With all of the baggage Gingrich has, the one piece that has been the most difficult for him to set aside has been the question over his participation in the Washington influence industry. We, quite unusually, find ourselves in the middle of an election in which the most burning concern has been the cozy relationship between special interests and the government. “Crony capitalism” has been the rallying point for would-be reformers of all stripes who are determined to play a role in the election — from the Tea Party to the Occupy movement — and the issue is being kept alive in the news by stories of corruption. Not too long ago, the Securities and Exchanges commission made headlines by bringing fraud charges against former executives of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. The public mood was summed up by a new Rasmussen poll which shows that only 17 percent of the country believe our government has the consent of the governed, a result that prompted pollster Pat Cadell to say Americans have a “pre-revolutionary” sentiment.

In this type of atmosphere, it’s not surprising then that his supporters would take reports that the Republican establishment don’t like him as bonafides for his ability to rock the boat and stir things up — or, would consider constant talk about his past divorces as more of the personal politics that has distracted the country from more pressing issues. But he also gets hit with the other side of the sword when his opponents press him as being Clintonian about the precise definition of a lobbyist. His performance in an Iowa primary debate became dogged by several verbal exchanges in which he defended his activities as a private citizen and defended the existence of government-sponsored entities; through out all that, he was never inaccurate, but never convincing. What’s worse, Gingrich’s “lobbyist issue” has the threat of bringing back into importance all of the other baggage that he’s so far been able to avoid. With the taint of corruption on him, Democrats will be eager to say that bringing up his past divorces would not be so much personal politics on their side; but an example of him having used it on his own, to hypocritically go after Clinton for sex while he was engaging in an extra-marital affair. They’ll also raise the case that so many of his colleagues dislike him because of how unethical he was, pointing to his ouster and ethics charges as proof of this.

What’s being left out of the story, however, is a larger picture, in which Gingrich has both acted as an advocate and an opponent of measures to curb lobbying and the influence of money in government. Listening to what people are saying in the news, for instance, who would ever guess that he once pledged his support for “dramatic reforms” to campaign finance law, and helped spearhead a bill which limited PAC contributions — denouncing PACs as having “become an arm of the Washington lobbyists” that needed to be reduced in significance?

That isn’t to say that he was an uncompromised advocate on the issue. His opponents referred to his efforts as a “mockery of true campaign finance reform”, and his bill as a political act that was designed to be impossible to pass, as he continued to fight proposals in the House that gained Democratic support, such as Shays-Meehan —which more popularly became known as the “McCain-Feingold” bill, after its counterpart in the Senate. But his efforts and rhetoric over the years showed some sincere support for laws that would change the system, as he tried to position the 1994 Republican Revolution as not only a change in party but a change in the way things were done in Washington.

The making of the Republican Revolution

The takeover of Congress in 1994 is now looked back on with a somewhat clouded memory. Both Republicans and Democrats are likely to depict it as the continuation of the trend that Reagan began when he won the Presidency in 1980. Republicans like to harp on how America was always essentially a “center-right” country, and they credit Reagan for beginning a decades-long challenge against the “elite” establishment that — abetted by liberal news media and academic institutions — kept the government separated from her people. Democrats obviously disagree with the reasons the Republicans came to power, but they still buy into the narrative that the shift started with Reagan; even President Obama will credit Reagan for being “transformational”, and has spoken at length about “30 years” of conservative philosophy dominating Washington — meant to dial-in to the date that Reagan was put in office. This narrative nicely fits both Republican and Democratic messaging; Republicans get to tout Reaganism as a solution to our problems, and Democrats get to denounce it as a cause of them. However, buying this narrative, it would be a little strange to notice that in 1992, not only was Clinton elected to the Presidency, but Democrats retained large majorities in both the House and the Senate. That’s more than a hiccup in a trend towards Republican dominance.

The usual blame for losing the Presidency, of course, goes to Ross Perot, who Republicans charge spoiled the election by splitting the conservative vote. But that doesn’t explain the victories in House and the Senate — which, in fact, were continuations of almost unbroken Democratic dominance since the 1950s. Republicans did storm into the Senate when Reagan came into office, but this didn’t last — by 1987, they were once again kicked out by the voters. Going forward, when Perot dropped out of the election, he cited a “revitalized Democratic party“, as the positive reception of Clinton’s address at the Democratic convention ended up stealing support from his faltering campaign. Now out of the race, most of his supporters moved over to Clinton, both of them having appealed to the public with messages of change and reform. At that time in history people were frankly skeptical about the Republican Party, after them having opposed reform efforts and after first, the Reagan administration had been dragged through the Iran-Contra scandal, and then several members of the Bush family were implicated in the Savings and Loan Scandal. Polling found that when Perot accused Republicans of “dirty tricks” — no matter how crazy he sounded (such as accusing them of doctoring photos of his daughter to make her appear she was a lesbian) — more people than not believed he was telling the truth.

After the loss, Republicans were split on where to go, but a constant focus was on Perot, who was trying to use his showing at the polls as a stepping stone for a bigger public presence. With a poll by a conservative group declaring that Perot was a threat to the Republican party, most Republicans, who had up until then been trying to flatter the man and win his approval, started turning against him. As Clinton was starting to draw fire on his health care proposals, they wanted to be the beneficiaries of the blowback. Bill Kristol was one of the first to draw out his guns, saying, “There’s an unwillingness to hit the bottom line here, to say the guy is a demagogue … we can’t let the dissatisfaction with Clinton’s stances be captured by Perot.” Bill Bennett added his voice. “Perot’s full of hot air,” he said. “This guy is peddling from an empty wagon.”

Gingrich sought to strike a different note, and continued his efforts to appeal to Perot voters. He applauded Perot’s efforts to rein in bureaucracy and eliminate government waste, and even sent in a $15 membership fee to join his new national organization, United We Stand America. What Gingrich did next is better remembered — he created the lynchpin to the 1994 Republican victory, the Contract with America — but few people understand where this strategy came from. As many people have pointed out before, the idea for the Contract with America was actually borrowed from a series of pledges Perot proposed in his 1992 campaign book which was titled a “Check List for All Federal Candidates.” According to Clay Mulford, Perot’s campaign manager, the idea of “getting a contract of issues that candidates would have to sign in order to get an endorsement … was transferred to Republicans, and of course, Perot was delighted by it.” Gingrich also drew from a previous reform movement, Theodore Roosevelt and his Progressive Party, in originating the title for the pledge. The 1912 Platform of that party was ceremoniously titled “A Contract with the People.” He sought to emphasize that the message of the Republican Party was essentially a message of reform; that the people who had voted for Perot could trust them, rather than the Democrats, to change the way the government operated. In trying to achieve that, he even worked with Frank Luntz, a pollster now associated with Fox News, but who had previously worked for the Perot campaign.

The strategy paid off, and to top it off, ended up earning Perot’s endorsement. Whereas Perot once looked more favorably towards Clinton and the Democrats, he now returned to his favorite venue, Larry King Live, and argued it was time to give the Republicans a “a turn at bat.” “For the last 40 years the Democrats have controlled the House of Representatives. For the last 60 years they’ve controlled the Senate for all but 12 years,” He said. “Those folks who work for us haven’t done a good job for all those years.”

“The Republican Party is the reform party”

From the start, Gingrich tried to reinforce the image he sought to create by making sure that the Republican Party stuck to the proper messaging. He circulated a memo to all incoming freshman that he had written five years earler; the title — “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” He noted, “As the tapes have been used in training sessions across the country and mailed to candidates we have heard a plaintive plea: ‘I wish I could speak like Newt.’ That takes years of practice. But, we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little.” It included half “optimistic positive governing words”, and half what were euphemistically called “contrasting words”. Gingrich’s list of “positive words” included “common sense,” “courage,” “liberty,” “strength” and “vision.” The list of what the congressman called “contrasting words” included “bosses,” “greed,” “lie,” “pathetic” and “taxes.”

