Swift Rise, Meteoric Crash for Firebrand

WASHINGTON —  Four years ago, House Speaker Newt Gingrich roared into power as the brilliant, hyperactive leader of a conservative insurgency that set out to overturn the old rules of congressional politics--and largely succeeded.

At the peak of his power, when his ideas and his followers seemed to be sweeping all before them, Gingrich declared himself a “conservative revolutionary.”

On Friday, he was devoured by his own oxymoron. The most powerful House speaker in a generation fell even more swiftly than he rose--a victim of the very ideological passion and political polarization he had helped to unleash.

Gingrich led his GOP troops to seize control of the House for the first time since 1952, brandishing a 10-point manifesto--the “contract with America”--that promised to define a new ideological center of gravity for the nation.

But within a single year, 1995, he became the most unpopular major figure in American politics. He won key parts of his program--a balanced budget, tax cuts, welfare reform--but rapidly lost stature in the eyes of his own GOP congressional colleagues, who divided bitterly over their party’s course.

And in the end, after only four years, he was unable to turn ideological zeal into success at the polls. In Tuesday’s congressional election, the Gingrich-led GOP lost five precious House seats to the Democrats--a stinging defeat, for Republicans had expected to gain strength.

“He was a superb political tactician . . . one of the great insurrectionists of American history,” said historian Joel Silbey of Cornell University. “But that may have been his undoing. The Republicans he brought in were insurrectionists too. They didn’t know how to govern. They were more comfortable staying out there in the jungle, shooting at authority figures.”

Indeed, within a day of Tuesday’s electoral reverses, dozens of conservative House members were saying--first privately, then publicly--that it was time for their party to find “a new messenger.”

Now the fractured House Republicans face a daunting problem: With no heir apparent and a slim 11-vote margin, they must find a way to bridge the gap between their insurgent and establishment factions.

In his resignation statement--uncharacteristically terse--Gingrich said he quit for the sake of party unity and urged his colleagues “to pick leaders who can both reconcile and discipline”--two roles he had never fully filled.

In a private conference call with his colleagues, according to one participant, Gingrich said of those vying for his job: “Let them fight it out.”

The speaker’s abrupt exit reflected a larger trend: the acceleration of the rise-and-fall cycles of American politics.

For most of this century since 1932, Democrats held the House, speakers had the job for life and presidents could pretty much count on the support of their party’s members in Congress.

Roller Coaster of National Politics

But beginning in 1989, when Gingrich ousted Democratic Speaker Jim Wright of Texas over ethics charges, national politics became a roller coaster.

In 1992, Republican President Bush lost the White House, in part because he was weakened by challenges from more conservative Republicans. Two years later, in 1994, Gingrich led his Republicans to their stunning victory in the House, and Democratic President Clinton looked finished.

Yet only two years later, the cycle turned again: Clinton won reelection and a handful of seats in the House. One more election, an unexpected Democratic surge, and Gingrich himself was gone.

“This has never happened before, at least not in the modern history of the House,” Silbey said. “There has never been this kind of purge and immolation.

“We seem to destroy everybody in American politics these days,” he added. “Nobody stands for very long.”

Gingrich’s resignation deprives the Republican leadership of its most intriguing, most baffling and--almost indisputably--its most historically significant figure.

“It’s important to recognize this guy’s phenomenal accomplishments. He single-handedly led my party to the majority for first time since the year I was born,” said Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas).

Gingrich “deserves a place in history next to Ronald Reagan,” said House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas).

Like Reagan, Gingrich took a conservative movement that had seemed doomed to minority status and transformed its once-narrow message into an agenda that attracted support from a majority of Americans.

Georgian Mesmerized Nation With Vision

But there were crucial differences. Reagan softened the edges of his rugged conservative creed; Gingrich sharpened his. Perhaps as a result, Reagan’s historical moment lasted well beyond the eight years of his presidency. Gingrich’s began to falter less than halfway through his four years as speaker.

The Georgian mesmerized the nation in 1994 and early 1995 with his eclectic new version of the conservative idea: a balanced budget and lower taxes, an audacious yen to experiment with reforms in welfare and education--and a dizzying dash of high-tech futurism.

In his glory days, Gingrich held forth before adoring audiences in freewheeling lectures that veered from his historical models (Churchill, Napoleon) to his visions for the future (a nation of Internet-wired entrepreneurs).

But his rhetoric was both confusing and polarizing. He once proposed a federal program to give every child on welfare a laptop computer. He said women should not serve in combat because they were prone to infection and because men were better at “hunting giraffes.” He called liberal Democrats “enemies of normal Americans.”

Over time, his idiosyncratic ideology never took hold in his own party, let alone the nation; he retreated to a quieter, more conventional conservatism. But his words and his actions rapidly convinced many independent, moderate voters that he was more dangerous than trustworthy; in one national poll, voters said the word they would use to describe Gingrich was “scary.”

In an epic budget battle with Clinton in 1995, the speaker and his followers shut down the government--and only then discovered that much of the country thought they had overreached. Gingrich compounded the political disaster by explaining that he had held firm against Clinton in part because the president had made him use the rear door on Air Force One.

He was achieving many of his core objectives from the “contract with America.” But in the polls, Gingrich’s “unfavorable” rating soared from 37% when he took power in 1995 to 61% after the government shutdown in 1996. At the 1996 Democratic convention, when a pollster showed a slide of the speaker’s popularity rating, an audience of liberal activists gave the numbers a standing ovation.

Gingrich’s fortunes sank further. In January 1997, the House Ethics Committee reprimanded the speaker for improperly allowing tax-exempt money to be used for political purposes--and for giving investigators false information about the issue.

Plotting a Palace Coup

In July 1997, the conservative insurgents Gingrich had brought to power concluded that the speaker had lost his way and plotted a palace coup. They failed, but their grumbling continued.

Gingrich’s great innovation in 1994 had been to “nationalize” a congressional election around the “contract with America.”

In 1996 and 1998, Democrats borrowed the speaker’s own strategy and sought to “nationalize” the election as a referendum on Gingrich and the House Republican leadership--and largely succeeded.

They derided the GOP as obsessed with an investigation into Clinton’s sexual misconduct--an impression Gingrich managed to confirm by inveighing against Clinton and approving $10 million in television commercials focusing on the scandal.

So when the Democrats won seats this week, it wasn’t merely a defeat for Republican candidates; it was a defeat for Gingrich’s own strategy.

The resulting divisions in the GOP may have made the speakership, not the presidency, the most difficult job in the country.

In his conference call with his colleagues, Gingrich reportedly noted that even some Republicans “hate me.”

“I won’t let them cannibalize the party,” he vowed.

It was an eerie, unintended echo of Speaker Wright, the Democrat he unseated on his way to power. Gingrich, Wright complained in 1989, had swept aside the traditional courtesies of American politics--to indulge in “mindless cannibalism.”

A discussion and informal survey about Rep. Newt Gingrich’s decision to step down as House speaker are on The Times’ Web site. Go to: http://ukobiw.net/gingrich