The Many Faces of Newt Gingrich

A House speaker divided

John J. Pitney, Jr. from the February 1997 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

By encouraging government planning, futurism may also spawn bureaucracy. As a House member, Al Gore sponsored legislation to establish an Office of Critical Trends Analysis that would have prepared reports on "critical trends and alternative futures," with the help of an Advisory Commission on Critical Trends Analysis. His bill's co-sponsor was Newt Gingrich.

Both should have remembered what Hayek wrote: "Human reason can neither predict nor deliberately shape its own future. Its advances consist of finding out where it has been wrong."

The Executive and Entrepreneur

I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions;
But really I am neither for nor against institutions;
(What indeed have I in common with them?--Or what with the destruction of them?)

Gingrich has often acknowledged his debt to the works of management scholar Peter Drucker, especially The Effective Executive (1966). During one of his college lectures, Gingrich rhetorically asked how he could do so many things at once. "And the answer is this book," he said. "This book taught me a quarter century ago how to systematically discipline, plan, think through, delegate, trust others to build a system." Anyone who knows Gingrich's career will find familiar concepts in The Effective Executive. For instance, Drucker's "rules for identifying priorities" embody much of Gingrich's style: "Pick the future as against the past....Focus on opportunity rather than on problem....Choose your own direction rather than climb on the bandwagon....Aim high, aim for something that will make a difference, rather than for something that is 'safe' and easy to do."

In his pre-leadership years, Gingrich always aimed high. Rather than embracing the "minority mentality," he sought ways to make the House GOP the majority. After the 1982 elections, he helped form the Conservative Opportunity Society, a new kind of congressional organization that sought to sharpen partisan distinctions and communicate the GOP message to the C-SPAN audience.

Gingrich was not merely tinkering with partisan tactics but creating a new, Gingrichian politics. "There are two ways to rise," he once said. "One is to figure out the current system and figure out how you fit into it. The other is to figure out the system that ought to be, and as you change the current system into the system that ought to be, at some point it becomes more practical for you to be a leader than somebody who grew out of the old order."

Gingrich could accomplish this goal because he observed another Drucker maxim: "Know thy time." That is, simply stop doing things that eat up work days without yielding results. As a backbencher, Gingrich chose to forgo the legislative detail work that consumes so many other members. Since the majority Democrats ignored GOP ideas anyway, Gingrich reasoned, why go through the motions?

After he became speaker, however, he let his self-confidence eclipse Drucker's advice about time. He took on too many duties, and when he got over-tired, he made serious mistakes. Thus he illustrated another Drucker saying: "Strong people always have strong weaknesses, too. Where there are peaks, there are valleys." Later on, he tried to rise from the valley by delegating more duties to Majority Leader Armey.

The first year of Gingrich's speakership saw harsh partisan struggles over the budget and social policy. Why did he begin by taking such a hard line? A passage from The Effective Executive explains that "one must start with what is right rather than what is acceptable because one must eventually compromise. But if one does not know what is right to satisfy the specifications and boundary conditions, one cannot distinguish between the right compromise and the wrong compromise--and will end up by making the wrong compromise."

In 1996, Gingrich and the Republicans did compromise on issues such as health and welfare reform. Because of their initial firmness, they argue, they ended up with the "right" compromises. Some conservatives would reply that the GOP "revolution" made the wrong compromises, leaving too much of the welfare state intact. They would quote another passage from Drucker: "The surgeon who only takes out half the tonsils or half the appendix risks as much infection or shock as if he did the whole job. And he has not cured the condition, has indeed made it worse."

In the next session of Congress, conservatives on Capitol Hill may hesitate to cede quite so much power to Gingrich, since they have seen that his valleys can dip very low indeed. Instead, some may turn to Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who lacks Gingrich's zigzag brilliance but wields power with a steadier hand.

The Warrior

Adieu, dear comrade!
Your mission is fulfill'd--but I, more warlike,
Myself, and this contentious soul of mine,
Still on our own campaigning bound...

Like all politicians, Gingrich uses military terminology. (After all, words such as campaign and strategy were born on battlefields.) Unlike most other political figures, he seriously thinks about applications of military analysis. In his first successful congressional race, he told a group of College Republicans: "A number of you are old enough to have been platoon leaders, or company commanders, depending on the situation, and how rapidly you move up in rank. This is the same business. We're just lucky, in this country, we don't use bullets, we use ballots instead. You're fighting a war. It is a war for power."