Yeah, yeah. I know. Newt Gingrich had a lousy week and will probably lose the Florida primary on Tuesday. But for those tempted to once again predict the speedy collapse of his campaign, consider yourselves forewarned. I?ve known this guy long enough to realize that the only three species destined to survive a nuclear holocaust will be cockroaches, Cher and Newton Leroy Gingrich.
I first met Gingrich 17 years ago at a Destin, Fla., fundraiser held in my honor a few weeks after Newt declared that I was too conservative to win the general election. But after I won the primary against the moderate woman he anointed, there he was in Florida looking supremely bored and a little put out that he was having to sit through another politician?s speech.
Continue ReadingIn the ensuing years, I found the mercurial maverick to be inspiring and maddening, disciplined and self-indulgent, forward thinking and short-sighted, gifted and dumb ? sometimes all within the same hour.
If, as Shakespeare wrote, what?s past is prologue ? and it often is ? then Gingrich?s political history is particularly relevant now. It?s a history I know well because I was there. And what I saw at the revolution has concerned me since I left Washington.
Many who have heard my harsh assessments of Gingrich over the past year have assumed that I feel a personal animus toward my former colleague. That?s just not true. That fact is that I remain awestruck that Newt envisioned a Republican majority when his closest allies thought he was crazy. Even an eternal optimist like me laughed at the ?Think Majority? sign hanging over the NRCC reception area in early 1994.
But Newt was right and we were wrong. The Gingrich Revolution overtook Washington (with a huge assist from Bill Clinton?s overreaching agenda) and good things followed. Within a few years, Congress passed the first balanced budget in a generation, welfare reform, tax cuts and meaningful congressional changes.
If Newt?s story ended there, I might have a Gingrich 2012 sign in my front yard. But unfortunately, it does not.
Three years into his speakership, the man who helped draft the Contract With America began trying to undo some of that document?s key provisions. The government shutdown had badly damaged the speaker?s brand and he went to work trying to raise his 27 percent approval rating.
In April 1997, Gingrich told The New York Times he was ready to be a kinder and gentler Republican by negotiating away the very tax cuts that he had once called ?the crown jewels of the contract.? Soon, conservatives were being pressured to vote for big spending appropriations bills. In his final speech from the floor of Congress, Newt Gingrich lashed out wildly at the same freshmen who had made him speaker ? mocking us as cannibals who made up ?the perfectionist caucus.?
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