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And now the voters seem to agree. In the past 12 months, his unfavorable rating has shot up from 29% to 56%. Now that they've gotten to know him better, they can see why he was called in the Washington Post "the most disliked member of Congress." They've learned how far he is willing to go to achieve his larger goals: shut the government down to make a point with the President; invite lobbyists not just to lobby, but to draft the laws themselves; and give a huge tax break to his party's allies at the expense of services for the poor, with the explanation that this is what it takes to keep his Republican coalition together.
If Gingrich and his closest disciples feel one great disappointment about the year, it's that the whole messy, historic budget fight has consumed so much of the energy he had hoped to spend renewing American civilization. The merry cybernaut wants a new moral order, not just a new political one, in which the poor will find their salvation on the Internet and private charities will succeed where government bureaucracies have failed. However great Newt's achievement in political terms, it was not enough for people who talked in terms of rearranging the moon and planets, and saw in Newt the chance for galactic change.
GINGRICH HAS SPENT HIS LIFE--not just his adult life, but his entire life since grade school--believing that destiny had saved a seat for him. To explain why an unlikable man could carry out such an unlikely ambition, it helps to understand some skills and obsessions that were planted very early. They had a long time to ripen.
According to his mother, his first taste of politics came when his father, Newt McPherson, made a deal: if he didn't have to pay child support anymore, he would waive his parental rights and let young Newt's stepfather Bob Gingrich adopt the boy. Newt's own legal parentage was thus the product of a budget deal. The adults around him were never very respectful of authority or convention. He shared a room until he was nine with a free-spirited grandmother, who had a romance late in life with a mysterious government agent and taught Newt to read and write before he even started school. With an IQ of 124 by third grade, he did well only in the subjects that interested him.
His father was a combat-hardened Army lieutenant colonel whose soldiers called him "Stoneface," who spoke three languages and served as an intelligence officer, but was passed over for full colonel twice because he didn't hide his contempt for incompetent superiors. His mother was the gentle buddy who sometimes let her kids stay home from school just to be with mom, but would hide them in the closet at lunchtime when Bob came home so he wouldn't get angry. Newt never openly challenged his father's strict rules. He just ignored them.