Democrats like to seize on this, of course, and portray Gingrich as an Orwellian figure, working with Luntz to manipulate the public and bamboozle them into supporting a Republican agenda. They claim he twists the meaning of words so they say the opposite of the truth, and that Luntz likewise tries to use polling to shape popular opinion, rather than gauge it. But Gingrich’s motive was in fact a sincerely held belief that Democrats had been doing exactly what they now accuse him of. In his world view, Democrats only had maintained an iron grip on the government for 50 years because their use of language better appealed to the public in an era in which popular media — television and radio — controlled the political debate. Hence, his praise of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as “the greatest president of the 20th century,” which is now, alternatively, being used to tar him as a progressive by his detractors on the conservative side of the aisle. Roosevelt is widely credited as having first effectively used the medium of radio in an election campaign, and later adapting it to his presidency with his Fireside Chats. While Democrats had successfully portrayed Republicans as the party of the rich, as against equality and civil rights and against reform, Republican language was typically tone-deaf, and Gingrich wanted to change that.

However, to dismiss Gingrich’s interest in reform as merely being a rhetorical strategy would be a mistake. Like many Democrats saw Republicans as controlling the swamp of corruption in Bush’s presidency, Republicans like Gingrich back then associated it with the Democrats. When he used “contrasting words” — “greed”, “bosses”, “lie”, “pathetic” — he meant them. Likewise, when he used “positive words” like “common sense” and “vision” to describe himself and his own views he also meant them. And as his conservative critics have mentioned, he was then unafraid to present himself as a problem-solving “progressive conservative” in the mold of Theodore Roosevelt and to link himself with Alvin Toffler and his idea of the “Third Wave.”

What they don’t mention — and is even more vitally important to unlocking how Gingrich sees politics — is two things — First, that what Toffler’s vision of the “Third Wave” actually involved was the idea that an increasingly decentralized, information-driven society would pose a challenge to the network of corporate, political, and social interests that were embedded in the government bureaucracy — what are today in common vernacular referred as the “special interests.” This is in line with the modern conservative vision of governance. Gingrich was actually one of many conservatives at the time to that were referring to themselves as “progressive conservatives”, and this included Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett. Kemp and Bennett founded a group together called Empower America, which described itself as a “unique combination of public policy institute and political advocacy organization” which “promotes progressive-conservative policies based on the principles of economic growth, international leadership, and cultural renewal.” Second, those who presented themselves as the “true conservatives” at the time and balked at his associations with Toffler, fought tooth-and-nail against his attempts to fight the entrenched interests — against agenda items of his such as term limits, a line-item veto, and a Balanced Budget Amendment. Mort Kondracke, for instance, in a 1994 editorial both criticizing Toffler and opposing the Contract with America, called these these proposals “at worst, cynical, empty promises or demagogic appeals to the anti-government passions of the moment.” On the other hand, supporters of Gingrich, and the supporters of the Contract with America, complimented his new approach. National Review editor William F. Buckley often expressed praise for Gingrich, and Rich Lowry, then just a writer at the magazine, said those who opposed his agenda were “creature[s] from a different era.”

Putting this in some context — according to Toffler, civilization had already gone through two phases: first as an agricultural economy, and second, as it was reshaped by the Industrial Revolution. The third phase would be shaped by the Information Age, the rise of television, computers, and as it later turned out, the Internet. Each of these was and would be shaped by the forces of movements, events, and people, which is what he characterized as the “wave”. What embodied “Second Wave” civilization was the entrenched set of interests in government that many people now see Gingrich as part of — the bureaucratic, hierarchical interests, in Washington, shaped by the culture of lobbying. In opposition to this, decentralization would be one of the primary aspects of “Third Wave” thinking, which through new tools would help topple the bureaucracy and give more power to individuals and entrepreneurs, and end up taking power away from lobbyists.

One of Gingrich’s associates, Jeff Eisenach, had at the time been head of a pioneering organization called the “Progress and Freedom Foundation”, which had the startling goal of developing a “Third Wave” political party, presumably to be molded out of the GOP. Eisenach contended, echoing Toffler, that the political battles of the era were no longer about left-vs.-right interests, but between the “Second Wave” interests entrenched in government and “Third Wave” interests anxious to break them down and move the society towards decentralization. Gingrich took up the mantles of this project through his leadership in Congress. He tried to tie Toffler’s ideas into a conservative vision, whereby linking them to American exceptionalism, he argued that the the United States as a country represented the vanguard of civilization — a “universal civilization” as he termed it — and that the Third Wave revolution would be furthered by a Republican platform oriented towards tearing down the bureaucracy, decentralizing government, and taking power out of the hands of entrenched interests. In this approach, he differed somewhat from Toffler, who had a modern, secularist take on values. Charities, churches, and community organizations were pictured as “mediating institutions” that would do work that is now performed by government.

In order to promote a Third Wave agenda in Congress, Gingrich pushed through a broad range of reforms as soon as he assumed his Speakership. One of his first was a set of changes in House rules that simultaneously shook-up the status quo and the relationship between entrenched interests and gave him more power to enact his platform in the same stroke. Gingrich first bypassed long-standing seniority rules — asserting a power that under the Democrats would have been left to the party caucus — and looked to younger members to head his committees. Second, he established new rules which limited future chairs to terms no longer than six years. Third, he instituted a set of “fairness rules” which guaranteed members of the minority party to participate in creating legislation. The changes he made in total had the effect of preventing committee chairs from maintaining their own personal “fiefdoms” — gaining control of a committee and becoming the go-to-guy for lobbyists who wanted access, who would then in turn work for the Congressmen to assure their re-election. Not incidentally, this also ended up making his position, as Speaker, more important, as it gave him more control over the makeup of committees and the content of bills that ended up on the floor. It didn’t harm him, either, that the appearance of him as a leader who wanted too root out corruption would give him trust with the public.

It was then not surprising that Gingrich later spent a lot of his efforts trying to convince Ross Perot not to form a new political party, and then insisting repeatedly after the Reform Party was formed that “the Republican Party is the reform party.” The messaging of an authentically new, third party referring to itself as the reform party would conflict with Eisenbach’s construct of a “new” Republican Party, and would de-legitimatize the “Republican Revolution” as well as Gingrich himself as a revolutionary.

The battle for campaign finance reform

The wedge that ended up driving the Perot movement against Gingrich was his failure, in their eyes, to demonstrate a genuine commitment to campaign finance reform. The Speaker had actually kow-towed to them on this issue, appearing at a United We Stand America conference in an effort to persuade Perot to continue his support of the Republican insurgency. When Perot endorsed their rise in 1994, he qualified his support by saying that his organization would form a third party if they failed to move on the issues they cared about. So, that in mind, Gingrich was eager to make some public efforts, going so far as making a handshake deal with President Clinton — pledging to work to put together a bipartisan commission to recommend campaign, lobbying, and political reforms to be taken up by Congress. By the time of the conference, however, he’d refused to move on this commitment, and Clinton was nagging him in the press about it, so he sought to convince Perot he was still interested in the issue. Following a speech by Dick Gephardt where the Democratic Minority Leader urged the organization to help him push “radical and fundamental political and campaign reform,” Gingrich, not to be outdone, said that his party was for “dramatic reforms,” too. He explained his lack of progress by saying that these issues needed study and warned that any commission that was appointed in haste would see its recommendations doomed to failure.

