The week between Christmas and New Year's, usually a dead time for punditry, sprang to political life when Newt Gingrich found himself in trouble yet again. For the media and the Democrats, the situation is simple: Newt bad, Newt forced to admit error, Newt dead.
Meanwhile, Republicans and conservatives are divided and ambivalent. Some on the right have devised ultra-sophisticated analyses of the ways in which the GOP would be better off if Gingrich were ousted as speaker of the House: Republicans would have a more solid platform from which to attack Bill Clinton for his fund-raising scandals; Gingrich is poison with independent voters; support for Gingrich now will cost Republicans in 1998. Other Republicans have equally sophisticated analyses of why Gingrich should stay: There would be a period of chaos if Gingrich were removed; a successor like Dick Armey would be just as unpopular as Newt in two months' time; only Newt can hold the moderate-conservative coalition together.
There's merit in all these arguments, and we've been batting them back and forth as much as anybody else in Washington this week. And we now say: To hell with it.
To hell with complicated and cynical calculations of strategy. when nobody knows what the real consequences of a Gingrich ouster would be. In fact, to hell with strategy altogether. It's time for conservatives to follow their gut and do what's right.What's right is clear: Newt Gingrich must be supported. And given the character of the assault on Gingrich by Democrats and the media, two short words provide all the guidance we need:
Screw 'em.
Whether or not Gingrich's ouster would be bad for the GOP, it would be bad for the country. It would make a hash of the basic principle that the punishment should fit the crime. Gingrich's alleged misdeeds are far less serious than Travelgate, Filegate, or any single one of the Whitewater tributaries. They pale in comparison with the misbehavior that led to the resignation of Democratic speaker Jim Wright in 1989. And they are orders of magnitude less sleazy than the foreign-donations scandals now engulfing the White House.
If Gingrich is forced out while Bill Clinton and Al Gore stay, we'll have ripped the blindfold off Justice. The lesson will be that abrasive guys who look bad on TV get punished for small sins while charming guys get away with big ones. If Republicans in the House dump Gingrich, they will have accepted and enshrined the principle that conservative Republicans with hostile media relations get judged by one standard, while Democrats are judged by a far looser one.
Gingrich appears to be guilty of sloppiness in the way he followed the tax laws governing not-for-profit organizations. If he were a private citizen and the IRS caught him doing what he purportedly did, his auditor would tell him not to do it again and send him home. That proves the real issue in the Gingrich controversy is not this ethics baloney. Gingrich's real crime is that he is unpopular.
Republicans, who sometimes like to laud political courage as a virtue, are proving to be divided on the issue of whether unpopularity should be a hanging offense. They need to stand firm, for they ought to know that Gingrich's unpopularity rests at least in part on the fact that he is a leader feared and disliked by the media and the liberal establishment.
Despite steady opposition from these quarters, the party Gingrich leads has come very close to being a majority party. And the definition of a majority party is that it doesn't use its opponents' criteria to measure its own success. People on the right cannot let people on the left decide who speaks for conservatives, or who leads them.
Conservatives have difficulty with this. Conservatism has long suffered from an inferiority complex: As Richard Brookhiser once put it, "In their hearts, they know they're wrong." Remember those Reagan revolutionaries who looked to the editorial pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times to see whether they were doing a good job? Weren't the elections of 1994 supposed to have ended all that?
Being in the majority means that you stand by your leaders, though they are flawed, when they are under assault from your opponents. If their transgressions are of the magnitude of Gingrich's, you don't hem and haw and drag out the scrutiny process. You stick by your man and you tell his implacable enemies like David Bonior and the Times to stuff it. That's what being in the majority means, because the assault on Gingrich is an attempt to reverse the decision of the real majority -- -the voting majority of the United States.
We just had an election. The American voters decided to return a Republican majority to the House knowing that Gingrich would be speaker. So of course the Democrats are trying to use Beltway social pressure and national media pressure to overturn the results of the election. Of course they are seeking to use their cultural power to discredit Gingrich and thereby retroactively discredit the results of 1994. We trust that Republicans and conservatives will not allow themselves to be intimidated in January by an assault that failed in November.
If House Republicans decide at some future date that Gingrich doesn't offer the right leadership for them, then it will be perfectly appropriate for them to seek a different helmsman. But Gingrich should not be ousted when, as now, his enemies and the party's enemies would have forced the decision.
It may be true that, in the short term, dumping Gingrich could lift a PR burden from GOP shoulders. Media opponents would be deprived of a juicy target. But we also know that parties that behave in a cowardly manner lose the respect of the public. We know that parties that are intimidated by their opponents quickly and deservedly come to be held in contempt.
We know this because we can look across the Atlantic to see it. In 1990, the British Conservative party ousted Margaret Thatcher. There were realpolitik reasons to replace her; the Tories had far stronger reasons to get rid of her than the Republicans do to get rid of Gingrich. She'd had a run of 11 years, with all the accumulated scars. She'd made major policy errors. She had broken permanently with a large section of her party over Britain's role in Europe.
So the Tories dumped her. And they went on to win the next election (against a weak opponent). But now they wander around at night trying to wash imaginary blood from their hands. The Conservative party is at war with itself. It is a diminished party, and its leaders look small. Thatcher was abrasive, but she was large. The men who ousted her now appear to be weasels.
Even as the British economy is booming, Tory prospects are bleak, and the public holds a oncerespected party in vague contempt. Meanwhile, Thatcher lingers in the national consciousness, sometimes annoying, sometimes shrill, but nonetheless personifying principle, while the men who replaced her, who are decent at heart, reek of opportunism. The party lives with a devastating legacy of that 1990 crime, which, at the time, was so easy to justify on the grounds of sophisticated political strategy.
The Republican party should learn from the Tories' mistake. Forget the fancy strategic footwork. Stick to the basics. Newt Gingrich's enemies are in full cry, demanding his removal. Give them the only appropriate response: Nuts.