Start the Revolution
House Speaker Newt Gingrich points the way as the Republicans get their turn to govern
Dick Gephardt, once a Democratic presidential candidate, always considered a sure bet to be speaker of the House, could not sleep. It was his job to hand over control of the House of Representatives to the Republicans, and he was having trouble figuring out how to do it. In the middle of the night, he sat down in his living room and suddenly understood what he had to say. "It was what everyone was thinking, and it couldn't be left unspoken." So the next day, Gephardt simply said it: "With resignation but with resolve, I hereby end 40 years of Democratic rule of this House. With deepest respect, you are now my speaker, and let the debate begin." The mostly Republican crowd went wild.
Witnesses at a royal coronation, Democrats and Republicans both knew they were watching a historic change of congressional power. Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole slipped in to watch history happen; so did Ted Kennedy. For Speaker Newt Gingrich, it was a moment "bigger than us all." For disoriented Democrats, who never dreamed this day would come, it seemed as though a bunch of aliens had moved into the House. The Democratic side of the chamber, which never had enough seats, suddenly had room to spare; the Republican side was standing room only. The GOP congressional newcomers chanted "Newt, Newt, Newt" as their leader took center stage. The Democrats were the ones shouting about the tyranny of the majority.
The new minority party, in fact, is mostly irrelevant to Gingrich's plans. "I won't respond to Democrats at all," Gingrich told U.S. News. "Sam Walton [the late Wal-Mart founder] told me that if you focus on the customers, the customers take care of the competition." And so the Republicans' strategy is to secure their conservative political beachhead with a string of victories aimed at middle-class consumers: a balanced-budget amendment, welfare reform, tax cuts, downsizing government, legal reforms and Social Security tax refunds.
One-man show. It is Gingrich's strategy, and Gingrich's show: Even the newly Republican Senate seemed a sideshow to his center ring. In a typically lengthy and sometimes off-the-cuff speech (some Gingrich allies privately fretted about his loquaciousness), the new speaker was part New Dealer, part management consultant, part historian, musing on everyone from Franklin Roosevelt to Abraham Lincoln to Henry Clay to management guru W. Edwards Deming. He reached out to the Democrats--more than anyone expected and more than some of his GOP flock would have liked. Yet in typical Jekyll-and-Hyde fashion, Gingrich's olive branch came minutes after a slash-and-burn press conference in which he lashed out at Democrats as "narrow and foolish."
The first day of the Republicans' first 100 days produced a package of internal reforms approved by large bipartisan margins. (Gingrich calls Democratic attempts to fight some proposals "negative and defensive," and says: "I would have looked cheerful and patriotic and bipartisan and waited for the Republicans to make a big mistake.") And the first bipartisan congressional leadership meeting with President Clinton brought amiable nods of agreement and vows of cooperation. Yet while there was a truce of sorts on some items--the line-item veto and an end to Congress's habit of giving thestates things to do but no money to do them with--it didn't last long.
Within a day, Democrats were calling for a raise in the minimum wage and asking Republicans to specify what they would cut in order to balance the budget. "Twenty-four hours after we had a good [bipartisan congressional] meeting, when we were told we're going to cooperate, we had the Democrats reverting to a partisan defense of the old order," Gingrich complained.
But so far, bemoaning GOP budget cuts as mean and deriding GOP tax cuts as welfare for the wealthy is the Democrats' only strategy. White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta launched the counterattack against the GOP plan to balance the budget. "Are they going to cut Medicare?" asked Panetta. "Are they going to cut Social Security? Are they going to cut benefits for veterans? Are they going to cut agriculture?" The Clintonites--as well as allies like Gephardt--think these issues will reunite them with the middle class, which pointedly rejected their entreaties in the November election.
But the Republicans have no intention of abandoning the fight for the middle class. That could mean not only the revival of class warfare but also a bidding war over a middle-class tax cut. Democrats, says House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas, "are obsessed with disliking the rich." A cut in the capital-gains tax, he adds, is good for the middle class. "If someone doesn't buy a machine, then a worker doesn't have a job."
One problem for the Democrats is that some of them agree with Armey. Party conservatives favor a capital-gains-tax cut, while liberals--including Gephardt--vow to fight it. New Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota has proposed an agenda that doesn't even mention tax cuts and focuses instead on issues such as incremental health care reform. The White House intends to rally the troops around its "Middle-Class Bill of Rights." Even Gingrich admits liking the idea of tax breaks for college tuition. But some Democrats flinch, preferring instead to hunker down into a defensive crouch. That could prove the riskiest strategy of all. "If we can't focus on our own ideas, we've had it," says one dispirited Democratic consultant.
Line in the sand. As Gingrich advances on a broad front, the Democrats' best weapon may be the president's veto. The White House is ready to draw a line in the sand on issues ranging from budget and tax cuts to welfare reform (story, Page 30). But choosing the wrong target could prove dangerous. "If you lose the first time out then you don't have a threat," says presidential scholar Charles Jones. Agrees a top administration official: "You've got to really be able to pick your fights. In this business, you are more clearly identified with the fights you wage" than with what you accomplish.
House GOP leadership aides say they would welcome (even solicit) some presidential vetoes--in part because they would force Clinton to share the blame for any gridlock. Even so, Republicans say they expect to pass more than half of their conservative "Contract With America"--with some Democratic support. Last week they even began looking to the second 100 days and to ways to fend off internal divisions on issues such as immigration.
In the Senate, however, some moderate Republicans are already chafing at Gingrich's one-man show. Veteran Republicans know there will be no long honeymoon and no free political ride. "The biggest pitfall," says GOP Chairman Haley Barbour, "is that we have set the bar very, very high for ourselves."
In his own search to reassert authority, Clinton has consulted everyone from former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell of Maine to historian Doris Kearns Goodwin to self-help-infomercial maven Anthony Robbins. Still, neither the president nor the shellshocked Democrats have yet, as one top House Democratic leadership aide puts it, "figured out how to act in the minority." If they don't learn quickly, they may have more time than they expect.
This story appears in the January 16, 1995 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.