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Power without corresponding influence is by no means a problem that only Presidents run up against. In an age of pollsters and focus groups, when public opinion leads leadership, it is the occupational disease of modern politics. This is why almost none of the leading names in government make the cut as influentials. Something about the pursuit of power these days seems to discourage elected officials from putting forward the kind of well-defined character that wins disciples and imitators. Yet in casting off the title of Senate majority leader, one of the golden prizes of American political life, even Bob Dole, a longtime master of the power game, has in effect admitted that power is a prize of uncertain value. By itself, it doesn't provide a vision or a following. It is possible that a presidential candidate can succeed without the first. Without the second, he has a problem.
Newt Gingrich has been learning that bitter lesson this year. The Republican House majority he led into Washington two years ago was the most impressive phalanx to enter the capital since the British came to burn it in 1814. As spearhead of the revolution his party was supposed to effect, Gingrich equipped himself heavily, putting aside the seniority rules to install committee chairmen loyal to him and denying his assistance as a fund raiser to House members who broke discipline on important votes. No journalist's story about him was complete until it described him as the most powerful Speaker since Joe Cannon of Illinois in the early years of this century.
But as a onetime history professor, Gingrich wanted influence as much as he wanted power. His recommended reading lists, the way he urges on listeners his favorite futurists and management gurus, are the hallmarks of a man for whom it isn't enough to get people to do things his way. He needs them to see things his way too. But while Gingrich gained a following within a segment of the Republican Party, his message stalled with the larger electorate. Lately he's a one-man version of the helpless superpower. The Contract with America is a suspended agreement, and Gingrich has the kind of approval ratings only Timothy McVeigh can envy. It can't give Gingrich much comfort to recall that Joe Cannon ended badly, getting kicked off the House Rules Committee in 1910.
The bad news that status is perishable is the eternal lesson of Washington, where handling the big levers of power is no guarantee you won't slip through the trapdoor that opens anytime enough people pull those little levers in the voting booth. (Ask Tom Foley about that.) This is why so many people in that city prefer to seek influence, whether by virtue of the strength of their ideas or their access. The powerful are apt to look a bit careworn, while the winners of the influence game tend to be less accountable in public and for the most part more durable. Together they make up the permanent government of lobbyists, advisers, think tanks and legislative aides.