Word: newt
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Clinton, he needs Gingrich too. The Speaker has given the long embattled Commander in Chief his first effective foil since George Bush left the stage three years ago. Compared to Newt, Clinton can appear measured, careful with his words, disciplined in his behavior. Compared to Newt, Clinton looks like a wise elder, a steady commander of the armed forces. In that sense, Newt is Clinton's redemption, the man who made the President "relevant" again--and just when it started to count...
...much of the energy he had hoped to spend renewing American civilization. The merry cybernaut wants a new moral order, not just a new political one, in which the poor will find their salvation on the Internet and private charities will succeed where government bureaucracies have failed. However great Newt's achievement in political terms, it was not enough for people who talked in terms of rearranging the moon and planets, and saw in Newt the chance for galactic change...
According to his mother, his first taste of politics came when his father, Newt McPherson, made a deal: if he didn't have to pay child support anymore, he would waive his parental rights and let young Newt's stepfather Bob Gingrich adopt the boy. Newt's own legal parentage was thus the product of a budget deal. The adults around him were never very respectful of authority or convention. He shared a room until he was nine with a free-spirited grandmother, who had a romance late in life with a mysterious government agent and taught Newt to read...
...because he didn't hide his contempt for incompetent superiors. His mother was the gentle buddy who sometimes let her kids stay home from school just to be with mom, but would hide them in the closet at lunchtime when Bob came home so he wouldn't get angry. Newt never openly challenged his father's strict rules. He just ignored them...
...Newt's early proposals revealed the Gingrich paradigm: civic progress on a tight budget. One day when he was 10, he told his mother he was going to the library and instead took a bus to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to lobby city and state officials about building a zoo. He pressed his cause for the next two years, with arguments that echo eerily 40 years later. "A few minutes' conversation with Newton leaves an awed adult with a flying start toward an inferiority complex," reporter Jace Bennett wrote in the Harrisburg Evening News. "Don't you know an African lion costs...