Word: gingrichs
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...time, House leaders were talking vaguely about a "glide path" toward a balanced budget in seven years. To Budget chairman John Kasich, that meant passing the normal five-year budget in a form that would simply make credible the idea of wiping out the deficit two years later. When Gingrich suddenly announced in late January that the Republicans would offer a seven-year plan to bring the deficit down to zero, Kasich was stunned. He was, after all, the guy who had to make the numbers...
...idea was born last winter, when most of his troops were still digging in for the first 100 days. Gingrich was already worrying about maintaining momentum. So he invited small groups of CEOS--including Jack Welch of General Electric, Jack Smith from General Motors and the Business Roundtable chairman John Snow of CSX--to dinner in a first-floor dining room in the Capitol. The executives had all presided over major downsizing in their companies, and all drew the same lesson when the bloodbath was over: they wished they had done more...
...Gingrich also learned the value of sleeping with the enemy. The strategy worked best on what would prove to be the riskiest undertaking of all, the Republican plan to restrain the growth of Medicare. Gingrich had watched as Hillary Rodham Clinton's health-care plan died its miserable death. His own proposal, which depends on shifting millions of seniors into managed-care programs, bears enough resemblance to Clinton's that he knew he had to be very careful. And, indeed, even as the Republicans were working on their plan, the lobby working on behalf of for-profit hospitals was preparing...
That's because in endless meetings, Gingrich graciously solicited their ideas, and even accepted some of them. But he also made clear that a bill was inevitable, that the numbers would be huge, and that they stood to suffer far more by opposing it and being frozen out than by playing along. The hospital executives were amazed by Gingrich's mastery of numbing issues like reimbursement formulas. And they were delighted by his willingness to buy them off. He protected doctors' fees and won the endorsement of the American Medical Association. He satisfied the American Association of Retired Persons...
...Democrats are no slouches when it comes to keeping lobbyists happy, but in Gingrich's Congress the most powerful interests are acting as honorary members. As the head of GOPAC, the Republican political action committee he led from 1986 until last May, he studied the ways and means of campaign cash flow as assiduously as he plotted the G.O.P. victory in Congress. With his party now in power, Gingrich's new goal was to give his permanent revolution a permanent fund-raising machine, each part of which would be overseen by a lieutenant...