The much-publicized first14-hour-long session of the 104th Congress “was a remarkably controlled event,” Gingrich boasted to Newsweek. “It worked. It worked amazingly.” The central question forthe next 100 days – and possibly years to come – was whether Gingrich can keep control. His first week offered clues as to why the new speaker is at once the Republicans’ great hope and perhaps a liability as well.
Seven hours into Day One, the new speaker of the House slipped off the floor. He marched through a thicket of TV cameras in Statuary Hall and plopped into a chair in an aide’s office. At that moment, chief of staff Daniel P. Meyer was shooting a home video of his new surroundings, trying to make the improbable day seem real. “What about the floor?” said Meyer, putting down the camera when the boss appeared. “I don’t care about the floor,” Gingrich shot back with a dismissive wave of the hand. His lieutenants could take care of the legislative mechanics. Actually, the details of the contract weren’t all that important. What mattered was the message.
Think of the contract as an infomercial, one long political advertisement. Its real purpose isto transform what Republican strategist William Kristol calls “the proto-realignment of 1994” into something grander and more profound: the end of big government, the dismantling of the welfare state. To get to the conservative millennium, Gingrich and Co. must carefully re-educate a jaded electorate and gradually build trust in the Republican Party. The contract is only a symbolic first step. “It was a campaign photo op,” said one GOP strategist, which was engraved after the election into party writ. That is why Gingrich is more concerned about winning votes right now than with the nuances of the legislation.
On the House floor, there was never much doubt about the voting last week. Moving quickly, the House changed its own rules, cutting staff, shrinking committees, applying – for the first time – several federal labor and civil-rights laws to its own members. By a 279-152 count, the members voted to require a three-fifths majority to raise income taxes, possibly flouting the Constitution but sending a signal of relief to tax-weary voters.
A key to controlling your message, Gingrich knows, is constant repetition. His speaking style, a blend of the homey and heroic, is a collection of interchangeable anecdotes and themes. He knows that channel surfers will eventually hear them all. An adviser says, “Gingrich understands the power of repetition better than anyone since Reagan.”
Gingrich’s natural ally and enemy in the battle for control is the mainstream press. Last week Gingrich showed how he could use Big Media’s worst tendencies to his advantage. In an interview on the CBS news magazine “Eye to Eye,” Connie Chung coyly baited Newt’s 68-year-old mother into saying what her son really thought of First Lady Hillary Clinton. “Why don’t you just whisper it to me, just between you and me,” Chung coaxed as the cameras rolled. “She’s a bitch,” whispered mother Gingrich. For Newt, the incident was a gift. He was able to be appropriately outraged, accusing Chung of “ripping off” his mother for ratings.
With equal dexterity, Gingrich stage-managed his meeting with President Clinton at the White House. Gingrich was full of diplomatic brio, beaming for cameras, winning headlines for his magnanimity. He told the president that he would rearrange the schedule of the first 100 days to accommodate early passage of any parts of the contract that Clinton was willing to sign. The real reason had more to do with control than cooperation. “We’d rather have more stories about signings than vetoes,” Gingrich explained to the president.
Gingrich also instructed the White House to inform him every time it made contact with a Republican House member. White House aides were taken aback. Did Gingrich really expect them to help him control his own party? Gingrich explained that Republicans already know they have to clear any contact with the White House through his office.
For the moment, Republican strategists aren’t all that worried about Democrats or the press. The bigger risk, they fear, is that Gingrich will overreach. In Gingrich’s moving acceptance speech, he offered up one particularly affecting vision as a “goal” of Republicans. There would come a Monday morning, the speaker said, when Americans would wake up to find that “for the entire weekend not a single child was killed anywhere” in the country.
That passage made one of the speaker’s close allies, conservative intellectual Bill Bennett, wince. Bennett has warned Gingrich before not to be too grandiose about what government can accomplish. “If you pass every item in the contract – and everything else any God-fearing Republican can think of – you will not have that Monday morning,” said Bennett.
In a memo last week, William Kristol, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, argued that Republicans should not assume that the “Republican-dominated conservative era” has truly begun. Going too far too fast could “spook the public,” he wrote. Americans are not ready to give up “the basic predictable arrangements of their daily lives. Conservative utopia can and should wait.”
