican Party has confined itself to radicalism abroad, letting the domestic front drift towards ever-larger government and more expansive entitlements. The moment is ripe for, well, a revolutionary.
The media, meanwhile, would love to televise the revolution. Quick with a sound bite and ever-eager for a photo-op, Gingrich is the sort of enlivening campaign character political journalists can scarcely live without. That's why political journalist Howard Fineman, on the March 12 edition of Chris Matthews's show, spent his final comment predicting that we're going to be hearing a whole lot more about Newt in the coming months. If that's not a self-fulfilling prophecy...
But Gingrich's run stands on a stronger foundation than his ambition and the media's boredom. What makes his candidacy so plausible is that conservative activists, for all their party's power, feel just as betrayed as he does. The religious right hasn't gotten the legislative action it wants, what with gays running free and fetuses yet to save. Nor have the law-and-order conservatives found their soulmate in Bush, whose immigration plan would, to them, legitimize illegal aliens who deserve deportation, not citizenship. Add to that the Party's disenchanted libertarian wing and, particularly in live-free-or-die New Hampshire, Newt's got himself a coalition. It's a coalition that, even now, is placing him in third place in the early polls, behind only John McCain and Rudy Giuliani -- two betes noire for the conservative base.
Gingrich knows all that. That's why his new book is as much James Dobson as Ronald Reagan, as much Bob Dornan as Barry Goldwater. It's classic divide-and-conquer. Grab the disenchanted, dissatisfied portions of the conservative movement, promise them the revolution that they've always wanted, and then swarm the primaries. And nobody in modern politics can promise a revolution like Newt Gingrich, the only contemporary political figure to have led a successful one. The question is, can he pull off a second?
Ezra Klein is a Prospect writing fellow.
