Unfortunately, no one at the town meeting asked that question. Or very many others: the audience was mostly into ranting. They formed long lines behind microphones and made short, furious speeches. It was odd, impersonal-primal therapy. They seemed too angry to be very curious about why the speaker had decided to get neck-deep in Washington, or what he was proposing to do there. And he chose not to proselytize them. He just listened, patiently, and took notes – an impressive act of discipline for a politician much given to bluster and confrontation.
So what is going on here? Something far more complicated than politics as usual. Gingrich has a romantic, at times messianic, sense of his own destiny-and he has always equated the moral seriousness of his anti-bureaucratic crusade with the righteousness of the civil-rights movement. He will blow hard and cheap on a great many issues, but never on race. He refused to criticize Ball Clinton on affirmative action, even though he disagreed with the president’s position. Instead, he said he wanted to develop a “positive” alternative, a set of policies that addressed the race issue at its real crisis point: in the cities. To that end, he has started gathering experts and colleagues into task forces–and set his sights on a mission improbable: salvaging the nation’s capital, whose budget the Congress helps feed.
This has not drawn rave reviews from the party faithful. Gingrich has, in fact, been set upon by columnist and human chain saw Robert Novak, who discerns some uneasiness in the ranks–the speaker is said to be “flinching” on affirmative action. What Novak, or the faithful, may not understand is the hard ideological edge to Newt’s urban obsession. He sees himself attacking the liberal establishment on its home turf. “Government is the primary impediment to progress here,” he said as his van headed back to the Capitol after the Washington meeting. “There is a moral responsibility to change that.”
This is vintage Gingrich. He has always been-justifiably–vehement about the collateral damages caused by the bureaucratic welfare state. “He has a point,” says Eleanor Holmes Norton. “We Democrats didn’t pay enough attention when the system got to be middle-aged and needed to be fixed. We should have proposed far more radical reforms.” Gingrich’s problem is what to do now. So far–and this is, quite clearly, a work in progress–his solutions aren’t scintillating. He talks about voluntarism and vouchers and tax breaks and empowerment–refried Jack Kemp. Some of these are OK ideas, and Gingrich may even spend money on a few of them (especially tax relief), but they are not panaceas. Certainly, none addresses the central urban question: public order. You can’t run schools (with or without vouchers) or businesses (with or without tax breaks) in a state of anarchy. The trouble is, it’s hard for a white fella-especially one who now has real responsibility–to get too specific about the culture of poverty at the heart of the social devastation. “The levels of anger and paranoia we’re dealing with are truly terrifying,” says a Gingrich associate. “You can’t imagine how volatile this city is.”
In fact, the speaker’s real breakthrough involves style rather than substance. He has chosen consensus-building over confrontation. He has, in effect, given Eleanor Norton and Marion Barry veto power over his D.C. initiatives. “We had no choice,” says a Gingrich associate. “Barry could have led a populist insurrection against the white Republican interlopers,” Of course, if the speaker were merely a cynical bomb-thrower, he might have welcomed such an assault. But his is the true believer’s ultimate leap of faith: Gingrich is convinced that a steadfast display of good will and moderation now–dropping school vouchers from his education task force’s reform plan last week, for example–will give him the credibility to push for purer schemes later on.
I sense a weirder outcome in the wind: Gingrich and Marion Barry successfully con each other into a giddy synergy. If we’re lucky, the result could be an urban policy of the radical middle-more entrepreneurial, less bureaucratic than the current morass, the sort of thing Bill Clinton talked about before he was endorsed by the public employees unions. But . . . we may not be so lucky. If Gingrich only wins on tax relief and Barry gets to keep his status quo cronies, Washington could become a cross between the Bahamas and Bosnia–a free-fire enterprise zone.
