HE ONLY WANTS TO RENEW AMERICAN CIVILISATION

Anne Applebaum spends a week following Newt Gingrich around, and discovers that America might be in for a

bigger shock than it had bargained for

Washington IT IS EARLY on a Wednesday evening in the ballroom of a large Washington hotel. A foundation is giving out its annual awards, one to a prominent Democratic Senator, one to the chief of Lockheed. Guests are in black tie; dinner will be served. Still, it is not the sort of occasion which usually attracts the attention of national television — which' is why I asked the reporter from ABC News what he was doing there.

He shrugged. 'The Speaker,' he said. `The Speaker might do something.'

What might he do?

He shrugged again.

into ten minutes' worth `You never know.'

But why the Speaker? Would the ABC reporter have covered Tom Foley, the former Speaker — the Speaker of the House of Repre- sentatives, that is — the same way?

`Of course not.'

In fact, Newt Gingrich, the Speaker, did nothing unusual that evening. He presented the awards, complimented the Democratic Senator and duly noted that Lock- heed is based in Georgia, his home state, along with Coca-Cola and CNN. Then he launched of Gingrichisms: 'We're going to go through a very dramatic reshaping of the United States government, and we need all the pri- vate sector advice we can get . . . by 2002 Medicare will be bankrupt unless the entire system is completely, totally overhauled' and so on. He then thanked the audience, and strode off into the night. The reporters switched off their cameras and tape recorders, and got up to follow him. If the prominent Democratic Senator and the head of Lockheed had anything to say, nobody noticed. Newt Gingrich was the story, and the story had moved on to his next speech. For anyone accustomed to the idea that in Washington the story is the President, this is different. For anyone accustomed to the idea that in Washington the Senate is the senior legislative body, this is different too. It is a subtle change, but important: these days, the President's major domestic speeches are made in response to Newt Gingrich's statements. These days, the Sen- ate is reduced to passing legislation that comes from the Gingrich-led House of Representatives.

These days, Washington is also getting used to altering two cornerstones of its conventional wisdom: that politicians always break promises upon taking office, and that radical politicians always move to the centre upon taking office. In his first 100 days, Gingrich eviscerated the first myth. Whatever you think of its worth, the House did pass nine out of ten chunks of the legislation which make up his Contract with America, including bills on congres- sional reform, welfare reform and tax rebates. Of 302 votes, he won 299, unheard of in the traditionally fractious American Congress.

Now he says he wants to eviscerate the second myth. For all the fuss made about the Contract, the Contract,may not, a few years from now, turn out to matter very much. For what Newt Gingrich says is com- ing next is, in fact, the solution to the prob- lem Ronald Reagan talked about but ultimately ignored, as well as the goal which Bill Clinton set himself but never attained: nothing les§ than the elimination of the multi-billion-dollar American budget deficit. Details, claim Gingrich, will be released this week.

And then? 'Make America competitive in the world economy' (modernise our indus- try), 're-establish public safety' (eliminate crime) and 'lead the planet', since if 'we don't do it, no one will'. Gingrich says he is talk- ing about 'literally replacing the welfare state with an opportuni- ty society'. He wants to eliminate welfare dependency, and the causes of welfare dependency: he holds up charts showing that illegitimacy and welfare payments have risen at the same rate. He also says he will 'remake the federal government'. With that, he pulls from his pocket a vacuum tube (`good, solid 1895 technology') as well as a microchip which he says has the com- puting power of 3 million vacuum tubes. `Today's government operates this way' he brandishes the vacuum tube —`but after we remake it the government of the future will operate this way' — and he holds aloft the microchip. '

Eliminating the budget deficit, 'which is stealing from our children's future', kicks in somewhere in the middle of the list. Cuts have to be made, programmes down-sized. `Everything is on the table,' he says, except pensions. But defence he says is included: `I'm a hawk, but I'm a cheap hawk.' And those who don't believe he will do it can dial 1-800-TO-RENEW for tapes of Newt Gingrich's lectures on why everything he says is true and what can be done about it.

Some might call these big ideas, even messianic ideas. Before speaking to a Republican fund-raising dinner, he was compared to George Washington and Joshua; before 1,000 young businessmen (at 8.15 in the morning) he was preceded by three dozen gospel singers singing the `Battle Hymn of the Republic'. At a lunch for the National Organization of Women Legislators, the woman who introduced him said she would 'listen in awe' to his words; as Gingrich got up to speak, a dozen more women, grown-up politicians, ran up to the podium to photograph him with lit- tle automatic flash cameras. 'He is the Moses of our movement,' breathed the head of a conservative think-tank, another grown-up.

On the other hand, Gingrich's picture has been printed on the covers of the national news magazines, curling his lip under the headline 'The Politics of Hate', and featuring, at Christmastime, as Scrooge. One democratic congressman compared the Gingrich-led Republicans to the Nazis. Mention his name and people's eyes narrow: 'You've heard Newt give a speech today? You've been following him around all week? That must have been an awfully unpleasant experience.'

