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In this unfamiliar role of actually governing, Gingrich will be severely tested. "He's operated at the level of abstraction and generality," says Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank, one of Gingrich's frequent liberal foes. "Now he's got to tell us what his ideas are. He's got to get specific." For the past year Gingrich has deftly exploited the roiling discontent Americans felt toward Washington. But suddenly, amid Clinton's collapse and Dole's near silence, Gingrich is turning into something potentially positive and, to him, much more daunting. He is becoming a chubby repository of the tangled and contradictory hopes held by middle-income Americans, who want their Federal Government to stop meddling in their life and, at the same time, to improve it. Gingrich framed his task this way in an interview with TIME: "I'm for limited government, but a very strong limited government."
In the weeks after the election, Gingrich misstepped by opening up a debate about school prayer that proved divisive among Republicans. It is a mistake he does not intend to repeat, and he has quietly put off emotional debates over such issues until next fall at the earliest. As Pennsylvania's Bob Walker, who is Gingrich's oldest ally and closest friend in the House, put it, "We have to discipline ourselves to stick to the substance."
During the past three weeks, Gingrich granted extraordinary access to a TIME correspondent and photographer, who followed him into private meetings where he formulated strategy for his first months in office. Surprisingly for anyone who has seen him in full truculence on the House floor, Gingrich spends most of his time listening -- a skill, he admits, that he has had to work on in recent years. He also has an almost religious belief in delegation. At one point, the head of his transition team, Representative Jim Nussle of Iowa, suggested that Gingrich interview the leading candidates for top administrative jobs, so they would understand "who the boss is." Gingrich responded with the exasperation of someone who has had to make this point more than once: "I ain't their boss! I don't want to be their boss!" But of course, he is -- more so than anyone else who has had his job in recent history.