Burning Down the House
Page 4
One of the stories that Gingrich liked to talk up involved Flynt and an unpaved road. Flynt had wound up in a controversy over a dirt road that bordered his home in the city of Griffin. One of the congressman’s neighbors, Skeeter Norsworthy, owned a home that was also adjacent to the road. In 1973, Norsworthy ran for Griffin committeeman promising to pave every city road. After he won the election, the city had the road paved at a cost of $12,000. The city paid for one-third of the bill. Flynt received a $4,000 assessment while Norsworthy shared his $4,000 assessment with four neighbors living on the other side of the road to cover the remainder of the cost. But Flynt had transferred the title to his property to a former aide, who never paid the assessment. When a local newspaper wrote about the story, someone anonymously sent the city a check to pay the bill, after which Flynt retook the land title.33
Gingrich also went after Flynt for having rented space on his farm to a Ford Motor Company plant to use as a parking lot and shortly thereafter offering an amendment to the Clean Air Act that the manufacturer endorsed.34 The only television spot that Gingrich ran showed him standing in a pile of five-pound bags of sugar, to highlight the contributions Flynt received from the industry.
Gingrich’s first campaign was exciting, but it wasn’t yet enough to knock off Flynt. The senior Democrat, as an incumbent, would continue to ladle congressional pork into the district. And 1974 was a hard year for Republicans all over the country; after Watergate, the party suffered from its connections to a discredited president who was forced to resign. Voters elected large Democratic majorities to the House and the Senate.
Gingrich’s first showing was still impressive. The Christian Science Monitor reporter John Dillin singled out Gingrich to his readers as evidence that Republicans “can recruit young, attractive candidates” and “challenge even Democratic incumbents head-on.” While most “Gingrich-style” candidates were attracted to the Democratic Party because of Watergate, Dillin wrote, Gingrich’s campaign was significant to the GOP because he offered an exception to the rule.35 In a Democratic year, Gingrich won 48.5 percent of the vote in a district where registered Republicans composed less than 10 percent of the electorate. He attracted strong broad-based support in the suburbs, the target electorate for the new Republican Party.36 He even did relatively well with black voters in Andrew Young’s former district, who felt little loyalty to a racist southern Democrat like Congressman Flynt.
Even as he earned support from the center, Gingrich kept his eye on the growing conservative movement eager to rebuild the GOP after Watergate. By the mid-1970s, several factions of conservatives were starting to coalesce into a full-blown movement that sought to push American politics to the right. Religious conservatives were inspired to enter into politics in response to the Supreme Court’s legalizing abortion in 1973, the campaign for an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and IRS regulations cracking down on all-white private school academies; business and Wall Street conservatives sought to cut taxes, curtail unions, and deregulate the economy; while neoconservative Democrats were abandoning their party to join hawkish Republicans in championing a more militaristic foreign policy. Though the New Right, as it was called, was still coming together when Gerald Ford was in the Oval Office, conservatism was seen as a legitimate and powerful force. The movement’s leaders employed novel tactics to attract members and money, such as Richard Viguerie’s use of direct mail to raise large numbers of small donations. Think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute served as incubators for rightward policy ideas that were capturing the imagination of young conservatives who began to dream about the end of the New Deal era.
In 1975, Gingrich attended an election-campaign “school” in Wisconsin run by one of the movement’s emerging stars, the fiery conservative activist Paul Weyrich, an evangelical Republican building bridges between religious activists and the Republican Party leadership. Weyrich had come to prominence three years earlier by co-founding the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, and saw himself as a movement builder. As one of the founders of the New Right, a network of political action committees, think tanks, and activists determined to make the Republican Party more conservative, Weyrich enjoyed nurturing lesser-known Republican candidates who could knock off Democratic incumbents or win open seats.
