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It's a wonderful psychology if you're a guilt-ridden rich person, but it's a terrible thing if you're poor. It strips you of the very drive you need to quit being poor.
TIME: You have suggested that your intense focus on the budget this year made it somewhat difficult to touch on these other themes.
Gingrich: The question was, what was our highest priority, and we felt that the broadest majority in America was for balancing the budget, that it forced other changes that were useful for where America had to go to compete in the world market, and that it created the right general debate on terms that were most advantageous for our team.
And I do think, if you look at the 3,000-page Balanced Budget Act, to have written that, conferenced it with the Senate and passed it against a sitting President with no national crisis is a fairly extraordinary achievement.
TIME: In restoring the House's authority, do you think you have truly restructured the institution, or is it more a function of your own personality and of the ability to bring in 73 freshman Congressmen who gave you that power?
Gingrich: I discourage a cult of personality. The most amazing thing about this institution right now is that it's a team.
TIME: Is it a team that can survive without you as the Speaker?
Gingrich: Oh, sure. I mean, it would be different. It would be less flamboyant and probably make less errors. It would probably take fewer risks, but it would survive.
TIME: Given how much you have changed the agenda over the past year, it must be frustrating for you to see how you have fallen in the polls over the past few months. In our poll conducted last week, for example, 49% said they found you a little scary.
Gingrich: If I am the person they see in the media, I would agree with them. I mean, I would have the same attitude toward me they do.
The only part I worry about is the psychological impact in this building, because this is a building that loves polling numbers. And I worry about the degree to which it makes it marginally more difficult to communicate with the American people because of an automatic presumption on the part of the listener that I have got to overcome it.
I have contributed to this problem at times, both because I am too intense and, ironically, I am too unsteady. You know, I take risks, and I say things that probably a more studied, careful, planned approach would avoid.
But I talked with Margaret Thatcher this year, who said basically, ignore [the negative press]. She said, do what is right, and in the long run history catches up with you.
TIME: You have talked about vision leading to strategy to tactics. Some people who follow your career would suggest the opposite was the way you got where you are today. That it began with tactics and strategy, which led to the vision. Could you, looking back, make a judgment yourself as to whether one leads to the other or whether in fact they are not necessarily sequential?