The most useful explanation goes beyond Gingrich’s ideology and background to an American public still sorting out ambivalent feelings toward conflict and commonality in the 1990s. In that sense, the new speaker and the O.J. Simpson trial (you didn’t really think you could read this far without a reference to it, did you?) are of a piece-blood sports that compel and repel at the same time. We listen for the clang, and wince at it. Today’s brawling style titillates-then ultimately disgusts. This love-hate relationship with conflict might be expected to keep the divisiveness in cheek, but it doesn’t. The adversarial excess that has tarnished our legal system is infecting politics and public life, with Gingrich as its most recognizable symbol.
The original idea undergirding American law was that Marcia Clark versus Johnnie Cochran adds up to the truth. Translated to politics, it’s that Newt Gingrich versus Bill Clinton yields understanding of the stakes the country faces. But we all know it isn’t working out that way. Loud conflict– butt into the structure of TV-driven debate-doesn’t yield truth in politics any more easily than it does in the courtroom. What remains are the recriminations, reverberating endlessly through the process. Adversary infinitum.
Gingrich must be aware that the screaming and scheming he did for 15 years as a lowly backbencher-doesn’t work in the speakership. But he no doubt comforts himself with the fact that he remains, by general consensus, the most powerful speaker of the era, enforcing a degree of party discipline almost totally absent under the Democrats. He knows that he has transformed the terms of the debate-both practically and philosophically-and forged a new generation of radical Republicans. And he knows that whatever happens to him personally, the antigovernment revolution he masterminded cannot be rolled back completely, and will most likely advance. While the speaker may have a weakness for pseudo-intellectual blather, he can be rightly proud of how early he understood the tides of political history.
Yet Gingrich’s understanding of social tides–the way the American people relate to each other and to their leaders-remains impaired. This is why his problems go deeper than rule-breaking by his PAC, pettiness on Air Force One or even the story of how he presented divorce terms to his first wife when she was in the hospital with cancer. Send a message, Johnnie Cochran says to the jury. Send a message, Newt Gingrich says to the public. At first, this feels good to any audience–like the contact high one gets from watching boxing or The McLaughlin Group. But the buzz wears off, leaving only a longing for something larger and more ennobling.
Politics has been famously described as the mobilization of resentments, yet even Richard Nixon paid at least some lip service to unity and common interest. (Remember that placard, BRING US TOGETHER?) At the beginning of this year, Gingrich set his sights high, too. He talked eloquently, for instance, about the need to explore the idea of bringing back orphanages. While liberals yelped, the pub-lie was intrigued. But when the GOP budget appeared the speaker had not earmarked one penny to test whether his grand idea might actually work.
Even if the public didn’t hold Gingrich accountable for this in particular, a general impression of hardness set in. “The Devil has taken his heart,” Jackie Gingrich once told her Georgia church congregation, in explaining why she needed charity to get by after her husband left her. While Americans today are unusually unsympathetic to the underprivileged, we want our politicians to convey compassion. (Which is one reason Phil Gramm is going nowhere.) “Message: I don’t care” is a sure loser, especially when the budget is so tilted against the poor. Were Gingrich a more pleasing, Reaganesque figure he might have been able to fight back better against the obvious demagoguery of the Democrats’ attacks on his modest Medicare reform.
Perhaps Gingrich is simply tone deaf. He laces nearly every sentence with the word “frankly,” which must be the single most off-putting Orwellian expression a voter can hear. More broadly, a politician dedicated to preventing the government from telling citizens what to think and do cannot himself lecture them so often on what to think and do. It’s as if he’s saying, “To get the government off your back I have to climb on it.” What he fats to understand is that for many voters, he is the government, or part of it.
When we drive, we like to honk. But we don’t like those big trucks leading us down the highway to honk at us. Gingrich doesn’t get that each American is proud, too proud, of his or her particular anger, but not of anybody else’s. When he lowers his voice and lays off the horn, he’ll win more credit for changing the country.
