Word: gingrichs
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...including the right to write the bills themselves, like the one passed last February that imposed a 13-month moratorium on federal regulations. During floor debate, the Gucci set stood close by, typing out on their laptop computers the talking points that Republican leaders would use on the floor. Gingrich's money operation is now purring: during the first six months of this year House Republicans received nearly 60% of the campaign contributions given by the top 400 pacs. Last year Democrats got two-thirds of such contributions...
...strength and my weakness," gingrich says, "is that I see normally impersonal events vividly and personally." Conviction and charisma helped him transform the House and press his agenda, but ego and hubris produced the major miscalculations. If the months leading up to the August break were played on offense, the fall was full of fumbles. For the first time, Gingrich had to close a deal, to bargain with someone whose interests were at odds with his own. He learned the hard way that this stage of the game, the stage at which Bob Dole is the unchallenged master...
Before the August recess, Gingrich drilled his troops on how to sell his yet-to-be-unveiled plan to "save Medicare," loading them down with packets full of talking points, charts and graphs. But when work resumed in the fall, the Democrats suddenly rose from the dead and struck back with a lethal message. The Medicare rescue, they charged, was actually just a way to give a tax break to the rich by robbing from the old. Gingrich had known all along that $245 billion in tax cuts over seven years would be hard to explain and easy to attack...
More than any other single person, Newt Gingrich has brought about this historic reversal of roles. In the process, he has just about finished off the political consensus initiated 60 years ago by Franklin D. Roosevelt. Gingrich's success was fed by the smoldering anger of a nation suffering from stagnant wages, chronic overspending by the Federal Government, the failure of the public schools, the decline of public decency and the stubborn inability of the American underclass to rise out of poverty. He bundled up these anxieties cleverly, even brilliantly, and set them ablaze. "I want to encourage...
...Gingrich has coupled his own campaign for power with the recognition that conservative skepticism was not a sufficiently upbeat message. In chronically optimistic America, he needed something more upon which to build a mass movement. In place of the old conservative caution, Gingrich, one of the most absorbent if not always discriminating minds in national politics, has concocted a stew of beliefs that blends the sunny economics of Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, the stern moralism of the Christian right and enough giddy futurism either to excite or to frighten his followers. He dubbed himself a "conservative revolutionary...