People forget how it was in 1979 and 1980 when Reagan was seeking the nomination for president in a crowded field of Republicans. It was the wisdom of most of the other contenders and of most Republican Party leaders, too, not to mention of practically everyone in Democratic politics, that Reagan was: too old, too extreme, too marginal and not nearly smart enough to win the nomination. The Democrats, in fact, when they weren’t chortling about him, were fervently hoping he would be the nominee. When he carried the convention in Detroit, people I knew in the Carter White House were ecstatic. They also campaigned against him as a mad, mean, snarling bomber, a figure that bore no resemblance to the affable, confident, there-you-go-again Reagan voters saw on TV. I found myself thinking, somewhere along in the Reagan cycle, that if this guy was so dumb how come he kept beating all of his awfully smart GOP competitors? And if his thoughts were so far outside the mainstream, how come he did so well at the polls? Neither the Republican candidates nor the Democrats he routed were actually running against him. They were running against a fabricated Reagan, and the other Reagan just kept beating them.
Even before his Nov. 8 ascension to presumptive Speaker and Dominator-in-Chief of the news, Gingrich had been defying the wishes of his party establishment, confounding the contempt of liberal opponents who considered him an overtalkative, reactionary fool, and repeatedly beating the odds as he rose to be elected to the No. 2 Republican office in the House, that of party whip. At first his candidacy for this job had been viewed as a long shot, an outrage and a bad joke by people who could neither court votes nor count them as well as he apparently could. He had also been opposed for whip by the No. 1 House Republican, Minority Leader Bob Michel, who quietly let it be known that he felt very strongly on the subject and really didn’t want Gingrich at all. But he got him – and got him as his successor as well. Interestingly, in the few weeks before this fall’s elections, I was told by two big-shot Republican conservatives that – off the record, of course, my dear – they thought Gingrich’s drawing up and publicizing of the Contract With America was a monumentally stupid political error; it shouldn’t have been done at all, etc. Now, I presume that, like everyone else in their party, they are going around saying how clever it was.
Over the years, Gingrich had made much of his progress against comparable currents of opposition. From the day he got to Washington he began to earn a mixed reputation and was always a very partisan, voluble, aggressive member of the House. My purpose is not to say all or even any of this was wonderful, only that it was different from the portrait his opponents have always painted. Gingrich is quick-bright; he is a strategist, and he is tireless – the one who is still standing there fighting and/or nagging and/or driving everyone crazy after all the others have had enough and want to call it a day. He escapes the pigeonholes people are forever trying to put him in, because his positions on issues, while overall very conservative, are in some respects radical and unexpected and politically shrewd. He has been playing the discon-tents of the voters with Democratic government and the discontents of Republican members of Congress with their lot almost flawlessly. The best thing his opponents have going for them is his habitual tendency to get carried away, to overreach, to take whatever he is talking about or doing to some outrageous or offensive place and thereby lose what he had just gained or was about to. Lyndon Johnson would have waited him out, watched for what he would have considered the inevitable, predictable, big footslip and then moved to take him down.
What will the 1994 and 1995 resistance do? What is the battle plan of those Republicans who are uncomfortable with the ascendant Newt and the Democrats who are repelled and enraged by him? There has been some pursuit of dreadful stories about Gingrich’s behavior toward his ex-wife, but I don’t think the good-husband issue is one his current opponents should exactly want to stir up; attempts at personally discrediting an opponent are always dangerous and may end up doing more harm to the one who rolled the grenade than to its intended victim. And there has been lots of gasping and sighing and denunciation and painting of him in dimensions of villainy that, for whatever wrongheaded or infuriating things he may have said or done, just do not fit with or represent the reality of Gingrich. Voters will be aware of this and lose interest in the invective.
Gingrich needs to be argued with, not shrieked about or smeared. He needs to be taken seriously and, importantly, taken on. The good Lord knows he has provided a veritable cornucopia of programs and positions that require intelligent, principled inspection. Some deserve to go to the junkyard, some don’t. There is plenty that doesn’t add up at all, either arithmetically in budget terms or as wise or even minimally humane policy. That part of the Gingrich agenda will only be stopped by people who are willing to address it and fight it, know what it says and know what is wrong with it. Those who would oppose him will also have to stick with the effort, rather as Gingrich stuck with his during his long march to the speaker’s chair. If, on the contrary, they just holler and mock and talk about Hitler and relevant things like that, Gingrich wins. He always has.