Weyrich conducted small workshops in his native Wisconsin, funded by his Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, which were becoming legendary for giving inexperienced candidates insights about the nuts and bolts of running effective campaigns. Gingrich attended one of these classes in a conference room in the Marc Plaza Hotel in Milwaukee on a bitterly cold December afternoon. Sitting in the first row among a group of talented classmates, Gingrich was eager to learn how to take out Flynt when he ran against him, as he intended, for a second time in 1976. Gingrich being Gingrich, he couldn’t sit still for very long. Just a few minutes into the class, the student sounded like the teacher. In his high-pitched, squeaky voice, arms waving like an orchestra conductor’s, Gingrich dominated the discussion, and everyone turned to hear what he had to say. Weyrich sat back in stunned silence. Gingrich argued that all the candidates in the room could be more effective if they ran on a shared message. Weyrich, Gingrich informed his teacher, should be responsible for ensuring that this coordination happened.
Weyrich was deeply impressed and sensed that Gingrich was someone special.37 Although Gingrich was still much more of a middle-of-the-road Rockefeller Republican than Weyrich, he liked the Georgian’s intensity and passion, as well as his vision for the Republican Party. The two men hit it off right away. “I made a conscious effort to make Newt a star of the conservative movement,” Weyrich recalled. “We had magazines, bulletins, and I got him featured on the cover of every one. No one had heard of him. I made an effort to be Newt’s promoter.”38
Two years after his first campaign, Gingrich, still teaching at West Georgia, challenged Flynt for a second round. This time around, Gingrich made congressional corruption his central theme, hoping that the GOP baggage from the Nixon years would now prove less heavy, and he portrayed Flynt as being part of the corrupt establishment even as he chaired the House Ethics Committee. Gingrich formally announced his second run by blasting a pay raise that Congress was considering for itself. Given that the salary of legislators was “4½ times the income of the average Georgia family,” Gingrich called the proposal “immoral.”39
After decades in power, southern Democratic politicians in the 1970s enjoyed such built-in advantages as troughs of campaign funds and gerrymandered districts. The corruption of politics, Gingrich declared, offered his party its best argument for taking on a powerful Democratic incumbent in the one-party South—perhaps the only rationale compelling enough to undercut the benefits of incumbency. When Flynt’s 1973 land dealings became public, the congressman admitted that it was the “worst mistake I ever made.” Gingrich agreed, calling the scandal “petty, arrogant behavior that does not befit a member of Congress, and certainly not the chairman of the ethics committee.”40 When Flynt rejected an invitation to debate Gingrich on the grounds that he had too much work to do in Washington, Gingrich pounced. “There is a chair in the House of Representatives in Washington,” Gingrich exclaimed at his kickoff rally, “a chair that belongs to the people of this district.”
The facts on the ground had changed too. By Gingrich’s second run, senior congressional Democrats had come under fire for scandals of their own. Wilbur Mills, the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, had to step down in December 1974 after being caught jumping into Washington’s Tidal Basin with a stripper named Fanne Foxe. The Ohio Democrat Wayne Hays, the head of the Committee on House Administration and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), resigned after being caught using public funds to pay his girlfriend, Elizabeth Ray, to work as his secretary, even though she admitted to a reporter that she didn’t know how to type.
The class of ’74, popu
larly known as the Watergate Babies (in part because eighty-seven of them were under forty years of age), deposed three senior committee chairmen—Edward Hébert of the Armed Services Committee, William R. Poage of the Committee on Agriculture, and Wright Patman of the Committee on Banking and Currency—for being unresponsive to the demands of younger Democrats.41 Such actions by freshmen had been unheard of in previous decades, when the norm was for younger members to defer to senior leaders.
