The crowd in the Hilton ballroom couldn't have been more excited if Elvis had turned up. Instead, this being Washington, the star was a fiftysomething politician, and as soon as his trademark helmet of white hair breezed through the door at stage right, 400 freshly elected conservative state legislators leaped to their feet and chanted, "Newt! Newt! Newt!" By the time Newt Gingrich had concluded his now familiar excoriation of the liberal welfare state, he had the faithful rushing the dais as if they were at a rock concert, shouldering each other aside just to be near their hero. An agile woman from Oregon exclaimed to her friends, "I touched him!"
Gingrich, newly anointed Speaker of the House and slayer of the Old Order, was naturally pleased by this adulation, but also somewhat shaken. True, he had presumed to plan months before the Nov. 8 election exactly how he would lead the Republican House that begins its work this week. But he hadn't planned on having strangers paw at his garments, nor on the intense public and press interest in his every casual utterance, nor on the spectacle of the President scrambling to pull himself aboard the Republican tax-cut bandwagon. Gingrich, who classifies most experiences as either neat or weird, pronounced these very weird. Yet he takes his new prominence quite seriously. On the morning after the Hilton speech, a rainy Saturday in mid-December, he met with a dozen of his top advisers and asked them, almost plaintively, "How would you use who I am becoming?"
Right now Americans are divided three ways on Gingrich: they love him, loathe him or can't figure out who he is. But what Gingrich is becoming is this: the pre-eminent political leader in America. As the new Republican * rulers of Congress converge on Washington to begin their reign this week, they will find the Democrats still in shock from their repudiation in the November elections -- and grumbling that they are leaderless to boot. President Clinton, they complain, has yet to frame any coherent strategy for dealing with a Republican-controlled Congress. Said a senior Administration official: "Part of the strategy, to the extent there is a strategy, is to wait and see what Gingrich and company do." The President's pre-Christmas promise of a middle-class tax break and wholesale cuts in Cabinet departments only seemed to ratify the G.O.P. agenda. Senate majority leader Bob Dole, meanwhile, has been distracted by travel and fund raising in pursuit of his presidential ambitions, and is playing the cautious establishmentarian. Into this vacuum Gingrich gladly rushes, seizing the initiative and setting Washington's agenda.
Though he can be meanspirited (suggesting that Democrats are somehow responsible when a woman in South Carolina admits to drowning her two young sons) and just plain goofy (sponsoring a bill to apply U.S. law to space colonies), Gingrich is providing the energy, imagination and confidence that, at least at this pregnant moment, seem lacking among other leaders of both parties. The new Speaker will gavel the House down to real work three weeks earlier than usual. He will move immediately to slash congressional staff and change the way it operates. He will seek speedy passage of a balanced-budget amendment, tax breaks, spending cuts and other measures the Republicans promised in their "Contract with America."