Word: newt
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...Newt is not going to miss me, but I'm going to miss him. I'll miss his knowledge of Prussian history, his unerring sense of what the Duke of Wellington would do in any situation, his grandiose sense of walking in the boots of Winston Churchill and Ulysses S. Grant. Like Napoleon, he was tall enough to see a future invisible to lesser mortals. A global visionary, he wrote in a calendar unearthed by Slate magazine that on June 30, 1993, he was going to "articulate the vision of civilizing humanity" and, when that was done, "define, plan...
...Newt Gingrich was still a shaggy rebel in 1993 when he sat down with the new Democratic President to share a drink on the Truman balcony. Clinton worked him hard, oozing charm, grabbing his arm, locking and listening. Newt, the smaller man, had been startled by his size, his friendliness; he liked the guy in spite of himself. Then Clinton leaned forward, and whispered to Newt his big secret, the one that defined his whole life: "I'm a lot like Baby Huey," he told Newt. "I'm fat. I'm ugly. But if you push me down, I keep...
...Clinton has always had a gift for turning weakness into opportunity, Gingrich has a gift for turning opportunity into rubble. Newt was the one who made unbalanced budgets a thing of the past, but it was Clinton who somehow got credit for it, rode to re-election, hauled his own party toward a more sensible center and emerged from Tuesday's election America's favorite imperfect leader. Voters might have retired Clinton in 1996 for moving too far to the left had Gingrich not come along and yanked the whole enterprise too far to the right. Gingrich had always been...
...next morning Gingrich held a gripe session by conference call, letting others vent about everything: the Republicans' utter absence of a message, the Democrats' lethally effective get-out-the-vote effort. "They were unbelievable," one of the leaders said to Newt. "They kicked our ass on the ground." Gingrich was mostly quiet. He listened. "He was in a state of shock," says one participant. It was different an hour later during the "listen only" conference call with members. This time Newt talked a lot, but he made no sense. He blamed the election on the unions, on black turnout driven...
...next 48 hours, the most important struggle within the G.O.P. was between not right and left but loyalty and ambition. Thinking it might be time for a human sacrifice, Newt tossed overboard his handpicked House G.O.P. campaign chairman, John Linder, only to watch Linder repay the favor by going over to the plotters. "All we did was raise all these millions of dollars--more money than we've ever had," said a source close to Linder. "Newt and [G.O.P. consultant Joe] Gaylord's job was to piss it all away." Senate majority leader Trent Lott, Gingrich's old coconspirator, couldn...