In his office late last week, Gingrich dismissed such qualms. Kristol is “just wrong,” he said, and he chastised his brethren for timidity. “At the vision level and the strategy level, we have to cross the watershed and we have to be extraordinarily bold, as bold as FDR, and we have to say we’re creating a new system with new solutions based on new principles.”
Conservatives are also worried about Gingrich himself. After two months of saturation coverage, his negative ratings are higher than his positives, according to a new ABC-Washington Post Poll. In his memo, Kristol writes that the party needs to be “reassuring,” a word choice that seemed aimed at Gingrich’s penchant for popping off.
Gingrich sometimes has a problem with self-control. In his first press conference last week, he began by saying that he had to “learn to be more cautious” in his pronouncements. Yet a sentence later, asked about a Democratic bill to ban gifts to members of Congress, he answered that he had heard “rumors” suggesting that the Democrats had adopted a “fairly stupid strategy of cheap and nasty.” Then he turned nasty himself. “It’s their prerogative to be as narrow and foolish as they want to be. It does, at times, make one wonder just how dumb they think the American people are.”
The next day Gingrich admitted that perhaps he had gone a little too far in denouncing the Democrats. There was, in his voice, a moment of doubt. But only a moment.
STEVEN WALDMAN IN WASHINGTON
Republicans took control of Capitol Hill by tapping into public contempt for Congress. The anger has usually focused on the signs of privilege and pettiness: bounced checks, free parking spaces, lavish junkets. The real problem, though, is not perks but parochialism, and an interest-group culture that makes it nearly impossible to strive for broad national goals. The rules of Congress, especially those in the Senate, allow a single lawmaker shilling for a single interest group – or his constituents – to tie up the institution. In the last days of the 102d Congress, Republican Sen. Al D’Amato of New York filibustered a $27 billion tax bill in order to protect a company in Cortland, N.Y., that made typewriters.
How can the Republican revolutionaries change the culture to make Congress really work? Gingrich’s “Contract With America” is as much a tool for dealing with this dynamic as it is a substantive blueprint. The contract gives cover to Congress, allowing members to say to lobbyists, “Gee, I’d like to be with you on that, but I’ve got to stick with the contract.” For 100 days at least, the contract promises to impose some discipline on the House of Representatives. It is supposed to shift the focus from local issues – like funding water projects in a member’s district – toward more national concerns, like balancing the federal budget. Gingrich has also rigged the House rules so he has more power over his minions than any speaker since Sam Rayburn. That could prevent powerful committee chairmen from following their own agendas.
Gingrich has made noises about cutting money for a few high-profile programs supported by narrow (and politically vulnerable) constituencies. He has targeted the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, saying these programs are protected by “a bunch of rich upper-class people.” He may also succeed in cutting back longtime sacred cows, like Amtrak and the Small Business Administration.
But even if Gingrich wins all of the cuts he has suggested so far, he won’t begin to reduce the federal deficit, which is expected to start increasing again in about 1997. The reason is that few members of Congress, on either side of the aisle, want to take on middle-class entitlement programs, especially social security. AFDC – Aid to Families with Dependent Children – costs taxpayers $16 billion a year. Social security costs $250 billion.
Lawmakers will soon discover that no member of Congress considers his or her constituents to be special interests. For instance, most deficit hawks have proposed slashing agricultural subsidies, but congressmen representing farm states will be judged by their constituents on their ability to thwart such attacks. Virtually every major example of “pork” has strong support from local civic leaders.
Members are loath to relinquish their power to delay and obstruct, which is often the only real power they have. Last week the House enacted internal reforms that should have been made long ago, such as banning “proxy voting,” which allowed committee members to cast their votes while lying on the beach. They even limited the ability of congressmen to edit the Congressional Record transcripts of floor speeches. But significantly, the Senate voted 76-19 to reject a measure that would have cut back on filibusters. Republicans voted overwhelmingly to hang on to the tool they used for years to frustrate the majority, even though they now are the majority. Gingrich himself is not willing to push for campaign-finance reform to lessen the financial clout of interest groups. Even for revolutionaries, old habits die hard.