Some UWSA members were upset that the meeting, rather than being a productive discussion, ended up being a chance for Republicans and Democrats to solicit Perot’s blessing. Unconvinced that Gingrich was truly interested in the issue, their dissatisfaction influenced Perot to finally come out and announce efforts for the third party. Quicker than lightning, this was then followed by counter-efforts by Gingrich and other Republicans to explain in the press about how a third party wasn’t really needed. Perot at that time was running as high as 26 percent in a hypothetical three-way race, making it appear that any third party candidacy would significantly disrupt the chances of a Republican victory.

The following year — anticipating a November election — became the host of a frenzy of efforts from both the Democrats and the Republicans to try to push through campaign finance measures. The bill with the most significant bi-partisan support — and media attention — was Shays-Meehan, which was matched by its counter-part in the Senate, McCain-Feingold. The main aim of the bill was to ban the use of “soft money” — money spent by political parties rather than campaigns — to circumnavigate federal spending limits, and to regulate the proliferation of issue advocacy ads. Many Reform Party members opposed this effort, because of provisions in the legislation that would end up helping incumbents and hurt third parties, rather than genuinely reforming the process. For instance, the terms of McCain-Feingold were designed give major party candidates an hour of free air time on public television, while requiring third party candidates to collect thousands of signatures just for a paltry five minutes.

Meanwhile, a newly elected Republican Congresswoman from Washington, Linda Smith, had been pushing a much tougher bill, one which would have banned PACs in their entirety and restricted candidates running for the House to raising half of their money in their district. Her past work on the issue — having helped craft campaign finance reform laws in her state — fortified an image her of as a reformer, and she won praise from Perot at the UWSA conference. “She will not flinch, will not be intimidated, will not walk away from it,” he said of her. U.S. News & World Report featured her in an article, with the laudatory headline “She just wants to Clean Congress.” To add contrast to their glowing approval of her efforts, the article picked out the Speaker as her foil, saying that he supported a vote on campaign finance reform, but had problems with her bill. Gingrich was quoted as saying he thought politicians needed to spend more money, not less, on campaigns; and also represented the standard Republican concerns that it would place improper limits on free speech. In another source, Smith suggested that the Speaker supported the concept, but hedged because he “realizes he faces some old bulls that have been here forever in both parties.”

Rather than allowing her bill to reach a vote, Gingrich had instructed her to work with Bill Thomas, then the chair of the House Oversight Committee, to work on drafting a different bill — something she didn’t at the time understand, since she believed hers to be perfectly fine. The reason why would later be clear. The next year, the Speaker ended up preventing a vote on Shays-Meehan, and instead offered up a countering Republican bill, which had — at the right moment — worked its way out of Thomas’ committee. With a few substantial changes, the “Smith Bill” had now become the “Thomas Bill” and was now posed as the “Republican alternative” for campaign finance reform. The legislation still would have required candidates to raise half of their money from within their district. However, it no longer imposed a ban on PACs, but now would only cut the amount they could contribute in half, and allowed the ceiling on the amount that individuals could give to rise with inflation. This fit the standard for “real campaign finance reform” that Gingrich had described earlier: it would, according to him, fix the system by allowing more, not less, money to be spent. Additionally, in what was seen as a poison pill — as if it wasn’t problem-some enough as it was — the bill would have required unions to get permission each year from each of their members before spending any of their dues money on political purposes. The President of Common Cause, a campaign finance reform group denounced this as “mock reform”, saying “It leaves in place the status quo.” She argued that the net effect of the changes would just be to trim PAC giving by 9 percent, since most PAC contributions had already been well under the ceiling.

The Thomas bill ended up failing in a vote 259-162; 68 Republicans joined with 190 Democrats and one independent to defeat the measure. Rep. Smith ended up filing a discharge petition that would have forced the House to bring her original bill to the floor if she were able to collect enough signatures for it. In 1997, still upset with Gingrich’s burying and then mutilation of her bill, she ended up being one of 9 Republicans who voted against re-confirming him in his role as Speaker. The bill was brought up again in 1998 to avoid another vote on Shays-Meehan. That time, further measures were put in place to insure the bill’s defeat. It was put forward right before the April recess, required a two-thirds majority for it to be passed, and no additional amendments were allowed. Democrats referred to this as a “sham procedure”.

Despite all of this, its still hard to dismiss Gingrich’s support for campaign finance reform as an idea. Although knowing that the Thomas Bill would never pass a vote, he still ended up giving a strong defense of it on the floor of the House. Calling it “a first step in the right direction,” he praised its logic and argued that it would actually work, in contrast to Shays-Meehan, which he felt would only end up helping incumbents. The biggest problem in our campaign finance system, he said, was there was a gross disparity between what incumbents could raise and what most challengers could raise, and this is something that inherently gave more control to PACs and lobbyists. PACs would form relationships with sitting legislators — often committee chairs — and then work to re-insure their election. The PAC system, through this, “has become an arm of the Washington lobbyists” and needed to be reduced in significance. Gingrich also framed the problem by saying that incumbents inherently had greater access to the media, from news programs, to talk shows, to commentators. In short, he said, “the fact is in a free society, one of the keys to freedom is being able to fire incumbents and hire new people.” Gingrich’s analysis fit squarely with his past approach to reforms in the House. His bypassing of seniority rules, term limits on committee chairs, and fairness rules, were all designed to do the same thing as his campaign finance reform bill — attack the entrenched interests, by means of attacking their ability to form relationships with sitting legislators. He criticized campaign finance reform efforts over the previous 20 years as going in the opposite direction, by limiting expenditures, and said this led to the current situation. In his view, Shays-Meehan was more of the same. Instead, he argued, by expanding the ability of individuals to contribute at the same time as placing restrictions on where Congressmen got their funding, it would empower challengers and weaken incumbents.

This wasn’t the first time he advocated on behalf of the issue, either. In 1989, at a time when Democrats were trying to push an ethics reform bill, he made clear to the press that Republicans would only accept such a bill if it were in a larger package that also included campaign finance reform. He was following the lead of President Bush, who earlier in the month had made a call for restrictions on PACs. In a move to compete with the Democrats on the campaign finance issue, Bush proposed that the ceiling on PAC contributions be cut in half — an idea, that as we saw, was revived later, for much the same purposes, in the Thomas Bill. Gingrich agreed with the President, believing campaign finance reform would help Republicans defeat Democratic incumbents, who at that time — if only because they had been in power so long — held the lion share of PAC money. He insisted Republicans would settle for nothing less than “real” reforms, in contrast to a Democratic attempt a year earlier to pass a bill which was denounced as an “incumbent protection act” and successfully filibustered by Republicans in the Senate. “We’re not going to give them an inexpensive ticket to masquerade behind,” he said. “In order to pass ethics reform, we’re going to require as a tariff that they agree to pass election reform.” Others in the leadership didn’t share his concerns, and believed that his efforts were making it appear as if Republicans were opposed to ethics reforms, so they put a stop to it.

Gingrich had actually added his support to idea of banning PACs just before the Thomas Bill was brought to the floor; something that once again created division within the Republican leadership and became characterized by The Washington Post as part of an “internal struggle over party identity.” According tot he Post, Gingrich was taking sides with one of two groups that was vying to control the message and agenda. The first group, composed of moderate Republicans like Shays and freshmen like Smith, believed that the Republicans were given a majority in Congress only because of their promises to fix Washington, and that if they didn’t stay true to those ideals they would be punished by voters. They were ardently pushing for strong campaign finance reforms, like those embodied in Smith’s bill. Up against them was a faction led by Majority Whip Tom DeLay, who argued they were wrong, and that taking corporate money was necessary to keep the party in power. Under the influence of that mindset, DeLay went so far as to encourage his fellow party members to take money by circulating lists of “friendly” and “unfriendly” lobbyists based on the size of their donations. He also fought to put down any of the proposals for banning PACs, believing it would put him and other Congressmen in an uncomfortable bind.  Voting against it would alienate Perot supporters, while voting for it would raise questions about why they had raised so much PAC money. Bill Thomas originally sided against DeLay and with Smith, as did Pete Hoekstra; and the two briefed the Republican leadership on the PAC ban proposal. DeLay’s opposition to them was then outvoted, as Gingrich and other leaders approved the recommendations, while agreeing to allow members to air out any differences before the Republican Policy Committee.

