We’ve been talking about what lies ahead, and how the media will probably fail to predict it. Gingrich has already scoffed at my wishful prediction that the next big story might be: “The Odd Couple – Newt and Bill Get Together to Solve Some Problems.” How naive. The next big story would be something else:
“That I’m a professor,” he says impishly.
Pause. Quizzical look from reporter.
“Ideas matter.”
Go ahead, call him grandiose, working an old con: look at me, the only guy on the Hill (other than Pat Moynihan) who actually reads serious books. Call him a history abuser, hiring a (dumb) polemicist as historian of the House, and routinely twisting the early history of the republic to make it seem as if the founders were men of great piety. (How closely did he read those books?) Call him just another hyperactive politician who in the end may turn out to be more interested in the idea of power than the power of ideas, who takes the plowshares that cultivate ideas and turns them into swords to stab Democrats.
All of this may be so, but it doesn’t detract from the basic accuracy of Gingrich’s assessment. Ideas do matter, not just in the collapse of communism but in the collapse of the Democratic majority, which Gingrich visualized long before anyone else. Today’s fine ideological ferment – where first principles of federalism and the welfare state are debated daily – must be credited at least in part to him. Some of Gingrich’s hundreds of ideas are fresh, some fatuous. But the three big ones he has summoned are in the saddle and will ride for years.
Everyone now knows the first Big Idea – changing and limiting government. The only arguments are about the compromises and hypocrisies involved in getting there. It’s Gingrich’s second Big Idea – changing American culture – that is more likely to undo him. He argues that society must be transformed for any new laws to work – that the first idea depends for success on the second. “If you believe in limited government, you have to change the culture,” he says. True enough. But the two ideas also conflict with one another. By suggesting that he actually cares about the poor he opens himself up to the examination of results. What if government gets out of the way and people don’t stop shooting each other?
Gingrich’s answer to this is: “I’m not the government.” Another pause. Say what? Isn’t Congress a branch of government? “You lead the polity, you manage the government,” he adds. “It’s more lasting always to change the polity.”
This sounds annoyingly semantic, even if Gingrich’s distinction between the government and the “polity” (or body politic) is legitimate in theory. The problem for Gingrich is that these distinctions break down at accountability time. If his “opportunity society” fails to deliver, it won’t be the unleashed private sector that is held accountable. It will be the government – including Congress.
Gingrich’s third Big Idea, though he doesn’t ever quite admit it, is that American politics is a Manichaean struggle. This good-and-evil matrix allows him to rationalize the savagery of his partisan attacks. Now, with old-fashioned Democrats practically able to caucus in a phone booth, he needs more enemies, and that means the media. Because he used the media to win power (the first speaker ever to do so), he must now essentially try to rip down his own ladder.
Gingrich’s critique of the press makes some sense. When confronted with articles last week that tweaked him for his weakness for loopy futurism, he answered, “Mockery is the first reaction to fear – it allows people to maintain their status.” He’s right. The old order – including the old media order – is in decline, under assault from the Rush Limbaughs and Larry Kings of the world. The mainstream press is “losing its resonance,” as he says, though it’s hardly as “decadent” as he insists. He was also right to lambaste White House reporters for assuming that he and Clinton had a cat fight at their first post-election meeting. Washington journalism is so hooked on conflict that it didn’t recognize a truly new story – Clinton and Gingrich getting along, however momentarily.
But in his hurry to prove that Rush rules, Gingrich ignores that the old establishment media still gets the last word (how else to explain his anemic approval ratings?). And he doesn’t seem to comprehend that the media bias in favor of conflict that he exploited so well is too strong a journalistic convention to disappear. Gingrich recalls that when he first came to Washington, the best advice he got was from a reporter who told him that “this is a city where hierarchy is determined by page one.” It still is. And the best way to get there – or on TV – is to attack the power structure, which now means him.
So why won’t other members of Congress now do to Gingrich what Gingrich did? “They can try, but it just won’t work as well,” he says gamely. “It’s not that you do television, it’s that you have an idea that resonates.” Well, among the ideas resonating right now are criticism of Gingrich’s views on welfare and term limits by other Republicans – Newt wanna-bes. True party unity in the TV age is next to impossible. The average member of Congress doesn’t know he’s alive if he’s not on television, and he’s not on television unless he’s saying something at least vaguely inflammatory. The speaker probably won’t self-destruct. But he may eventually be eaten – live – by his own children. By the time he yells, “Hey, what’s the big idea?” it’ll be too late.
