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Within a year of becoming minority whip, Gingrich was already obsessed with the next job, which became clear when President Bush and congressional leaders met to hash out a deal to reduce the deficit by $500 billion over five years. This was the first time Gingrich was invited to sit with the grownups. If his goal had been to perform as a successful whip who rounds up the troops and keeps them in the party line, he would have used all his energy to support the deal Bush, Dole and minority leader Bob Michel worked out. But Gingrich had a different success in mind; faced with the devil's bargain of raising taxes to reduce the deficit, Gingrich declared war on his own party's President. In a stunning vote, 105 House Republicans sided with Gingrich to defeat the plan; only 71 voted with Bush. "I was astonished that they didn't understand we were the party of no taxes," Gingrich says. "I do think the actual fight was one of the saddest things I've ever been involved in."
The decision was certainly a gamble; he burned the President, the minority leader and many fellow lawmakers who took Gingrich's disloyalty as a sign that he was unfit for leadership. But by refusing to perform his role as whip he laid the foundation for a bigger prize. In one skirmish he had cast himself as a populist, antitax revolutionary and vanquished both the Democrats and the moderate Republicans who stood in his way.
The rebellion very nearly brought him down. In 1990 Gingrich held on to his seat by fewer than 1,000 votes out of 156,000 cast, after his opponent charged that he was more interested in playing God than in seeing to the care and feeding of his constituents. That brush with political death, it turns out, has produced an even more harrowing one. Some of the charges that are now ruining his holiday stem from that tight race. GOPAC was permitted by law to help only candidates for state and local offices, but documents filed by the Federal Election Commission charge that the lobby spent more than $250,000 in "Newt support" to help Gingrich hang onto his seat. Democrats have long claimed that Gingrich used GOPAC as his political piggy bank; the fec charges that GOPAC paid his American Express fees, lent him consultants for his campaign "to help Newt think" and urged its big donors to direct their money to the re-election effort.
Once he became Speaker, his adversaries began holding him to the same ethical standards he so righteously enforced as the House proctor. During his first months in the job, the Democrats hounded him for his lavish $4.5 million book deal with Rupert Murdoch, to the point that he settled for a $1 advance, plus royalties. By last spring there were no fewer than five ethics charges pending against him, and now the ethics committee has recommended bringing in outside counsel.
DREAMS OF GLORY
COMING ON THE HEELS OF GINGRICH'S BUDGET woes, the GOPAC fight has kept him on the defensive, a place he'd rather not linger. The next few weeks of budget summitry will require a tight focus and a strong stomach. The most immediate danger for Gingrich is that this extraordinary year will yield little concrete policy change--an outcome that Dole or Clinton could exploit in their presidential campaigns but one that could consign the Speaker to political limbo.