Word: newt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...abortion rights. Members were growing tired of going along with the Speaker; they were suffering, as majority leader Dick Armey put it, from "greater-good fatigue." They drew the line that night, after 26 hours of floor debate, as the House moved toward a vote on the spending bill. Newt's high command knew it didn't look good. By majority whip Tom DeLay's count, the Republican leadership had started the day fully 80 votes short of a majority; now, with precious time ticking away, Gingrich still needed at least 10 votes...
...areas of his greatest success, it was Newt the professor at work, a careful student of power who recognized that if he hoped to change the world, he would need to change the Congress first. His problem was that the House was never intended to be very powerful; the Founding Fathers designed a legislative body that could boil over with parochial passions, only to be cooled by the sober Senate. Senators can filibuster; Presidents can veto. All the Speaker can do is create the appearance of momentum so that the rest of the government will...
...carefully choosing his fields of battle, Gingrich gained enormous leverage over the Senate and the White House. And when necessary, he could still use the freshmen in a good cop--bad cop routine. Early this fall, when Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich were haggling about the budget over the phone, the President told one of his aides that the Speaker wasn't the problem in reaching a deal. "It's not Newt," the President said. "It's all those freshmen he's got to worry about...
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...
...disputes that America is caught in a thicket of problems. And no one disputes that many of the solutions of the past have done little to solve them. But if we leap into Newt Gingrich's Conservative Opportunity Society, will we, collectively, be better off? Conservatives of various stripes and hues have opposed activist, progressive government for generations. Indeed, the minimalist and maximalist approaches even divided the Founding Fathers. Will less government, as envisioned by Gingrich, then mean more prosperity and well-being for all Americans...