During a speech to the Young Republicans of Fulton County in 1976, Gingrich warned, “The news media continues to uncover more and more Congressional corruption every day. We have seen padded payrolls and falsified travel vouchers, bribery and forgery, all by the men we elect to pass our laws and lead this country, and all by powerful members of the Democratic Party.”42
Turning from the national to the local, Gingrich sharpened his corruption case against Flynt. The House Ethics Committee that he chaired was notorious for sitting on its hands when fellow members, especially Democrats, were accused of ethics violations. The joke on Capitol Hill was that the best way to bury an ethics complaint was to send it to Flynt’s committee. To drive the point home to voters in Georgia’s Sixth, one Gingrich campaign ad depicted him knocking on the door of the Ethics Committee, with the caption explaining that he was there to ask “Flynt to open it up to public scrutiny.”43
In the 1976 campaign, Gingrich showed voters his full potential by devoting more attention to issues besides political corruption. He endorsed a tougher stance toward the Soviet Union and opposed proposals for national health insurance. The Republican promised to vote against the Humphrey-Hawkins bill being debated in Congress, which would fund federal public works programs as a way to lower unemployment, and he threw his support behind antiunion right-to-work laws. Abortion legislation, Gingrich told voters, should be left to the states. He reached out to moderates by championing most of the government’s efforts to protect the environment.
Gingrich continued to receive attention from national conservatives. The 1964 Republican nominee, Barry Goldwater, stopped by a fund-raising luncheon for Gingrich at the Airport-Sheraton Hotel as part of a tour of the region aiming to mobilize Republican voters.44 Gingrich, who still identified and was seen as a moderate Republican, began to show indications that he was sympathetic to the conservative movement, including its figurehead, Ronald Reagan, who challenged President Gerald Ford in the 1976 Republican primaries. The Fords and Rockefellers of the party, Gingrich warned in an op-ed for The Baltimore Sun, were in “grave danger of overestimating conservative . . . goodwill.”45 The Atlanta Daily World endorsed Gingrich again, saying that the race “pits youth, intelligence, compassion and ability in the person of Newt Gingrich against an aging incumbent whose 22 years in office represents some of the worse [sic] you can find in Washington’s so-called ‘Establishment.’”46
Gingrich had refined his case, but he came up short again—this time by less than a percentage point. Republicans were still paying for Watergate, and the Democrats had nominated a popular Georgia Democrat, the former governor Jimmy Carter, for president. Running as a sincere, trustworthy outsider to Washington, Carter won the White House, and Democrats increased their margins in both the House and the Senate.
After his defeat, Gingrich kept poking at Flynt and the Democratic Congress. During a speech in Atlanta, he rejected the notion that his fellow Georgian Jimmy Carter’s election as president had somehow cleansed Washington of its problems. “Our legislative system,” Gingrich insisted with his attention turned to Capitol Hill, “has become morally, intellectually, and spiritually corrupt. Indeed, the patterns of corruption have become so firmly established that they overwhelm reform-minded freshmen when they arrive, and convince them by the time they become sophomores to accept what is, rather than struggle for change. In Sam Rayburn’s memorable phrase, they learn quickly to get along by going along.” What this meant in practice, according to Gingrich, was “closing one’s eyes to a thousand bad things,” all for the promise of making a difference.47 The break Gingrich needed came in February 1978, when the sixty-three-year-old Flynt made the surprise announcement that he would not run again. Flynt didn’t like the way the class of ’74 had changed life on the Hill, and his own district was steadily moving away from the racial conservatism that had sustained him.
