That was when he was at his most effective. At the time this struck me as deeply improbable, but I have to concede now that McKinnon was well ahead of the curve. Since the advent of television, there have been just two presidential elections that were arguably decided by debates: elections in which the candidate leading in the polls going into the debates ultimately lost the race.
The first was , when a sweating and sickly-looking Richard Nixon saw his lead evaporate in the bronzed glow of John F. The second was the election. There is only one moment that anyone really remembers from the first debate between Al Gore and Bush that October: the moment when Gore, listening to Bush answer a question about his litmus test or lack thereof for judicial appointees, leaned over his podium and sighed heavily into the microphone.
Voters polled immediately after the debate actually gave the match to Gore. By the following day, the sigh had warranted a segment on the Daily Show. Check out the full table of contents and find your next story to read. When I ask him how he views his legacy, Gingrich takes me on a tour of a Western world gripped by crisis. In Washington, chaos reigns as institutional authority crumbles. Throughout America, right-wing Trumpites and left-wing resisters are treating midterm races like calamitous fronts in a civil war that must be won at all costs.
And in Europe, populist revolts are wreaking havoc in capitals across the Continent. Twenty-five years after engineering the Republican Revolution, Gingrich can draw a direct line from his work in Congress to the upheaval now taking place around the globe. But as he surveys the wreckage of the modern political landscape, he is not regretful.
It was a natural audience for him. At 35, he was more youthful-looking than the average congressional candidate, with fashionably robust sideburns and a cool-professor charisma that had made him one of the more popular faculty members at West Georgia College. But Gingrich had not come to deliver an academic lecture to the young activists before him—he had come to foment revolution. The speech received little attention at the time.
Gingrich was, after all, an obscure, untenured professor whose political experience consisted of two failed congressional bids. But when, a few months later, he was finally elected to the House of Representatives on his third try, he went to Washington a man obsessed with becoming the kind of leader he had described that day in Atlanta. The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. But Gingrich had a plan. The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along.
His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself. Gingrich recruited a cadre of young bomb throwers—a group of 12 congressmen he christened the Conservative Opportunity Society—and together they stalked the halls of Capitol Hill, searching for trouble and TV cameras. Their emergence was not, at first, greeted with enthusiasm by the more moderate Republican leadership.
They even looked different—sporting blow-dried pompadours while their more camera-shy elders smeared Brylcreem on their comb-overs. Gingrich and his cohort showed little interest in legislating, a task that had heretofore been seen as the primary responsibility of elected legislators. Bob Livingston , a Louisiana Republican who had been elected to Congress a year before Gingrich, marveled at the way the hard-charging Georgian rose to prominence by ignoring the traditional path taken by new lawmakers.
For revolutionary purposes, the House of Representatives was less a governing body than an arena for conflict and drama. And Gingrich found ways to put on a show. He recognized an opportunity in the newly installed C- span cameras, and began delivering tirades against Democrats to an empty chamber, knowing that his remarks would be beamed to viewers across the country.
Although Congress had been a volatile place during periods of American history—with fistfights and canings and representatives bellowing violent threats at one another—by the middle of the 20th century, lawmakers had largely coalesced around a stabilizing set of norms and traditions. Entrenched committee chairs may have dabbled in petty corruption, and Democratic leaders may have pushed around the Republican minority when they were in a pinch, but as a rule, comity reigned.
This ethos was perhaps best embodied by Republican Minority Leader Bob Michel, an amiable World War II veteran known around Washington for his aversion to swearing— doggone it and by Jiminy were fixtures of his vocabulary—as well as his penchant for carpooling and golfing with Democratic colleagues. Michel was no liberal, but he believed that the best way to serve conservatism, and his country, was by working honestly with Democratic leaders—pulling legislation inch by inch to the right when he could, and protecting the good faith that made aisle-crossing possible.
More important, Gingrich intuited that the old dynamics that had produced public servants like Michel were crumbling. Tectonic shifts in American politics—particularly around issues of race and civil rights—had triggered an ideological sorting between the two parties. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats two groups that had been well represented in Congress were beginning to vanish, and with them, the cross-party partnerships that had fostered cooperation.
Rather than letting the party bosses in Washington decide which candidates deserved institutional support, he took control of a group called gopac and used it to recruit and train an army of mini-Newts to run for office.
Gingrich hustled to keep his cause—and himself—in the press. Effective as these tactics were in the short term, they had a corrosive effect on the way Congress operated. But Gingrich looks back with pride on the transformations he set in motion. And no one was noisier than Newt. It was , and he was 15 years old. His family was visiting Verdun, a small city in northeastern France where , people had been killed during World War I.
The battlefield was still scarred by cannon fire, and young Newt spent the day wandering around, taking in the details. He found a rusted helmet on the ground, saw the ossuary where the bones of dead soldiers were piled high. His mother struggled with manic depression , and spent much of her adult life in a fog of medication. Gingrich moved around a lot and had few friends his age; he spent more time alone in his room reading books about dinosaurs than he did playing with the neighborhood kids.
But this is not the stuff Gingrich likes to talk about. Those family picnics at the zoo that he has been reminiscing about all day? It was in Verdun that Gingrich found an identity, a sense of purpose. The next year, Gingrich turned in a page term paper about the balance of global power, and announced to his teacher that his family was moving to Georgia, where he planned to start a Republican Party in the then—heavily Democratic state and get himself elected to Congress. Gingrich immersed himself in war histories and dystopian fiction and books about techno-futurism—and as the years went on, he became fixated on the idea that he was a world-historic hero.
As Gingrich tells me about his epiphany in Verdun, a man in a baseball cap approaches us in full fanboy mode. I love you on Fox. After the superfan leaves, I make a passing observation about how many admirers Gingrich has at the zoo. The next contest is the January 31 Florida primary. Without a roaring crowd to encourage him, Gingrich took a heavy pounding from Romney on Monday and spent long stretches of the debate on the defensive over his record in Congress and his work for mortgage giant Freddie Mac.
Gingrich surged to victory over Romney in the South Carolina primary last Saturday after two debates that featured standing ovations for the former House of Representatives speaker as he lashed out at moderators Juan Williams of Fox News and John King of CNN for asking questions that he said were out of bounds. People ought to be allowed to applaud if they want to. In South Carolina, Fox News moderator Bret Baier waved his arms to the crowd before one debate but says it was part of his normal pre-show routine.
Gingrich spokesman R. The next debate is scheduled for Thursday in Jacksonville, Florida, and host CNN said it would not instruct the crowd to be silent before the it begins.
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