LEADERS MAKE THINGS POSSIBLE. EXCEPTIONAL LEADERS make them inevitable. Newt Gingrich belongs in the category of the exceptional. All year--ruthlessly, brilliantly, obnoxiously--he worked at hammering together inevitabilities: a balanced federal budget, for one. Not so long ago, the idea of a balanced budget was a marginal, we'll-get-to-it-someday priority. Other urgent work needed doing: the Clintons' health-care program, for example, which would have installed elaborate new bureaucratic machinery. Today, because of Newt Gingrich, the question is not whether a balanced-budget plan will come to pass but when.
Gingrich has changed the center of gravity. From Franklin Roosevelt onward, Americans came to accept the Federal Government as the solution to problems, a vast parental presence. Ronald Reagan preached that government was the problem, but his Administration focused mostly on the Evil Empire; it did not overturn the grand centralizing legacy of New Deal and Great Society. Newt Gingrich wants to reverse the physics, make American government truly centrifugal, with power flowing out of Washington, devolving to the states.
A sometimes unlovely blur of headlong energy and pinwheeling, roughhouse creativity, the Speaker has transformed both the House of Representatives and the Speakership into unprecedented instruments of personal and political power. It has been an amazing performance and, for all its scattershot quality, a display of discipline that is either impressive or scary, depending on one's sympathies.
Having organized an insurrectionist crew in the House, Gingrich seized the initiative from a temporarily passive President and steered the country onto a heading that the Speaker accurately proclaimed to be revolutionary. His venture is in a stormy mid-passage now. It may ultimately be forced back, or even sunk. Yet Gingrich did the work--crude, forceful, effective--that compelled the voyage in the first place. It is for that reason he is Time's Man of the Year.
Gingrich envisions a promised land--an America that may lie just over the horizon, in his cherished Third Wave Information Age, where traditional values connect to the future. He hopes to get to a place beyond poverty and violence and moral decay by leaving behind the welfare state and the deadening, blockheaded bureaucratic mind of Washington: a renewed civilization, says Newt--Norman Rockwell in the 21st century, a wholesome Utopia. Newt's destination has the refulgence of a never-never land--that is, an ideal. But in America, ideals have always been a necessary and efficient form of national energy. Which came first--Newt's vision of the future? Or his fierce personal ambition? Which one drives the other? The nearest answer may be found in W.B. Yeats' line (in language prettier than Gingrich might use): "How can we know the dancer from the dance?" Gingrich decided not to run for President in 1996. That may be just as well. The polls say more than half the American people disapprove of him. His negatives reached critical mass just before Christmas. Whereupon Democrats began to rouse themselves amid the wreckage leftfrom '94 and to tend small campfires of hope again.