That meeting led to a lot of anger and rancour. Fifty members showed up and listened to Hoekstra outline the proposal, and, against skepticism, Dick Armey said that passing legislation that banned PACs would be a test of its constitutionality. Bob Barr retorted that Armey’s suggestion of how to use the courts was “the dumbest idea [he had] ever heard.” Pat Roberts called the proposal “self-flagellation” and an invitation to defeat; arguing that while corporate donors would pull back, unions would continue to contribute to Democrats. Peter King accused the leadership of an “abdication of responsibility” and “pandering to Perot voters.” In a later interview, King argued that using PAC money was necessary to defeat wealthy challengers or incumbents. “This was a political decision based on the easy assumption that politics is corrupt and we’re going to be above politics,” he said. “It’s hypocritical, pompous, and self-righteous.” John Dolittle decried that it was “horrible politics” and would only make Republicans look like hypocrites, as they twisted the arms of PACs for money while going behind their backs to voters and argued they should be banned. One lobbyist referred to the whole affair as a “political inferno.”

It’s not surprising then that Gingrich tempered the idea, and sought to shift the focus of the bill.

His more-money, rather than less-money approach to campaign finance reform won the endorsement of David S. Broder, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist at the Washington Post, who had long talked about the pernicious influence of lobbyists in government. Broder’s commitment to the issue is evidenced by the fact that would later go on to write a book on this topic, titled Democracy Derailed: Initiative Campaigns and the Power of Money. He wrote editorials endorsing the Thomas Bill, saying although Gingrich’s idea was “heresy”, that he was “dead-right to challenge the conventional wisdom on this subject and urge politicians and pundits alike” and that they should “think again before they saddle the country with another batch of ill-considered ‘reforms’”. He re-emphasized the logic of the bill and argued that that it “may point the way to the future” and “offer a way out of this maze.” It to him was both more of an effective approach, and more of a practical approach. Besides focusing on the right problem — the inability of challengers to face incumbents — he said that it acknowledged that the Supreme Court was moving towards the view that restrictions on spending were restrictions on speech, and also pointed to the fact that more and more spending was moving outside of the process of contributions to candidates and parties, and towards “independent expenditure” and “issue advocacy” campaigns. Allowing a candidate to raise more money from individual donors in his district, according to Broder, would “enhance the role of two groups: a congressman’s own constituents and the political parties”. This approach, he argued, made more sense.

In addition to the advocacy by Broder, Rep. Thomas continued to go to the press and argue the logic of his proposal even after the bill was defeated. Both he and Common Cause president Ann McBride wrote editorials about the bill, debating its merits, in the conservative print and online magazine Insight on the News. From all of the evidence — the attempts to argue the issue to both liberal and conservative outlets — it would seem that both Gingrich and Thomas displayed genuine interest in pursuing the issue. Its likely that all of the apparent roadblocks the Speaker put up that double-downed on making it look certain the bill would fail were efforts to placate his fellow Republicans, many of whom did not want themselves associated with the effort. They had two reasons to be against it: first, that they tended to be against campaign finance reform of any kind and didn’t want the party to be associated with it; and second, even if they were associated with it, it would be politically counterproductive for them to be linked to a bill that proposed more-money rather than less as a solution to the problem. It was also almost a given that the Thomas bill would never have passed, even if the vote on it followed normal legislative procedures, and the appearance of its failure being designed served to save them any embarrassment.

However, the vote on the bill did serve some purposes. It allowed Gingrich to make a public statement that the approach that Democrats were pushing on campaign finance reform was not the only possible one, and that what he originally said at the UWSA conference was in fact correct — that the issue needed to be studied more. It also served as a conversation starter for Gingrich and Thomas for the approach they would be more favorable towards seeing enacted. Even Broder acknowledged, in defense of the approach, “it won’t become law this year, but it may point the way to the future.” Of course, that was no consolation to Rep. Linda Smith, who all this time only wanted an up-or-down vote on her own bill and felt like she was being intentionally shut out of the process.

In the mean time, even as he was trying to defend the idea that the Republican Party was the reform party, Gingrich went out and defended the idea of including Ross Perot in the Presidential debates, while other Republicans were trying to keep him out. It was another area where he stood against the majority of his own party. He criticized the Commission on Presidential Debates as a rigged process and a tool of the entrenched interests, calling the appearance that the selection criteria were independent and objective “an excuse for political leaders not to be accountable.” Further, he said, “I think we have nothing to fear by allowing people to be seen and to argue and to talk with each other and I think the very concept of an elite commission deciding for the American people who deserves to be heard is profoundly wrong.”

This was the first strategy that Gingrich used to speak to the public’s concern on campaign finance issue; the second was already shaping up back around the UWSA conference when President Clinton was pressing him on his commitment. Clinton at that time said that he was pushing Gingrich on their agreement, but was met by “five weeks of silence.” He tried to make it seem like Gingrich wasn’t interested in keeping his promises; saying he would have been spanked growing up if he had done that in his household. Gingrich tried to turn the table on him, feeling the President was only so interested in the issue because he wanted to distract from his own corruption and his legal troubles. He re-framed the issue this way: “It’s almost as though Dick Morris, his chief in staff for politics, has said to him, ‘Every time there’s another Whitewater hearing, why don’t you hold a press conference on this topic, or every time there’s new evidence that … they didn’t pay their taxes on Whitewater, let’s do another press conference.’” He continued, saying that he already spoke to the administration and told them he was prepared to deal with the issue after they addressed Medicare, and suggested that instead of accepting that answer and moving on until then, they were pushing it merely for political purposes.

Gingrich, the public muckraker

As it so happened, the legislative efforts for campaign finance reform, after the election, were about to transform into campaign finance hearings, a means for him to expose and root out corruption in the Clinton administration and position himself as a public muckraker. During the election, Common Cause had issued a scathing report that aimed its guns on both parties: they accused both the Dole campaign and the Clinton campaign of receiving money from foreign sources, and both the Democratic and Republican parties of violating federal election laws by helping their respective campaigns.

The Speaker was eager to seize on this issue, although — not surprisingly — he ended up being more interested in scrutinizing Clinton than he did Dole. The campaign finance hearings uncovered a lot of evidence embarrassing to the President, including a tape of him discussing with his advisers how to get around campaign finance laws. The hearings also featured explosive testimony by Roger Tamraz, an oil company executive, who acknowledged that he bought access to the White House and that this practice was normal. Tamraz said that he was trying to keep up with all the other business people who make contributions, including heads of other oil corporations who opposed his projects. “Who do I meet at the White House but my peers, and all the oil company executives,” he said. “So now they know that Roger is also there, so they can’t bluff me. At least I neutralized their position.”

Scrutiny was brought on the Clinton administration in many different directions, from allegations that they were renting out the Lincoln Bedroom to high-paying donors and were involving White House staff in illegal activities, to charges that Al Gore was involved in improper fundraising at Buddhist temples. It ended up spiraling out into many mini-scandals that were being built on top of the rap sheet that Gingrich was already creating. This most famously included ‘Chinagate’, in which the Clinton administration was accused of trading money from Chinese nationals for seats on an important commission that would eventually lead to the transfer of missile technology to China.