Actually, listening to a Gingrich speech isn't an unpleasant experience, but it is a strange one, particularly the first time. I am not alone in thinking this. The first time he appeared on television as Speaker, a sur- prised Washington Post journalist wrote that 'elite America had been prepared by weeks of media reports to find him heart- less, calculating, bizarre — the man who wants to starve our children and launch the handicapped in space'. Instead, Gingrich `seemed utterly at home with himself, in a way we haven't seen since perhaps John Kennedy . . . [he] smiled naturally and seemed loose and comfortable up there in his unfortunate suit and horrendous hair- cut . .

It may be only an illusion, but most of what makes Gingrich look 'loose and com- fortable' when he speaks is that there appears to be a startling lack of distinction between what he thinks and what he says: he talks quickly, he sounds excited by what he is talking about, he rarely uses notes, he doesn't always bother to finish his sen- tences. When other statesmen speak, they seem to be reading from a prepared text, usually because they are. When Gingrich speaks, he seems to say whatever comes into his head, usually because he is. This is why he makes faux pas, like the time he suggested that the American government should give a laptop computer to every poor child. It is also why he is able to cre- ate paragraphs like this one, from a speech about 'information warfare': I mean virtually every soldier in combat in 2010 will have somewhere on their body a personal telephone, linked by satellite to a world telephone network. That telephone will probably be a personal communication system, that will also have computer capabili- ty and faxing capability, so during lulls they [the soldier] can arrange a date, they can set- tle on what they want fixed for dinner and they can remind their home computer that it's time to water the plants. A lot of this sounds far-fetched but it's not. This is literal- ly the edge of the future .

Or comments like this:

The experiment we have had with profession- al politicians and professional government has failed. We have discovered that you can't hire people to think about your government and society and then walk off and let them do it. We have discovered that you can't hire people to teach your children and then walk off and let them do it. We've discovered that you can't hire people to keep you safe and then walk off and let them do it; that in fact, you have to be engaged, you have to be involved, you have to reassert civic responsi- bility.

He also says the same thing to everyone, defying the long tradition of the American statesman playing for the ethnic vote: not only is he the first American politician in living memory to say exactly what he thinks, he may also be the first politician in decades not to be afflicted with any form of political correctness at all. In an appear- ance on Black Entertainment Television, no less, he attacked affirmative action, demanding that a group of black journalists explain to him how racial quotas 'fit into Martin Luther King's statement that he had a dream that someday we're going to be a country that judged people by their character and not by the colour of their skin'. When challenged, he announced that `government discrimination in favour of whites was wrong; government discrimina- tion in favour of blacks is wrong'. Later, asked by a woman at the women legisla- tors' lunch about a programme he had pro- posed to cut, he replied, 'I will tell you something that you will disagree with: we don't need more money in education, we need to replace the failed bureaucracies which are cheating our children.'

Some people in the room cheered. Some sat in stony silence. Either way, it was a sign that the effect, calculated or otherwise, of the Gingrich speaking technique was working: Newt rightly inspires love and hatred when he speaks, simply because people believe that he means what he says.

Nevertheless, he is often attacked or defended for some of the wrong reasons as well. Democrats excoriate him for mean- ness, bigotry and lack of compassion, as lib- erals generally excoriate conservative Republicans; meanwhile, conservative Republicans eulogise him for his conserva- tive values, as conservative Republicans generally eulogise their own. But while Newt Gingrich is clearly a Republican, is Newt Gingrich really a conservative? It is true that he is supported by the same coali- tion of Baptists and businessmen that brought Reagan to power, that he is popu- lar among religious conservatives in his Georgia Bible-belt district, that he is sup- ported by religious conservatives across the country, including the politicised Christian Coalition. But in the 'Address to the Nation' he made last month, upon the completion of his 'first hundred days' of legislation — the first time a Speaker's speech had been televised in full — he didn't use the word 'conservative', let alone the word 'God', at all.

'He doesn't say he's a conservative, he says he's allied to the conservatives' is how Paul Weyrich, head of the echt-conserva- tive Free Congress Foundation, explains the relationship. Others told me they sus- pect that Gingrich's views on the 'moral issues' which obsess American conserva- tives are less than solid. 'He's been all over the place on homosexuals,' notes Weyrich. Certainly he is not against homosexuals: the one uncloseted Republican homosexual in Congress is one of Gingrich's closest allies. As for abortion, Newt is also, accord- ing to his press spokesman, against abor- tion, although he is not in favour of criminalising abortion. This is a popular position, which some would nevertheless call 'fence-sitting'.

