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At first the system he installed worked wondrously. To much ridicule and skepticism, Gingrich had promised to bring to a vote the 10 items in the Contract during the first 100 days. By that deadline he had actually rammed through everything, with the single exception of term limits. On the few occasions when the freshmen rebelled--as when they pressed for campaign-finance reform--he shut them down with a promise to do it next year. Likewise they had vowed not to rest until they had killed at least three Cabinet agencies, but they are going home for Christmas without even the easiest mark, the Commerce Department, as a trophy. Those will come next year too.
The same tactics worked on allies outside the House, particularly the lobbyists who had bankrolled the revolution and expected to be rewarded for it. The National Rifle Association, for instance, contributed $1,442,519 to Republicans in the last election cycle. But when they pushed last spring for an early repeal of the assault-weapons ban, Gingrich put them off, explaining that he needed to build more momentum to create the impression of power.
By carefully choosing his fields of battle, Gingrich gained enormous leverage over the Senate and the White House. And when necessary, he could still use the freshmen in a good cop--bad cop routine. Early this fall, when Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich were haggling about the budget over the phone, the President told one of his aides that the Speaker wasn't the problem in reaching a deal. "It's not Newt," the President said. "It's all those freshmen he's got to worry about."
LESSONS IN LEADERSHIP
ALONG THE WAY, GINGRICH was learning some handy lessons. One was the value of setting the bar high, in the belief that it's sometimes easier to do the impossible than the merely improbable. This was especially true about his insistence on balancing the budget in seven years, when conventional wisdom held that no politician had the stomach to balance it at all.
The idea was born last winter, when most of his troops were still digging in for the first 100 days. Gingrich was already worrying about maintaining momentum. So he invited small groups of CEOS--including Jack Welch of General Electric, Jack Smith from General Motors and the Business Roundtable chairman John Snow of CSX--to dinner in a first-floor dining room in the Capitol. The executives had all presided over major downsizing in their companies, and all drew the same lesson when the bloodbath was over: they wished they had done more.
At the time, House leaders were talking vaguely about a "glide path" toward a balanced budget in seven years. To Budget chairman John Kasich, that meant passing the normal five-year budget in a form that would simply make credible the idea of wiping out the deficit two years later. When Gingrich suddenly announced in late January that the Republicans would offer a seven-year plan to bring the deficit down to zero, Kasich was stunned. He was, after all, the guy who had to make the numbers add up.