All of these were legitimate inquiries, even though they also happened to be one-sidedly interested in investigating Democrats. Gone from the public’s memory was the fact that the original report by Common Cause had also implicated the Dole campaign in receiving foreign money, and that the Republican party, too, was awash with the same corruption. This was something that perhaps the Speaker couldn’t have helped even if he wanted to; even if he was interested in going after corruption in his own party, it might have sewed dissent and removed him from his leadership position. — Never mind that it would also be one more thing that would de-legitimatize the Republican Party as a reform party in the mold of his Third Wave revolution; as a party against the entrenched interests. It may be possible he even believed that whatever problems were in the Republican Party, he would find them in the Democratic Party a hundred-fold, since they were, in his mind, the party of the establishment. Republicans would keep on insisting that the problems in the Democratic party were proportionately larger, even despite protests from Democrats. Democrats called on Gingrich to pull the plug on the “incompetent and unfair” investigation that they charged was wasting millions of taxpayer dollars.

In any case, his strategy worked in turning the campaign finance issue against the Democrats; the avalanche of charges and evidence against Clinton damaged his public image. By October, the President’s job approval ratings started a slide, going down from 60% to 55%, and the Vice President’s favorability ratings went down more markedly from 61% to 47%. A majority of the public believed all of the sordid charges against Clinton — two-thirds believed that he made fundraising calls from the White House and improperly used the Lincoln Bedroom, more than half believed that he knowingly took illegal foreign contributions, and about half believed that Clinton was willing to exchange government policy for donations, and was aware of illegal plans to raise money for him during the campaign. Polls further showed the public supported an Independent Counsel being appointed to investigate illegal fundraising activities by the President.

Like his play on the campaign finance reform issue was not a new strategy, but a renewal of an old hobbyhorse, this wasn’t the first time that Gingrich played the role of a public muckraker. In 1988, he filed a complaint with the House ethics committee against then-Speaker Jim Wright,  asking for an investigation into several charges of corruption — allegations that Wright converted campaign contributions into book royalties to pocket them, that he hired people on the taxpayer’s dime for personal purposes, that he excessively used his office to intervene with federal agencies on behalf of savings-and-loan officials, and that he, on several instances, used his power to try to help companies in which he had a direct financial stake. The ethics charges, which eventually forced Wright’s resignation, led to retaliatory efforts against Gingrich, as Democrats charged that the future Speaker was engaged in mail fraud. They maintained the allegation that Gingrich’s PAC, Conservatives for Hope and Opportunity, had obtained money in the mail through false representations; saying that that claim was the money would go to conservative candidates, when very little of it did.  Gingrich characterized these attacks as smears, meant to derail his investigation into Wright.

To this day, Democrats maintain that his efforts against Wright were unfair, scorched-earth tactics, and had been the start of the increasing partisan infighting that has plagued the Congress ever since. “Gingrich invented the politics of venom,” Barney Frank said recently. In counter to this, it should be noted that Common Cause — the group that released criticisms about fundraising practices in both parties, and had fought Gingrich on the campaign finance issue — was also at that time supporting the investigation into Wright. Democrats, who had worked with the group on issues like arms control and Iran-Contra, now were attacking them and claiming they were only mounting their campaign against Wright to raise funds and make good on a claim of bipartisanship. The President of Common Cause at the time, Fred Wertheimer, rebutted, saying that their support of the issue was based on careful consideration, and that Wright could have avoided being under so much heat if he had himself called for a ethics inquiry in order to clear the air instead of fighting it.

In the end, the success in forcing Jim Wright out helped put Gingrich into the spotlight and aided his rise to power as Speaker. Now years later, after the campaign finance hearings, there was talk that Gingrich was positioning himself to run for President. “If you put together a list of 20, I am on the list,” the Speaker told a hometown paper in an interview. When asked if he wanted to be President, he responded, “Sure, of course.” His own favorability ratings were still low, so he remained non-concomitant and said that he was only considering it.

But the campaign finance charges against Clinton ended up being a dead-end. Even though a majority wanted an Independent Counsel appointed, and even though it was urged on by FBI Director Louis Freeh, Janet Reno refused to move, and the media started to move off the issue, preventing any public pressure from coming down on her and forcing her to do so. Frustrated Republicans went out and did interviews, calling for an Independent Counsel, but they weren’t able to translate their pleas into any results. Yet, by January of the following year, they were about to have in their hands a more sexy scandal — one that the media was not only willing to cover, but willing to cover day-and-night with an obsessive enthusiasm until Clinton finally left the Presidency.

Past is prologue

When Gingrich pushed through his reforms to House rules back in 1994, it was actually not ushering the Congress to a ‘never to have been seen before’ era, but a throwback to an era a century past, where Speakers Reed and Cannon similarly changed House rules to gain power. Reed, in 1890, gained the authority to name chairmen and all the members of all committees, and presided over the Rules Committee, allowing him to play a key role in deciding which bills got to be heard by the House. He was followed in 1903 by Cannon, who was seen as using his authority as a means to obstruct the will of the majority, rather than enforce its will. Cannon, ironically, was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative that was at odds with the agenda of the President at the time, Theodore Roosevelt, the original “progressive conservative”. In 1910, a bipartisan House majority revolted against Cannon and removed the powers first instituted by his predecessor. Over the following years, the full membership reasserted its authority over the affairs of the House, and diminished the role of the Speaker. Gingrich didn’t follow Reed and Cannon’s model to the tee, but he nonetheless ended up facing a similar fate.

By the end of the Lewinsky scandal and the whole affair of charges of impeachment, Clinton’s job approval ratings had skyrocketed and the approval ratings of the Republican Congress had continued to dwindle. Clinton, a smart politician, sought to turn the attacks against him around and — with the news of the scandal now dominating the airwaves — make them look like a distraction from his duties in office. Shortly after the scandal broke, he held a State of the Union address where he lauded all of his accomplishments while in office. His approval ratings went up over night, and suddenly all of the Republican efforts against him were termed a “witch hunt” or a “fishing expedition.” Not only were the Lewinsky charges impugned, but so were all of the charges brought up in the campaign finance hearings. And, as quick as the public was to forget that Republicans, too, were guilty of campaign finance abuses, they would soon forget that there were any abuses by Clinton either, or any abuses to begin with. Now, Republicans weren’t after Clinton because he was a corrupt man who flouted campaign finance laws, but because they were prudes, and were concerned with moralizing about his adultery. In the 1998 elections, Republicans ended up losing five seats in the House, the worst midterm performance in 64 years for a party that didn’t hold the Presidency. It was too late for the party to disown Gingrich’s efforts, but it was not too late to force him out as Speaker.

All this time, Gingrich was facing his own problems — charges against him from the House ethics committee — although, up until that point, his fellow Republicans were eager to defend him on them. In an ironic twist, the ethics violations he was accused of concerned activities that helped his rise to power, the Republican insurgency, and formed the foundations for his strategy in a creating a Third Wave revolution. The heart of the case was that he used entities organized as nonpartisan research groups to subsidize his political activities — this included groups such as American Opportunity Foundation, American Campaign Academy, the Abraham Lincoln Opportunity Foundation, and finally, Eisenbach’s group, the Progress and Freedom Foundation. The problem was that was because they were formed as nonpartisan they were able to fall under tax laws for charitable giving, and donations to them were tax-deductible. However, all of the groups were formed to promote, in some way or another, his Third Wave political agenda. Not only did all of these activities speak to his ideas, however, but they also in a way represented his whole idea of what a Third Wave revolution would look like: groups from the outside — “mediating institutions”, we can call them — rising up to create a challenge to the interests entrenched in a “Second Wave” bureaucratic system.

