Newt Gingrich had a favorite game when he was growing up in Hummelstown, Pennsylvania. His pal Dennis Yantz would pretend to beat him up and leave him crumpled on the curb. "When a car would pull up to see what was wrong," Yantz recalls, "Newt would jump up and scream 'SURPRISE!' We would do this over and over again." For some reason, Yantz says, Newt always wanted to be the one who played dead.
The Speaker of the House finds himself in deep trouble this Christmas, which is no surprise for one whose whole career has been a series of near-death experiences. Between ethics charges and budget tantrums, he has become the greatest liability to the revolution he launched. More than half of all Americans disapprove of him, not least for actually doing what he said he would do if given the chance. Gingrich is suffering not only for what he has done, but also for how he did it. Without so much as a decent burial, he has killed the old order of American politics. No U.S. President, Democrat or Republican, is likely to propose spending more than the government earns, or expanding what it tries to do, for at least a generation.
That is why so many Democrats are retiring or defecting to the other side. It's not just that government isn't fun or noble anymore. It's that their brand of politics is defeated, and won't be revived in their lifetime. President Clinton has accepted terms that would have seemed like political suicide even a year ago: a balanced budget in seven years and a brake on entitlement spending. All that's left are the ugly details.
The qualities that brought Gingrich this far are also the ones that are bringing him down: militance, arrogance and a lot of nerve. The year has shown him at his very best and his very worst. His discipline in pursuing his grand design revealed a level of political talent that few people outside his inner circle ever imagined he had. To wield that kind of power from the House required that he transform a weak, discredited institution into a humming legislative engine that could tow the Senate and White House behind it. He did it with such focus and shrewdness that even his opponents were perversely grateful. The House had been broken, and someone finally fixed it.
But sometimes he forgot who he had become. Under pressure he reverted to the pompous thug of late-night cable, the backbencher lobbing grenades on C-SPAN about sick Democrats who were enemies of normal Americans. He was new on the job. And the job, as he reshaped it, was new too. He didn't realize his every remark would now be measured for maturity, not ferocity. He didn't realize that once a battle is won, it's time to move graciously to the peace table. "I keep forgetting that all the ground rules have changed,'' he told Time last week. "I have consistently, all year, said things that made no sense for the Speaker of the House."