Word: gingriched
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...words of DeLay aide John Feehery, "come-to-Jesus time." This would be the final bill before the House adjourned for its month-long August recess. A defeat, in Gingrich's eyes, meant that the budget battles scheduled for the fall would suddenly be much, much harder. At such a moment as this, a traditional Speaker might have reached into his pocket and pulled out a water project here, an Air Force base there to secure the last votes he needed. But Gingrich has little in common with his predecessors; he has never even chaired a committee in Congress, where...
...higher authority. They retreated to the Tip O'Neill room, where they usually held their weekly Bible class, and took turns reading Scripture and praying, sometimes holding hands. They finally told their leaders they would go along with the family-planning money and vote for the bill. Now Gingrich needed the moderates to cede ground over the rape and incest question. "This is a time when the American people are looking at what we are doing," he told them. Did they want to go home losers...
...Gingrich called the moment "mystical, magical." More than any of his early wins, the romp through the first 100 days, the votes on tax cuts and regulatory reform, this one was hard, a truer measure of whether the new ecosystem he had created in the House would actually work the way he planned. "You can't, in a free society, postpone permanently major arguments," he says, " and the job of leadership is to manage it." That night he erased decades of habit in the House: the habits that members are more loyal to their supporters than to their Speaker, that...
...When Gingrich arrived in the House in 1979, he could see that the Republicans were a sorry lot, sorely in need of inspiration if they were ever to find their way out of the wilderness. The old minority leader, the sweetly irrelevant Bob Michel of Illinois, would greet freshly elected G.O.P. members with the revelation that "every day I wake up and look in the mirror and say to myself, 'Today you're going to be a loser.' And after you're here a while, you'll start to feel the same way. But don't let it bother...
...Gingrich refused to get used to it, and instead spent 10 full years methodically recruiting and training his own private army. "He was willing to go in and help these candidates that other people wouldn't touch," says conservative guru Paul Weyrich. "When they came here, who was it that they knew? Gingrich was their leader." Once he became Speaker, they supported all the House restructuring he proposed, not least because it gave them a more central role than any generation of congressional arrivistes in modern history...