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I wish Gingrich spoke a little less off the cuff; he gets himself into trouble. But he is an extraordinarily intelligent man and always worth listening to. He obviously would like to follow in the footsteps of Franklin D. Roosevelt, except that it's one thing to be President and another thing to be Speaker of the House. Sometimes these two roles get confused, perhaps less in his mind than in the mind of a lot of the Republicans in the House who forgot that the President is a very important and powerful person. They thought they could write the agenda to suit themselves.
Obviously much depends on the '96 election. If we have a Republican President, [Gingrich] obviously will be very, very influential. And if we have a Republican Congress, he will remain influential. But with time, that influence may erode if we don't have a Republican President.
ALAN BRINKLEY
Author of The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War
IN MANY WAYS GINGRICH IS AN OLD-fashioned political boss within Congress. He has a control over members of his own party that we haven't seen in decades. Lyndon Johnson played a little bit of this role when he was a majority leader in the Senate, but not nearly as successfully as Gingrich.
If there are lessons that Gingrich can draw from the lives of other American leaders, it is that highly ideological politics in the long run are less successful than more pragmatic ones. If you look at the successful political leaders of this century, Presidents in particular, they have almost without exception been people to whom ideology was secondary to a pragmatic response to immediate problems. Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, they weren't all successful Presidents, but they all had successes. They are people whom we think of as having had greater stature and impact than people who have come after them.
I don't think what Gingrich is talking about is a revolution. I don't think he has any vision of overturning the fundamental institutions of our society. I do think that the danger that Gingrich and the Republicans are flirting with is overinterpreting their mandate and assuming that public opinion is going to follow them simply because the results, as the G.O.P. sees them, will be so healthy and welcome. The history of public policy suggests that the results of policy are almost never those that the people who frame them foresee.
It's dangerous to assume that once you implement a policy people will support it because of its results. You can't know what the results are going to be. So you need the support up front, so people feel they have been a part of the policy change, rather than something that's been imposed upon them. That's something the Republicans have been unwilling to do. They've been quite convinced, because of ideological preconceptions, that market-based solutions to most social problems will make the world better. They haven't paid very close attention to how fully the public is convinced about the same thing. I don't think the public is yet convinced.
--Compiled by Ratu Kamlani/New York