Is Newt Going Nuts? Or Is He Already There?

Newt Gingrich takes movies very seriously.

As a boy, he modeled his behavior on John Wayne. As speaker, he said that “Boys Town” was a fine source of welfare policy and that the baseball strike could be solved by making the players and owners watch “Field of Dreams.”

So it is passing strange he does not recognize that something is happening to him that is straight out of the movies. He is being Gaslighted.

Hasn’t he seen the 1944 psychological thriller “Gaslight,” in which Ingrid Bergman marries Charles Boyer, a murderer who systematically tries to make her think she is losing her mind?

It dawned on the Democrats early on that a Gaslight strategy could be effective, when Gingrich made that crack about how women cannot serve in combat because they get infections, while men “are basically little piglets” who are “biologically driven to go out and hunt giraffes.”

When he wrote books about pouting sex kittens, dodos and honeymoons in space, the Democrats figured it would be a cinch to push the guy over the edge.

Vice President Gore easily got under the speaker’s skin by referring to him as “an extremist” - and the two had a screaming fight at the White House earlier this month.

Then came the trip to Israel. Gingrich was right, of course. The 25-hour flight back and forth would have been a fine time to work on a budget deal, a fitting tribute to the pragmatic Yitzhak Rabin. But President Clinton’s advisers had persuaded him that this was his big chance to act muscular, so he kept the Republicans at a distance.

At first Leon Panetta said that it would have been “inappropriate” to negotiate the budget while Clinton was mourning a friend. But when the New York Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman let it leak that he and the president had been playing hearts on the ride home, White House officials backed off the appropriateness line and said Clinton just wanted to relax. Well, sure, but not if it was going to end up costing the government nearly a billion dollars.

Gingrich was also right that the two most important congressional officials should have left by the front door. But by letting himself be provoked into whining and scheming, he came across as hysterical. The Gaslight strategy was working.

The White House kept needling. Panetta called Gingrich’s behavior “bizarre” and Mike McCurry offered to send the speaker some M&M’s with the presidential seal.

When they made a deal, the White House thanked Dole, Senator Domenici and Congressman Kasich, pointedly leaving out Gingrich.

“It’s a calculated attempt to irritate,” said Tony Blankley, Gingrich’s spokesman.

The White House turned up the pressure. McCurry sinisterly sported the same book tie that Gingrich likes to wear.

“I saw the tie in the closet and subliminally, I knew it would make the speaker crazy,” the press secretary said. “What makes it fun is that such innocent things drive him nuts. You never know when he might go on some tangent, like in that debate when Reagan rambled about the Pacific Coast highway. Who needs roller coasters at an amusement park when you can watch the speaker talk?”

With his poll numbers sinking and his presidential dreams receding, Gingrich is acting out even more. Talking to Republican governors the other day, he blamed the murder in Illinois, in which a woman’s womb was sliced open so her baby could be stolen, on “the welfare state.”

“He was just carrying on the way he often does,” McCurry said, with practiced dismissiveness.

So far, the Gaslighting is paying off. Gingrich has managed to seem so immature that he makes Bill Clinton look, well, mature.

Blankley, who knows about Hollywood from his days as a child actor, predicts the Democrats won’t succeed.

“Newt will not end up playing Ingrid Bergman,” he says. “And somehow I can’t quite see Clinton as Charles Boyer. He’s not suave enough. He’s more a Jethro Clampett type.”

Anyway, the Gaslight strategy is misplaced. In the movie, the husband tried to make the wife unstrung because she wasn’t unstrung. You can’t Gaslight someone who is already a little lit.

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