WASHINGTON, Nov. 16, 2006
Good Riddance To The Gingrichites
CBS' Meyer: GOP 'Chess Club' Ruled The House For 12 Years And Won't Be Missed
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Former Rep. Newt Gingrich led the "Contract With America" crowd in 1994. (AP)
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This is a story I should have written 12 years ago when the "Contract with America" Republicans captured the House in 1994. I apologize.
Really, it's just a simple thesis: The men who ran the Republican Party in the House of Representatives for the past 12 years were a group of weirdos. Together, they comprised one of the oddest legislative power cliques in our history. And for 12 years, the media didn't call a duck a duck, because that's not something we're supposed to do.
I'm not talking about the policies of the Contract for America crowd, but the character. I'm confident that 99 percent of the population — if they could see these politicians up close, if they watched their speeches and looked at their biographies — would agree, no matter what their politics or predilections.
I'm confident that if historians ever spend the time on it, they'll confirm my thesis. Same with forensic psychiatrists. I have discussed this with scores of politicians, staffers, consultants and reporters since 1994 and have found few dissenters.
Politicians in this country get a bad rap. For the most part, they are like any high-achieving group in America, with roughly the same distribution of pathologies and virtues. But the leaders of the GOP House didn't fit the personality profile of American politicians, and they didn't deviate in a good way. It was the Chess Club on steroids.
The iconic figures of this era were Newt Gingrich, Richard Armey and Tom Delay. They were zealous advocates of free markets, low taxes and the pursuit of wealth; they were hawks and often bellicose; they were brutal critics of big government.
Yet none of these guys had success in capitalism. None made any real money before coming to Congress. None of them spent a day in uniform. And they all spent the bulk of their adult careers getting paychecks from the big government they claimed to despise. Two resigned in disgrace.
Having these guys in charge of a radical conservative agenda was like, well, putting Mark Foley in charge of the Missing and Exploited Children Caucus. Indeed, Foley was elected in the Class of '94 and is not an inappropriate symbol of their regime.
More than the others, Newton Leroy Gingrich lived out a very special hypocrisy. In addition to the above biographical dissonance, Gingrich was one of the most sharp-tongued, articulate and persuasive attack dogs in modern politics. His favorite target was the supposed immorality and corruption of the Democratic Party. With soaring rhetoric, he condemned his opponents as anti-American and dangerous to our country's family values — "grotesque" was a favorite word.
Yet this was a man who was divorced twice — the first time when his wife was hospitalized for cancer treatment, the second time after an affair was revealed.
Gingrich made his bones in the party by relentlessly attacking Democratic corruption, yet he was hounded from office because of a series of serious ethics questions. He posed as a reformer of the House, yet championed a series of deforms that made the legislative process more closed, more conducive to hiding special interest favors and less a forum for genuine debate.
And he did it all with epic sanctimony.
These squirrelly guys attracted and promoted to power similarly odd colleagues: birds of a feather, you know, stick together. Bill Clinton of Monica Lewinsky fame had no more zealous and moralistic critic than Rep. Dan Burton of Indiana, who ran a then-powerful committee. In the course of his crusade, Burton was forced to admit he had actually fathered a child in an extramarital affair.
The man who led the House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearings with equal, if saner, bloodlust was Rep. Henry Hyde. In the midst of this, Hyde was forced to admit to a five-year affair.
When Gingrich stepped down, Republicans turned to a master Louisiana pork-barreller, Robert Livingston. That lasted a day or so, until Livingston (you guessed it) admitted to having extramarital affairs.
Livingston was succeeded by Dennis Hastert, perhaps the most, well, conventional of the GOP leaders of his era. Still, Hastert was a hawk with no military service and a defender of the rich with no money or experience in business.
In this year's election cycle, House Republicans were justly vilified for their subservience to the corruptions of Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay's entire K Street project. While extreme, there have been many other periods of extreme corruption in Congress.
What marked this Republican cadre was not their corruption, but the chips on their shoulders.
It was a localized condition. It didn't spread to the Senate. The Republican leaders there — again, suspend your ideology and just look at biography — were pretty typical American politicians.