In fact, while some of Newt Gingrich's views — about the decentralisation of gov- ernment, about the reduction in the role of the state — happen to coincide with the views of the Christian Coalition, the Free Congress Foundation and others, not all of his inspiration and his belief in personal responsibility lies in the Bible. On the con- trary, the list of books which he handed out to new Congressmen as 'essential reading' — shades of Mrs Thatcher and Keith Joseph — include 18th- and 19th-century observers of America (Jefferson, Madison, de Tocqueville) as well as a clutch of respectable and less respectable manage- ment theorists: Peter Drucker's The Effec- tive Executive, Mary Boone's Leadership and the Computer, and Alvin and Heidi Toffler's Creating a New Civilization: the Politics of the Third Wave. The latter is a futurist pamphlet now being sold with the word 'Gingrich' in larger letters than the world Tofflef on its cover (he wrote the introduction). It is, in fact, an extended meditation on what the information revolution means for us all: the advent of direct democracy via computers, the demise of mass media, the arrival of computer-linked families — 'families of many diverse types, some nuclear, some extended and multi-generational, some composed of remarrieds, some big, some small or childless' — none of which is 'fami- ly values' as we know it. It is, however, slightly unsettling to the Republican mainstream. 'To some extent, he's a wacko,' says another Republican party activist, this one speaking well off the record. 'He's been underestimated by his opponents, but he's still a wacko, a futurist, an autodidact, a compulsive talker.' He is also, judging from that book list, not some- one who would necessarily have felt the way Edmund Burke did about the French Revolution. This is nothing if not Enlight- enment and up-to-date Enlightenment thinking, in the form of management theo- ry: super-rational, super-pragmatic, uncom- fortable with old mythologies, dedicated to a new and different future, with just a touch of the small-town American Rotary Club businessman's ethos thrown in. Gin- grich keeps saying that he wants to fix the welfare benefits system, not because it is immoral, but because it doesn't work.

His speeches are permeated with a boundless, unconservative optimism, his daily life with an unconservative activism. `What we're trying to do here is simply say we ought to have something out there which keeps bringing together ideas — to tie together the information-age revolution, the world market, the classic principles of American civilisation — and talk about how we can re-establish progress as the norm in American society' is how Gingrich himself puts it.

Alas, the Speaker also shares some of the Enlightenment's scorn for those who are not similarly enlightened. Diderot once complained to David Hume that philosophes 'preach wisdom to the deaf. Along those lines, I heard Gingrich tell an audience of Prudential executives that 'you won't be able to grasp the importance of what I am saying in the short space of one after-dinner speech'. His arrogance is deep enough to have filtered down to some of his less talented, and therefore more unbearable, staff. One also senses that the conservative foundation chiefs notion of Gingrich as the Moses of the Republican Party, leading the true believers out of Egyptian slavery, probably does not dismay the man himself in the least. 'Let's put it this way,' a columnist who admires him told me, 'you wouldn't want to spend a lot of your discretionary time with Newt.' His faith in himself also seems to be matched by his belief that his opponents are motivated by ill-will and corruption: his constant attacks on the 'liberal welfare state' and the 'liberal welfare state mentality' do demonise a set of beliefs which have, after all, a legitimate his- tory and honourable origins.

And yet, and yet — there are technical reasons why, if he is willing to pay the political price, he might really cut the bud- get and reshape the federal government and renew America. Far from fracturing, as Democrats continue to predict, the Repub- lican Congressional coalition which backs him seems actually to be growing stronger, defying more conventional wisdom which says that parties are disintegrating in America. Many of the new Republican Congressmen are virtually Newt clones, politicians who watched the videotapes sent out by his political action committee, GOPAC, and now mimic not only what he says but the way he says it. Even those who are not Newt clones still support him: out of power for more than 40 years, they are just grateful to him for providing the agen- da which put them back in the majority. `Before the election we just discussed. Now we get to decide.' That is what he told a roomful of 30 Congressmen right after the election, according to one who was there. `And we just sat there, silent. Nobody could believe it was true.'

Gingrich has also strengthened the office of Speaker, not previously a position which commanded much national attention. He has selected his own committee chairman, something enormously important in the American system; he delegates responsibil- ity to cronies, reaches out to moderates. `Everyone is a star in Newt's galaxy,' says Dick Armey, the Senate majority leader who functions as Gingrich's second-in-com- mand. And because Congress is radical, everyone in Washington suddenly seems radicalised: foundations now vie with one another to produce model budgets and plans which out-Newt Newt. People around him talk seriously about him running for president, and a 'Draft Newt' movement is in the making. But why should he run for president when he is, de facto, acting prime minister? That, in fact, is the measure of his achievement.

Eventually, he will also get his chance for a final showdown with the hated 'liberal media'. For, in fact, the worst charge they have laid against him is not that he lacks compassion: in America, the desire to end welfare dependency or trim government spending is no longer automatically associ- ated with mean-spiritedness. No, by far their most potentially damaging criticism is that he is a hypocrite: that he will not do what he says he will do; that he will never dare dismantle the middle-class benefits and the defence programmes which are the main componlents of the budget deficit; that he will end up, like Ronald Reagan, rewarding the rich with tax cuts and doing nothing at all about the poor whose inter- ests he claims to hold close to his heart; that his apparently fervent beliefs are just another political facade. Gleefully, one journalist after another has dissected the Contract with America, precisely in order to prove that it hardly amounts to the radi- cal change promised.

If these critics are right — if Newt Gin- grich is a hypocrite — then we will know within the next few months, when the bud- get debate is finished. But if they are wrong — if Newt Gingrich really does mean what he says — then they will have a far more serious problem on their hands. It will be a problem they cannot, as Newt would say, even begin to imagine in the short space of this article.