The ethics charges were pushed against him about six-months after he promoted his campaign finance reform bill on the floor of the House, and right as Senator Dole was bringing up campaign finance reform as a way to push Clinton in a corner after the Common Cause report had indicted both of their campaigns.  The President had, in return, endorsed Dole’s idea, in a move that was designed bring the issue to a more general discussion of the problem of money in politics, and take heat off of himself. Joining in the cause, ninety House Democrats and two Republicans signed a letter to Gingrich and Gephardt requesting passage of “comprehensive and meaningful campaign finance reform” within the first 100 days of the congressional session. This was not only in the defense for President Clinton, but as a way to challenge a growing Republican discussion of organized labor using dues money for “educational” campaigns on behalf of Democratic candidates. Democrats argued that unions using members dues without permission, was no different than corporations using stockholder money without their permission.  A second battle for campaign finance reform seemed like it was about to heat up.

It was in this contentious atmosphere that the Democrats on the ethics committee were pushing for charges against the Speaker. The charges were filed by David E. Bonoir, the Democratic whip — the job, of the whip, of course, is to insure party discipline and make sure that the party is getting through the agenda of the party leader. In what was seen as a move to counter this, and keep the focus on Democratic wrongdoing, Dick Armey began an effort to replace most of the members of the ethics committee. He insisted that it was normal housekeeping; that some of the members had to be removed because of House rules which limited service on the ethics committee to a term of six years. Democrats contended that some of the members he said he would replace did not reach their six-year limit, and others he wanted to stay in fact did. They also argued that, because the House adopted new rules at the beginning of each Congress,  they could alter the rules temporarily to allow the Gingrich case to be settled without any appearance of tampering.

The news of these efforts came the same day that the House Republicans unanimously re-confirmed Gingrich as Speaker and Armey as Majority Leader. Gingrich gave a speech where he urged House Republicans to adopt his father’s creed that “‘duty, honor, country’ were more than words; they were a way of life.” He declared, “We are more than just politicians. We’re more than the usual cynical, venal, narrow, corrupt profession that all too often is a reflection of the current culture. We are in fact the inheritors and the lifeblood of freedom.” He hailed Armey as part of a “partnership of extraordinary sophistication and strength” and the “chief operating officer of the House.” Armey returned the compliments, saying that Gingrich was “among the most powerful Speakers ever”. He continued, “he’s powerful because of the weight and strength of his ideas. He’s powerful because of the weight and strength of his presence in the presentation of those ideas. And he’s powerful by virtue of the weight and the strength of the affection and respect that he is held by his colleagues in the House of Representatives.”

A few months later, right as the campaign finance hearings were beginning, the same man who lauded Gingrich as a paragon of leadership and virtue, and to whom he extolled his respect, would be accused of joining other Republican leadership in an attempted coup. In what would be hard to consider a coincidence, the hearings were set to begin in the Senate on Tuesday, July 8, while discussions of a coup are reported to have begun on Wednesday, July 9. Allegedly because they saw the Speaker’s public image as a liability, the coup attempt — led by Majority Whip Tom DeLay — was to present the Speaker with an ultimatum: resign, or be voted out.  After being warned by a member of Armey’s staff, Gingrich met with Republican leadership and explained that he would under no circumstance step down, and put water on their efforts by saying that if he were voted out, there was a possibility that Democrats, with dissenting Republicans, would vote in Gephardt, and that their plans would fall through. DeLay now quickly fell out of Gingrich’s circle of trust, as Gingrich began a discussion to replace him with his chief deputy, Dennis Hastert. DeLay, remember, had originally led the opposition to Gingrich’s support for the reform faction in the party. Years later, he would be the center of a number of legal troubles related to the campaign finance issue, through his association with lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Ambramoff allegedly provided DeLay with trips, gifts, and political donations in exchange for favors to Abramoff’s lobbying clients. Two of his aides, one of them a later lobbying partner, pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges associated with Abramoff. DeLay himself would be indicted, and convicted, on charges of money laundering and conspiracy to commit money laundering, in an attempt to move $190,000 in corporate donations  to Republican candidates in the Texas State Legislature. He was sentenced to three years in prison, and ten years on probation, and is now out on bail pending an appeal.

In 1997, the Speaker was able to effectively shut down the efforts at a coup and quell dissent in Republican ranks, but he wouldn’t have been able to do the same after the 1998 election results. Amidst talk of dissent, and after talk of a “war” on the Speaker by James Carville, he announced that he was resigning from his position. “I’m willing to lead but I’m not willing to preside over people who are cannibals,” he said. Just a month earlier, in October, the ethics committee dropped the last of the 84 charges against him. The tax concerns were handed over to the IRS, who recused him of any violations of the law. In the end, the only thing Gingrich ended up being reprimanded on was “misleading statements” to the committee.

After Gingrich removed himself as Speaker and left the House, the Republican Congress entered a period in which it grew lazy on the issues that had inspired the ’94 revolution, and started getting deeper in the swamp of corruption that Tom DeLay brought with him. With Gingrich gone, the McCain-Feingold bill was also able to pass, although its effects in helping incumbents and expanding the role of lobbyists in the system seemed to validate the Speaker’s concerns about it. The connection between Republicans and Abramoff, the increase in pork spending, and the refusal of Republicans to strongly pursue any budget-cutting or reform measures, helped bring back the Democrats to power in 2006, in a campaign in which Nancy Pelosi charged Republicans as fostering a “culture of corruption.”

Once Pelosi was in power, promising to “drain the swamp”, she started to take mantle of the reform agenda that was once in the hands of Speaker Gingrich. She passed rules ending congressional rides on corporate planes, a block on the revolving door between congressional staff jobs and lobbying shops, and a process to make it more difficult to insert earmarks into bills. She also instituted a strict time limit on roll calls, to prevent arm-twisting of reluctant members on votes,  and a requirement for conference committees to work in the open and include minority party members. Republicans called her a hypocrite on the issue, but they were so tarnished that they lost the argument. Two years later, however, when a Democratic President was elected, she begin to reverse the rules reforms that Gingrich had put in place more than a decade earlier. The six-year term limits on committee chairmen was gone, as were the fairness rules that ensured that the minority party could participate in the legislative process.

Meanwhile, the Speaker, now free from the confines of elected office, returned to his project of creating think tanks and research groups. These too, by the time of his Presidential run, would be under attack for participating in political activities — specifically, lobbying. The most notable group is the Center for Health Transformation — perhaps, taking a cue from the fact that his attack on Clinton’s health care proposal aided him enormously in the Republican Revolution. Several years later, with another Democratic health care proposal on the table, he was in a position to frame himself again as the “real” reformer.

Everything old is new again

It would be an understatement to suggest Gingrich’s interest in a presidential run was ever simply a flirtation. The man who said “of course” he wanted to be President was even floating hints of his interests on the wake of his resignation as Speaker. On talk that he was gearing up to run for the Republican nomination in 2000, many found confirmation in a written statement released by his office. There, he said, “It is time for me to move forward where I believe I still have a significant role to play for our country and our party.” In the prelude to the loss of the Republican Congress in 2006, Gingrich pined about the direction in which the party was going and called for it to return to being a “reform party.”  Anything that jeopardized the Republicans’ status as the reform party “is more dangerous for us than it is for Democrats,” he said, pointing out that the party’s majority came from followers of Ross Perot who wanted “real reform”.  He called the GOP a “too internally oriented” party and commented,”To the degree that we are seen as no longer the reform party, we create space for either a third party or for people to just stay at home.”

