Newt Gingrich
As a politician, Newt Gingrich would say, “I grew up in kind of an idyllic children’s background.” But really, he grew up above a gas station in a life that was “narrow and harsh and unforgiving” (Packer 18). He got his first taste of leadership at ten, when he tried to convince the Parks Department to build a zoo for Harrisburg, making the front page. His ambition became more serious when he visited the scarred battlefields of Verdun and saw what bad leaders could do to a country. With Lincoln and Churchill as his models, he decided that “his future was in politics” (19).
Newt Gingrich married Jackie Battley when he was nineteen. While she worked, he went to Tulane for his Ph.D. and became a campus activist. When Tulane banned two films, Gingrich organized protests against the decision. “He had a favorite phrase, ‘corrupt elite,’ that could be hurled in any direction, and for the rest of his life, he kept it in his pocket” (20).
While teaching college history, Gingrich ran for Congress in 1974 and 1976, losing both times. In 1978, he ran again. “He didn’t make racial appeals, didn’t seem very religious.” He understood the New South, where his love for aircraft carriers, moon launches, and personal computers was a perfect fit for the emerging Republican majority. With stagflation and a president preaching sacrifice, people were sour, suspicious of bureaucracies, and antitax. Gingrich’s opponent was a wealthy, liberal, female state senator. He knew exactly what to do. He moved to the right and went after her on welfare and taxes with his new pocket phrase, “the corrupt liberal welfare state.” Meanwhile, he talked about family values and featured Jackie and their kids in his ads. Though he was cheating on Jackie and they would soon divorce, Gingrich was elected to Congress in 1978 (21).
In Congress, Gingrich developed another phrase to keep in his pocket, “corrupt, left-wing machine.” He baited Speakers of the House until they were red in the face. The times were changing, and he knew what weapons to use. When C-SPAN started broadcasting Congress to the public, he gave speeches to an empty room and built a TV following. The party system became obsolete, and politicians were becoming entrepreneurs who depended on special-interest PACs and lobbyists. He “created his own power base, with a fundraising apparatus and a political action committee” (22).
Gingrich saw that voters “were not persuaded by policy descriptions or rational arguments. They responded to symbols and emotions.” He trained Republican candidates on word-choice: if you discussed your opponents with words like bureaucracy, corrupt, disgrace, lie, pathetic, stagnation, welfare, you had them on the defensive, and if you described your side with children, courage, empower, moral, opportunity, tough, reform, “you had already won the argument.” An entire generation of Republicans began sounding like Newt Gingrich (23).
He met his match in the White House, discussing the budget with the president: “Gingrich dictated terms, while Clinton studied Gingrich.” Clinton saw the insecurities beneath the fiery words and set traps for him. When the government was forced to shut down at the end of the year, Gingrich got the blame. Any successes he achieved after that were ascribed to Clinton. In 1997, Gingrich was fined $300,000 for laundering political contributions through his nonprofits. He resigned the Speakership, and the last vote he cast was to impeach his rival (24).
Gingrich left office after two decades, but stayed on in Washington and married his third wife. “Like his rival, he spent his time out of office with rich people.” He found a place in think tanks and partisan media. He had never had money, so he set out to make a lot of it by selling his lobbying connections for influence. He wrote seventeen books in eight years, continuing to claim that America’s decay was growing deeper and more radical while the need to be heard was unquenchable (25). During his career, Gingrich was changing Washington and the Republican Party “maybe more than Reagan—maybe more than anyone else” (23).
Work Cited: The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.