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He confronted the Speaker at a meeting of the high command: "Where is it in stone that we have to balance the budget in seven years?" The Speaker replied, "Let's put it to a vote. Who wants to put it in stone?" Everyone in the room raised his hand--except Kasich. Senate Republicans, though queasy at the idea, eventually accepted the goal as well, and the script for the rest of 1995 was written.
Gingrich also learned the value of sleeping with the enemy. The strategy worked best on what would prove to be the riskiest undertaking of all, the Republican plan to restrain the growth of Medicare. Gingrich had watched as Hillary Rodham Clinton's health-care plan died its miserable death. His own proposal, which depends on shifting millions of seniors into managed-care programs, bears enough resemblance to Clinton's that he knew he had to be very careful. And, indeed, even as the Republicans were working on their plan, the lobby working on behalf of for-profit hospitals was preparing to spend millions on attack ads. They built the poster boards and met with the ad agencies. "We probably could have put ads out in a week," says hospital lobbyist Tom Scully. But they never went on the air, despite the fact that hospitals would take one of the largest hits--roughly $100 billion out of the $270 billion savings. Other health groups held their fire as well.
That's because in endless meetings, Gingrich graciously solicited their ideas, and even accepted some of them. But he also made clear that a bill was inevitable, that the numbers would be huge, and that they stood to suffer far more by opposing it and being frozen out than by playing along. The hospital executives were amazed by Gingrich's mastery of numbing issues like reimbursement formulas. And they were delighted by his willingness to buy them off. He protected doctors' fees and won the endorsement of the American Medical Association. He satisfied the American Association of Retired Persons by staving off a proposal to raise co-payments and deductibles for people who stayed in the traditional fee-for-service plan. When White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta finally convened a meeting of health lobbyists at the White House to beg them to mount a late offensive, one bluntly told him that his opportunity had passed: "We've been meeting with Gingrich every two days. They were the only game in town."
The Democrats are no slouches when it comes to keeping lobbyists happy, but in Gingrich's Congress the most powerful interests are acting as honorary members. As the head of GOPAC, the Republican political action committee he led from 1986 until last May, he studied the ways and means of campaign cash flow as assiduously as he plotted the G.O.P. victory in Congress. With his party now in power, Gingrich's new goal was to give his permanent revolution a permanent fund-raising machine, each part of which would be overseen by a lieutenant.