Who knows more about accepting failure than Gingrich? Since resigning as House speaker in January 1999 and enduring a headline-making divorce, the former field marshal of the Republican revolution has been quietly reinventing himself as an Internet brand name. He still preaches his “Contract With America” gospel of limited, decentralized government, but his pulpit these days is a Web site. At Newt.org, Gingrich promotes his ideas for privatizing Social Security and touts his insights into the Internet’s influence on society. As a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, Gingrich makes regular pilgrimages to the Valley to quiz scientists, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists about the hottest new technologies.
His latest passion is online health care. Gingrich wants every American to have a digital health-care record and for doctors to issue electronic prescriptions, a move he says will improve the quality of care and dramatically reduce costs. He agrees with privacy advocates that new laws will be needed to protect electronic records from misuse, but predicts that the public will someday become as comfortable with online medicine as they are “using an ATM.”
Later this year, Gingrich will travel around the country with Ira Magaziner, the onetime architect of the failed Clinton health-care plan. During the GOP revolution, the plan served as exhibit A in Gingrich’s crusade against the bloated welfare state. Now the two have been recruited by the Internet Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, to come up with the best Internet advice for the next president. Magaziner, now a business consultant in Rhode Island, admits his friends “did a double take” when they heard he had partnered with the Clintons’ onetime nemesis. “But,” says Magaziner, “the Internet really breaks down a lot of old ideologies.”
Going online also is not a bad way to capture hearts, minds and eyeballs, especially if your own party–not to mention the Old Media–seems to have deliberately forgotten your name. When veterans of the GOP revolution gathered recently to commemorate the “Contract With America,” Gingrich wasn’t even invited. And GOP presidential nominee George W. Bush is keeping his distance too.
Gingrich’s agile use of the Internet–he and Al Gore were both early supporters in Congress–is eerily reminiscent of his rise to congressional power in the early 1980s. Then, too, Gingrich used the new media of his day, videotapes and cable television, to create a political power base for the 1994 Republican revolution. Sitting poolside in Palo Alto, Gingrich is coy about whether Newt.org is yet another media assault on the old order or whether he is genuinely morphing into a New Economy guru. “A lot happened prior to June 6, 1944,” he says–before D-Day, that is. “We’re in the preparation phase now, but there will be a landing soon.” The medium may have changed, but the messenger is as grandiose as ever.
