Gingrich More Like The Apprentice Than The Sorcerer
The speaker of the House knows he did not have a great first half in 1997. It began with his colleagues voting a formal reprimand and a penalty of $300,000 for his violation of House ethics rules. It ended with widespread criticism within Republican ranks of the bungled flood-relief bill and rumbles of dissension among his leadership lieutenants.
But Newt Gingrich says that things are looking up for him and his party. The one-time history professor has found a role model you never would have imagined: Sam Rayburn.
Yes, that Sam Rayburn. Mr. Sam, the legendary Texan who was speaker of the House from 1940 until his death in 1961, with just two two-year breaks when Republicans had a majority.
I had barely begun a pre-Independence Day interview in Gingrich’s office when he hit me with the seemingly outlandish comparison. “You look at Rayburn operating in 1955-56 with a similarly small majority against (President) Eisenhower and you find a certain level of turmoil,” Gingrich said, by way of explaining the outbreaks of fratricide among his charges. “Northern liberal Democrats often were fighting with Southern conservative Democrats. His job was to hold them all together and to maneuver against a president with considerable personal skills who had a high popularity rating. And in the process, Rayburn shattered the Republican Party. Because he was able to distance Eisenhower from his party and define the Republican Party in ways that were unsustainable, this (the Republican leader’s) office remained the minority office for 40 years.”
Gingrich’s history is impeccable. Rayburn and his Texas partner, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, were so skillful in alternately accommodating and challenging Eisenhower, while outmaneuvering congressional Republicans, that the House Democratic majorities survived the Eisenhower years and persisted right until 1994, when the Gingrich revolution swept Capitol Hill.
When I asked Gingrich if he is serious in thinking that he could be a Rayburn in reverse, by using Clinton’s tenure to help build a long-term Republican congressional majority, it turned out that he is.
“The key for the Republican Party is to ignore the wedge issues and develop magnets … positive issues … where the Democrats, in order to compete, either have to give up their ideology or give up their allies. When we offer better alternatives, we draw the country, and even draw Clinton, away from the Democrats.”
Those “magnet issues” include, in his view, cutting and eventually eliminating taxes on savings, investments and inheritances; school choice; and incentives for churchbased charities to take over welfare and other human service programs. “Those will create fissures within the Democratic Party” that will keep it from regaining its House majority, he said.
The problem for Gingrich is not just that he lacks Rayburn’s reputation for personal probity and that twice as many disapprove of his job performance as approve it. It is also that his party keeps finding itself on the losing side of the fights it picks with Clinton. Take the tax bill the House and Senate are now completing.
Almost every poll shows large majorities of the public accept Clinton’s argument that the GOP tax cuts are tilted to the wealthy. Nonetheless, Gingrich says he would hate to be in Clinton’s shoes. Why? Because Clinton is insisting that the $500-per-child tax credit be paid even to the working poor, whose income-tax liability is erased by the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). “That is welfare,” Gingrich told me, “and if the choice is giving more welfare to people who pay no taxes vs. cutting taxes for people who pay them, my guess is that’s about 80-20 in our favor. We can stay on this fight all summer. And if he wants to veto the first tax cut in 16 years, he’ll find it very hard to pull off. …”
That was the same confidence that Republicans had when they put the anti-government shutdown rider onto the flood emergency relief bill. Then, too, they thought the public would rise up in protest if Clinton vetoed the bill. They could not have been more wrong. Clinton deftly made the Republicans the scapegoats for delaying needed relief.
Sam Rayburn made few such errors in his dealings with Eisenhower. He was so conscious of the advantage a popular president has over any congressional leader in the battle for public support that liberal Democrats chafed at his willingness to compromise.
More often than he wants to admit, Gingrich, weakened by his ethics fight, has let himself be pushed by the ideological right wing of his party into battles he cannot win.
Much as he would like to think otherwise, Mr. Newt is not yet Mr. Sam.
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