Bottle Rocket: Newt Gingrich’s turn
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It was a sunny Monday in mid-December when Newt Gingrich arrived in the cafeteria of L-3 Warrior Systems, in New Hampshire. Because the company is technologically sophisticated, labor-intensive, military-affiliated, and close to the Manchester airport, it is an enticing venue for Presidential candidates. In honor of Gingrich’s visit, the tables had been removed, and the chairs were lined up in rows. A few months earlier, a Gingrich visit might not have required any rearrangement of the furniture: in June, after a slow and frustrating start to the campaign, most of his top staffers quit, and pundits couldn’t believe that Gingrich didn’t have the sense to quit, too. But in October, after a series of feisty debate performances, his poll numbers started improving; in late November he was endorsed by the New Hampshire Union Leader, the state’s largest newspaper; and by the time he arrived at L-3 Warrior Systems he was leading in the national polls. He was thrilled by his comeback, though not surprised. “I’m now, I think by a big margin, the front-runner,” he said, and he passed a pleasant half hour telling the assembled employees and reporters about his plans to debate President Obama into ignominy, thereby clearing the way for a transformative Gingrich Administration.
Gingrich has been a national political figure for more than thirty years, although he sees himself as a historian. He has a Ph.D. from Tulane, and was a history and environmental-studies professor at West Georgia College in the nineteen-seventies; he still has a knack, common to effective teachers, for making his listeners feel smart for keeping up with his train of thought. He speaks in a soft tenor, often tucking his chin and leaning toward his interlocutor—if he wore glasses, he would be constantly peering over them. When he arrived in Washington, in 1979, he was a new kind of Southern conservative. He represented Georgia’s Sixth District, the wealthiest in the state, and he combined the expected denunciations of the “corrupt liberal welfare state” with unexpected paeans to the emancipatory powers of information technology and galactic exploration. In 1984, Gingrich published a manifesto, “Window of Opportunity,” which has on its cover a space shuttle and a bald eagle; its author is advertised as “Chairman of the Congressional Space Caucus.” The preface, by the science-fiction writer Jerry Pournelle, declared, “It’s raining soup, and Newt Gingrich has the blueprints for soup bowls.”
A less original politician, or a humbler one, might have assumed that fierce partisan invective was incompatible with futuristic policy proposals. But Gingrich saw that these two kinds of provocation, combined, could form the basis of a crafty political strategy: the more sharply he criticized liberalism, the more freedom he had to depart from conservative orthodoxy. He described himself as a leader of a band of nuanced partisans. “We’re post-New Deal conservatives, not anti-New Deal conservatives,” he said.