The former Speaker started going on the television circuit, primarily Fox News, where he became a common contributor and commentator. In order to try to steer things around, he released a book with a new 10-point Contract with America. He chose not to participate in the 2008 election, citing McCain-Feingold as a reason, saying that by those rules he couldn’t campaign and run his group American Solutions at the same time. That type of rule, he said, “penalizes being a citizen.” A few years later, his new public presence would coincide with the rise of the Tea Party, another movement with a reform-driven anti-establishment agenda. To Gingrich, it must have seemed like a match made in heaven, and if any time was going to be ripe for a Presidential run, this should be it. On the airwaves, he took the fight against “Obama’s secular socialist machine”, to position his rhetoric in sync with that of the Tea Party movement.

In what should have been an foreshadowing of another split in the anti-establishment movement, the Supreme Court, now with a greater conservative presence, struck down decades-old campaign finance restrictions in their Citizens United v. FEC decision. McCain-Feingold, the legislation he both fought against, and cited as a reason he wasn’t running for President, was now gone.  Gingrich appeared on NPR to praise the ruling and make an argument in line with his more-is-less view about campaign spending. “I think I would say that the real campaign finance reform under our Constitution would be to allow anyone to give unlimited amounts of after-tax money”, he said, qualifying that with a support of transparency, saying that candidates should have to file reports on what they were spending. He reiterated, “I think you want to really be engaged in allowing the maximum of resources to be in politics, not the minimum.”  The past 30-year regime of campaign finance reform law was framed by him as “anti-middle class”, saying again that it helped incumbents, and added that it prevented citizens from criticizing their politicians effectively. Now that campaign finance reform was no longer as popular as it once was, this allowed Gingrich to take out one of his favorite “contrasting words” — “bureaucratic” — and called the past laws “bureaucratic finance reform.”

In none of that conversation, of course, did he mention he once hawked his own campaign finance reform bill. While he saw the court decision as in line with his own thinking on the matter, he originally defended both the logic of fundraising restrictions in his own bill as well as their Constitutionality. Remember, he argued that candidates should have to raise half their funds from their congressional districts. Also, by limiting PAC money and increasing the ceiling on individual contributions, he felt that the bulk of contributions would shift away from lobbyists and towards citizen activists. Time has shown that to be questionable; individual donations have become another channel, through “bundlers”, by which to funnel corporate money. Gingrich can argue that he was wrong, but that his instincts were correct — that the campaign finance issue was more complicated than his opponents were making it out to be. Like with the individual mandate, he can also say that his campaign finance reform bill was only offered as an alternative to the Democratic bill. On both issues, he can say, he only put forward legislation that he preferred to what the Democrats were offering, not something he was enthusiastic about. What he can’t do, however — and neither can the rest of the Republican Party — is run away from the argument he used to support restrictions on union contributions.

In his floor speech, he pointed to a prior Supreme Court ruling, Communication Workers of America v. Beck. In that decision, the Court found that unions were only authorized to collect from  non-members those fees that were necessary for them to act as their collective bargaining representative, and so could not use their fees for political purposes. These have been colloquially known as “Beck rights.” Gingrich justified this — as did Trent Lott, and any number of other Republicans — as allowing legislation that would put additional restrictions on union spending. He argued that the Congress could require fees for fair representation to be completely severed from fees for political expenditure, and then require that unions only collect fees for political expenditures with specified permission from each individual union member. This argument was revived by the Republicans again, during the campaign finance hearings, to which we should recall, the Democrats objected, saying there was no difference between what unions did and what corporations did. The Supreme Court seemed to disagree with both previous Republican and Democrat positions on this issue. During the proceedings, Justice John Roberts mocked the idea that the government needed to help the shareholders keep the board of directors accountable. It was something they could take care of themselves.

Nonetheless, Gingrich took sides with the Court, as did many self-annointed Tea Party spokespeople like Glenn Beck. He was poised to be the beneficiary of what he touted as “real campaign finance reform” — more money in the system and more of an opportunity for people like himself to engage in “citizen activism.” He would also work with Citizens United, which was in fact, a long-time conservative activism group that had its heyday the Clinton era and, in sync with his own public muckraking campaigns, hounded the President about issues like Whitewater. Newt and his wife Callista would produce with them a video extolling his view of American exceptionalism. Not long afterwards, another anti-establishment arose, Occupy Wall Street, which decried the Citizens United decision with slogans like “corporations are not people.” Anti-Citizens United, they’re inherently anti-Gingrich. His own message to them? “Go get a job after you take a bath.” They didn’t represent the “deep sense of responsibility” in the American psyche, nor the “citizen activism” interested in “renewing America” he would often talk about. Apparently, some anti-establishment movements are Third Wave revolutions, and others are not.

The former Speaker continues to push forward his campaign, which now has a new Contract with America, and now in its third iteration, he calls for taking on corruption in the judiciary with the same fervor in which he took on corruption in the Clinton administration and pledged his support to campaign finance reform — a venture that could prove just as divisive. If the split between the Tea Party and OWS on Citizens United was not a sharp warning, its unclear what would be. The Supreme Court’s stand on this issue has many on the left calling out the “conservative activism” of Republican-appointed judges, much as the right raised their voices about the “liberal activism” of those appointed by Democrats.

Some people are arguing that Gingrich would be too smart to jump aggressively into an assault on the courts when there would be too many other issues to address if he were elected President. They say that his suggestions are a way to start a conversation about judicial activism. That has a good argument behind it. Gingrich’s bark has always been larger than his bite, and, as his battles over campaign finance reform show, he’s always understood the need to maneuver and posture in order to make his case. His proposal for a Republican alternative to campaign finance reform, as addressed, could also be seen as a means to start a conversation. However, if there’s something else this past shows, its that he doesn’t like to be on the losing end of conversations. Gingrich continued to maneuver and manipulate the campaign finance issue and take it in many different directions just so it would be in the Republicans advantage rather than the Democrats — from opposing Democratic legislation, to offering his own bill in a phony vote, to turning it into campaign finance hearings — that he eventually precipitated his ouster. Stepping down, he continued to point the finger at his critics, saying, “The idea that I would be the excuse to cannibalize the majority is so sickening I can’t risk it.” There’s no reason to believe it will be any different in a Gingrich presidency. What would begin as a conversation might end up consuming his whole term in office.

Like he was more than eager to appeal to Ross Perot and appear before UWSA, Gingrich also seems ready to speak to those who would get a lot of popular attention today, even if it runs against the wishes of the conservative establishment. He was the first to come out and announce he would appear at a debate hosted by Trump, just as he tried to make a statement and send in his membership fees to UWSA and go against the warnings of critics of Perot like Kristol and Bennett. However, this time, those who have anointed themselves as the “true conservatives” of the party have ideologically consumed his 1994 agenda, while back then, the people who used that type of posturing fought against it. What Kondracke, the “true conservative” of an era past, once called “cynical, empty promises or demagogic appeals to the anti-government passions of the moment” — issues like a balanced budget amendment and term limits — are now the calling cards of Tea Party favorites like Jim DeMint and Michele Bachmann.  And while then National Review staff writer Rich Lowry once called opponents to Gingrich’s agenda “creature[s] from a different era,” now National Review editor Rich Lowry snarks that Gingrich’s ideas are “not especially conservative.”

Toffler’s revenge

Times, of course, change, as does politics. The favorite argument then was that Theodore Roosevelt was a conservative that had been misportrayed as a liberal; the favorite argument now is that he was the start of big government progressivism. It was seen as a liability for a Republican candidate to oppose campaign finance reform then; its now seen as a liability to be in favor of it. The fact that things change is a constant in the universe, never mind in politics, where everything is about expediency and winning the argument. However, what’s is more difficult to sort out is who is being honest and who isn’t.

