NEWT GINGRICH’S WORLD

LEADERS MAKE THINGS POSSIBLE. EXCEPTIONAL LEADERS make them inevitable. Newt Gingrich belongs in the category of the exceptional. All year–ruthlessly, brilliantly, obnoxiously–he worked at hammering together inevitabilities: a balanced federal budget, for one. Not so long ago, the idea of a balanced budget was a marginal, we’ll-get-to-it-someday priority. Other urgent work needed doing: the Clintons’ health-care program, for example, which would have installed elaborate new bureaucratic machinery. Today, because of Newt Gingrich, the question is not whether a balanced-budget plan will come to pass but when.

Gingrich has changed the center of gravity. From Franklin Roosevelt onward, Americans came to accept the Federal Government as the solution to problems, a vast parental presence. Ronald Reagan preached that government was the problem, but his Administration focused mostly on the Evil Empire; it did not overturn the grand centralizing legacy of New Deal and Great Society. Newt Gingrich wants to reverse the physics, make American government truly centrifugal, with power flowing out of Washington, devolving to the states.

A sometimes unlovely blur of headlong energy and pinwheeling, roughhouse creativity, the Speaker has transformed both the House of Representatives and the Speakership into unprecedented instruments of personal and political power. It has been an amazing performance and, for all its scattershot quality, a display of discipline that is either impressive or scary, depending on one’s sympathies.

Having organized an insurrectionist crew in the House, Gingrich seized the initiative from a temporarily passive President and steered the country onto a heading that the Speaker accurately proclaimed to be revolutionary. His venture is in a stormy mid-passage now. It may ultimately be forced back, or even sunk. Yet Gingrich did the work–crude, forceful, effective–that compelled the voyage in the first place. It is for that reason he is Time’s Man of the Year.

Gingrich envisions a promised land–an America that may lie just over the horizon, in his cherished Third Wave Information Age, where traditional values connect to the future. He hopes to get to a place beyond poverty and violence and moral decay by leaving behind the welfare state and the deadening, blockheaded bureaucratic mind of Washington: a renewed civilization, says Newt–Norman Rockwell in the 21st century, a wholesome Utopia. Newt’s destination has the refulgence of a never-never land–that is, an ideal. But in America, ideals have always been a necessary and efficient form of national energy. Which came first–Newt’s vision of the future? Or his fierce personal ambition? Which one drives the other? The nearest answer may be found in W.B. Yeats’ line (in language prettier than Gingrich might use): “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” Gingrich decided not to run for President in 1996. That may be just as well. The polls say more than half the American people disapprove of him. His negatives reached critical mass just before Christmas. Whereupon Democrats began to rouse themselves amid the wreckage leftfrom ’94 and to tend small campfires of hope again.

They worked on the idea of running in 1996 against one man, Newt Gingrich, a vividly inviting target who virtually poses for cartoons of himself. Enemies picture Newt as the Simon Legree of school lunches and Medicare, the golfing partner of capital gains, the Churchill from K Mart, the nerd pistolero of the punitive right, the all-purpose villain.

IF GINGRICH WERE TO RUN for president, of course, he might be applying for a job inferior to the one he has created for himself as Speaker of the House. Whatever his fortunes in the polls and in the hands of a special counsel to the House ethics committee, Gingrich has the American genius for reinventing himself. The Gingrich Republicans, however, may be in danger of exercising their party’s perverse talent for throwing away its advantages with both hands. Clinton is a superb campaigner, himself a gambler with a gift for new lives. And Republicans underestimate him.

Americans in 1995 kept a wary, ambivalent eye on both Clinton and Gingrich, the famous fraternal twins of American power, yin and yang of the Baby Boom, polar extremes of Pennsylvania Avenue. A generation or two ago, leaders were father figures. For better and for worse, Clinton and Gingrich–powerful yet indefinably immature–give off a bright, undisciplined energy, a vibration of adolescent recklessness.

Justice Holmes judged that Franklin Roosevelt had a “second-class intelligence but a first-class temperament.” Newt Gingrich has a first-class intelligence that fires through a strangely refracted temperament that is not exactly second-class but agitated and sometimes grandiose enough to make Americans nervous. He has proved himself an impresario of leverage in using Congress to change America, a sort of hothouse genius. Americans may discover in 1996 whether Gingrich can evolve outward–as a truly popular leader in the open air.