Gingrich had already been campaigning; now he was all in. He and his wife no longer had his professorial income to draw from; Gingrich had never published his research, and without the prospect of tenure he had resigned from West Georgia College. His marriage to Jackie had become rocky; they had been in and out of counseling while repeatedly considering divorce. They lived in a modest house with cheap furniture. Money was going to be a big issue this time around. Gingrich’s mother worried that her son wouldn’t be able to provide for his family.48
To finance his campaign, Gingrich turned to a group of wealthy Georgia donors, headed by a local developer named Chester Roush, who offered him a whopping $13,000 to write a novel (Gingrich didn’t write the book). The donors structured the donation, which well exceeded Gingrich’s salary as assistant professor, as a tax shelter to minimize their losses. Gingrich, according to this plan, would use the private advance as income to sustain his run.49 He also relied on the national party for assistance. He brazenly arranged a meeting in Washington with the deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), Eddie Mahe, who was scouring the country for new faces who could help the party take advantage of President Carter’s falling approval ratings. When Mahe, unaware that his executive assistant had set up this meeting, entered his office, he found Gingrich seated in front of his desk. Mahe peered through his Coke-bottle glasses at the mysterious gentleman in the madras jacket and polyester pants and thought, “How did this dork get in here?” Even though Mahe had a busy day ahead of him, he sat down and asked Gingrich what he wanted. Without missing a beat, Gingrich delivered a three-and-a-half-minute monologue about how Republicans could win in southern districts that had been solidly Democratic via the story of his own campaign. Mahe was hooked.50
The RNC decided to invest in this fresh face. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) contributed $50,000 to Gingrich’s campaign, and the party provided him with a seasoned manager named Carlyle Gregory from Virginia and a talented consultant named Bob Weed. Gingrich cleaned up his looks: he lost weight, trimmed his long sideburns, and purchased a Washington-worthy wardrobe. According to a Gingrich biographer, “The used car salesman ties, shirts, and suits had been banished (hopefully burned), and the long sideburns had been eighty-sixed, along with the steel-rim glasses. He was now photographed in attire befitting a young politician on the go: red ties and solid blue, gray, or black suits.”51
Gingrich’s third campaign took on a more conservative tone than his previous runs. With the economy tanking, American power in decline, and conservative activism on the rise, politics was shifting rightward at the national level and within his own district. Gingrich had been enthralled upon hearing the New York congressman Jack Kemp, a former professional football player, deliver a passionate one-hour speech at the Georgia Republican state convention about supply-side economics. Kemp touted deficit-inducing tax cuts for wealthier Americans as the best way to grow the overall economy. Short-term deficits would create a stronger economy and in the long term generate balanced budgets. Like President Theodore Roosevelt, Kemp seemed to be the kind of “big idea” Republican who Gingrich believed was needed to save the party from obscurity.52
Gingrich got on board with conservative movement politics. Environmentalists and younger students were gone from his campaign headquarters, replaced by staunch conservative Republicans and professional party activists. He aligned himself with the movement by emphasizing supply-side tax cuts and deregulation, combating inflation, eliminating bureaucratic waste, and enacting welfare reform, as well as opposing the ERA. Foreign policy was not as important in local elections, but Gingrich di
d make clear his support for higher defense spending, and he lambasted President Carter for agreeing to treaties that relinquished control of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians.53 Gingrich easily won the Republican primary.
For the general election, he crafted a tough campaign against the Democratic nominee, the Georgia state senator Virginia Shapard, a moderate. His rightward policy promises always came back to a defining theme: Gingrich, the fighter, was going to bring down the entire corrupt political establishment. “Tip O’Neill’s title should be changed from Speaker to Dictator of the House,” he proclaimed.54 One of his campaign flyers, titled NEWT GINGRICH—HIS ONLY SPECIAL INTEREST IS YOU!, featured a photograph of the young renegade with his sleeves rolled up and right arm bent in the air with his hand clenched tight in a defiant fist.55
Tactically, a now-seasoned Gingrich demonstrated exceptional skill when it came to framing how voters perceived his opponent, no matter how distorted the charges. Gingrich hired Deno Seder, a notorious advertising man from Shreveport, Louisiana, who produced ads that made Shapard look more liberal than she was. He unleashed advertisements that painted her as a ruthless feminist willing to destroy her family in pursuit of power. Shapard made the mistake of telling a reporter that she would commute to Washington so that her husband could keep his job in Georgia and her kids could stay in their school. “When elected Newt will keep his family together,” Gingrich cheekily countered in a campaign flyer. Perhaps with little sense of the irony involved, Gingrich’s self-published tabloid, the New Georgia Leader, part political information and part campaign propaganda, featured numerous stories highlighting the wonderfulness of his churchgoing family—with one article in October titled NEWT’S FAMILY IS LIKE YOUR FAMILY—to disparage his “home-wrecking” opponent.56 “Newt knows the problems families face—but he also knows the joys and rewards of strong family life,” read the copy of a newspaper ad.57 Jackie abetted her husband by sending personal letters to fellow schoolteachers reiterating the same message.58