Gingrich is currently in the process of explaining to his critics that there were two different Theodore Roosevelts; one who, in his early Presidency, reflected the same type of “problem-solving conservatism” that Gingrich represents; and one who, later, represented a shift towards big government progressivism. Maybe it would be helpful to point out that Roosevelt, himself, was accused of being both too conservative and too liberal, each by different parties. For his political life, he was known as a supporter of business interests, which is the source of his support for protectionist trade policies. Back in that era, business was in favor of tariffs, while labor was against them. However, as different anti-capitalist movements were emerging, he tried to position himself towards the center, and support what he ended up calling a “square deal”, in which both business and labor were given their proper dues. In taking this position, he was often called by his conservative critics a “liberal” and a “radical.” Unlike Democrats like William Jennings Bryan, whose rhetoric not only showed an antipathy towards business, but a hostility towards the Constitution and the courts; Roosevelt believed that conservative values could be used to justify liberal ends. Roosevelt was a supporter of the Constitution, but felt that the courts had acted in too reactionary a manner, and positioned himself in the tradition of Lincoln’s opposition of the Dredd Scott decision. The 1912 Progressive Party platform, from this vantage, called for the Supreme Court to give the same review to appellate court decisions that determined legislation to be Unconstitutional as to those that determined legislation to be Constitutional. This was the infamous “Lochner era”, where the Court ruled exclusively in favor of the “freedom of contract”, now widely regarded as judicial activism even by conservative legal scholars such as Robert Bork. Roosevelt’s New Nationalism speech, often quoted for its criticism of business, also took the time to defend it against “a war on the owners of property.” He often referred to his opponents on the left as “radicals” and his opponents on the right as “reactionaries”.

Of course, that was a different era, shaped by what Alvin Toffler would recognize as “Second Wave” interests like corporations and labor, and where the key to getting politics done was forging great compromises. So far, it would seem that rather than compromise, faction has been the operative interest in “Third Wave” revolutions. That would not leave Gingrich out. Although he’s sometimes regarded by his critics as being prone to compromise, its hard to see any compromises he put forward as anything else but wedges in a dogged pursuit of a conservative agenda. His support for an individual mandate was used by him as a wedge against the Clinton health care plan, and his support for a “more money” campaign finance bill was used by him as a wedge against Democrat-supported campaign finance reform proposals. He may have supported their reasoning at the time, but the only reason he even brought them up was to have an alternative to Democratic legislation. Gingrich felt that if Republicans didn’t have an alternative solution, the Democrats would always win the argument. This also explains the fact that Gingrich has pushed Republicans to have a “conservative environmental policy”, and was willing to sit down with Speaker Pelosi in an ad, so to not let the Democrats have control over the issue. At any rate, eventually, what counter-proposals he ever offered didn’t get through, and he quietly dropped his support for them, moving on to more hardened conservative positions.

His supporters and his opponents alike recognized this intentional duality in his policy agenda.

William F. Buckley’s praise for him was based on an appreciation of his acumen in managing his policy priorities with his rhetoric. Buckley gave a keen analysis about his maneuvering over the question of the minimum wage: “Gingrich is overwhelmed by the political question. He has responsibilities not faced by the opinion merchants. Thus, on the minimum wage he makes his point,  in order to keep him in good terms with his philosophical network; but then capitulates, on the ground that flesh-and-blood Americans who are running for re-election can’t fight back with any prospect of success against the charge that they would deny a worker a better wage than the minimum. Even so, it isn’t only sedentary Republicans who believe the time has come to return Gingrich to the theoretical fastness. In the last analysis, the vitality of the conservative movement has got to depend on the communicability of truths. If it is an untruth that the minimum wage helps the very poor, and then the question becomes: Is this one of the battles we should weigh in on?” Buckley also saw the same reasoning in Gingrich’s refusal to go after a tax cut agenda. “Gingrich is, of course, in favor of reduced taxation, but the accent he has placed on a balanced budget has gotten in the way of a political crusade on the subject.” Clinton had the ability to frame any tax cuts without spending cuts as creating problems with the deficit, he explained, and this was a distraction from Republican arguments for a balanced budget. Instead, Gingrich sought to defer any crusade on tax cuts until after the balanced budget amendment was passed.

Kondracke, when criticizing Gingrich’s affinity for Toffler and Roosevelt as well the proposals in the Contract with America, also couldn’t help but notice the juxtaposition. “While his allies say that Gingrich is a problem-solving ‘progressive conservative’  whose hero is Thedoore Roosevelt,” he noted, “the GOP contract is mainly a traditional-conservative document in the image of William A. McKinley or Robert A. Taft.” Kondracke also took pains to contrast the scope of the idea of a Third Wave revolution with the focused, concrete efforts of the Contract with America, saying it represented “less than meets the eye.”

What is being tested in this election, however, is whether Gingrich’s skill at maneuvering can either win his way with the establishment, or survive the demands of anti-establishment sentiment, in both the Tea Party and in Occupy Wall Street. The first option is something that he already seems to have lost, as key figures within the Republican Party have done some maneuvering of their own; against him, and in favor of Romney. They don’t want a Gingrich campaign, or a Gingrich Presidency, to be a repeat of what they saw when he was Speaker of the House.

That in mind, he’s ratcheting up his anti-establishment rhetoric in preparation for the Iowa caucus. The biggest issue here that will test him is his activities with his non-profit groups, the same type of groups that were both key to his rise and the center of the ethics case against him. If he could be plain spoken about it, Gingrich would have no reason to deny that he was part of what’s nebulously being called the “influence industry.” That’s part of the point of what think-tanks do, after all — they’re formed to influence policy. The Center for Health Transformation was formed by Gingrich to influence health policy. He was working to express his own view as a “private citizen” and as a “citizen activist.” Gingrich is arguing what people refer to as a “lobbyist”, on the other hand, is someone who is paid to take a position on someone else’s behalf; and he makes the argument that he’s never changed his position on issues in exchange for any money.  To him, that’s what defines corruption: a quid-pro-quo deal, in which an exchange of money between hands leads someone to advocate for those moneyed interests.

It may not be everyone else’s definition of what corruption is, however. In most of the cases in which Gingrich worked in the “influence industry” he only worked as a consultant. In his role for the Center for Health Transformation he may not have lobbied, but he did help facilitate lobbying. The Center helped create meetings between Congressmen and corporations through their lobbyists. You would think this would also go against Gingrich’s own interest in fighting the bureaucracy and the entrenched interests, as he was positioned to do in his role as Speaker, when he sought to break up legislative “fiefdoms”, whereby Congressmen were bought and sold, and denounced the PAC system as an “arm of the Washington lobbyists.” In his broader vision, he always seemed to be more interested in technical definitions of lobbying and technical definitions of corruption than changing the system. Again, he once vowed, “We are more than just politicians. We’re more than the usual cynical, venal, narrow, corrupt profession that all too often is a reflection of the current culture. We are in fact the inheritors and the lifeblood of freedom.”

Maybe this is something Gingrich has in the back of his mind. As he continues his Super PAC ad fight with Romney, he once again has brought up the absurdity of campaign finance laws and called for them to change. Jonah Goldberg, in a recent column, puts it this way: “Mr. Gingrich, after all, is the only candidate to actually move the government rightward. While getting wealthy off the old order, he’s been plotting for decades how to get rid of it. To paraphrase Lenin, perhaps the K Streeters paid Mr. Gingrich to build the gallows he will hang them on?”

Perhaps. But maybe, as the true heirs of the Third Wave revolution — the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street — march on and find their own voice, he’ll find that he’s built the gallows on which he’ll use to hang himself.