Bob Dole, Trent Lott and Bill Frist were not acting out in office. They were not ideologues and did not use the rhetoric of the righteous. The colleagues that wielded the most power — like McCain, Simpson, Lugar, Specter, Stevens, Warner — have had long runs of service in several arenas relatively free of public and private embarrassment and hypocrisy — and even some substantial accomplishments pre-Senate.
History reveals that great leaders and intellectuals often appear in clusters, inspiring and motivating each other to extraordinary achievement. American historians have focused on this in recent books looking at the "founding brothers," Lincoln's "team of rivals," the 19th-century pragmatist philosophers called "the metaphysical club," Roosevelt's New Dealers and Kennedy's "best and the brightest."
The opposite is also true.
What's next for the House is of course uncertain, but an undistinguished chapter has come to a close. Good riddance.
Dick Meyer is the editorial director of CBSNews.com, based in Washington.
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By Dick Meyer
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Michelle Obama tells how her role as the First Lady has changed her perspective.
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See all 119 CommentsVote them all out. It's time for a new party to step up and unite us, to shape us into the country we used to be but lost sight of. Our greatest export was democracy; our greatest strength a compassion for those who would destroy us; our guiding principle opportunity for all.
We have become the thing we hate the most. A nation saying torture is okay; a country that would rather label than understand; an America compromising the very ideals it was founded upon for the sake of national security; a public living in fear of boogeymen and Great Satans instead of the security our universal, founding values will eventually overcome all evils. In short, we are the very thing we tell the global community we are fighting against.
We as a nation are becoming cattle led to slaughter by politicians on both sides who put their own self-interests above the greater good. We see posturing instead of progress. Insults instead of ideas. Hypocrisy instead of integrity.
We are long overdue for a house cleaning. The only problem is we can't decide on a maid.
Vote them all out. It's time for a new party to step up and unite us, to shape us into the country we used to be but lost sight of. Our greatest export was democracy; our greatest strength a compassion for those who would destroy us; our guiding principle opportunity for all.
We have become the thing we hate the most. A nation saying torture is okay; a country that would rather label than understand; an America compromising the very ideals it was founded upon for the sake of national security; a public living in fear of boogeymen and Great Satans instead of the security our universal, founding values will eventually overcome all evils. In short, we are the very thing we tell the global community we are fighting against.
We as a nation are becoming cattle led to slaughter by politicians on both sides who put their own self-interests above the greater good. We see posturing instead of progress. Insults instead of ideas. Hypocrisy instead of integrity.
We are long overdue for a house cleaning. The only problem is we can't decide on a miad.
Thanks for nothing.
It's just coincidence that they happen to be Democrats.
I have to say that you and the entire crew at CBS make me sick to my stomach. You seemed to have no reservation at all on reporting ad nauseum on Bill Clinton's personality, not to mention the personality of every member of his administration, as well as that of Jimmy Carter. Your admission of failure now should be followed by a letter of resignation, having allowed a republican congress to run wild for over ten years and a republican White House to trample the nation for six. How dare you crawl out from under a rock now that "the coast is clear" and tell us that you knew these people were freaks all along. Americans depend on the fourth estate to make reasonable, sensible judgements on our nation's direction, and you have failed energetically, confidently, and repeatedly for a decade. How does it feel to have wasted your professional life?
I think you get the idea.
You didn't have any guts 12 years ago (and, frankly, looking at how the media is covering the incoming Democratic majorities in Congress, none now).
You don't have any glory now.
Want some? Make up for the last 12 years: cover all of the Republican scandals. Will they call you "liberals?" Sure. This country was founded by liberals. All the best things about this country came from liberals.
Republicans haven't accomplished anything of any substance since Teddy Roosevelt, and he would be considered liberal by the likes of Trent Lott, Mitch McConnell, and Rush Limbaugh. Who gives a *** what they think? Republicans don't believe in a free press anyway; why be nice to them? They're a bunch of thugs anyway.
What you all in the media need to be doing - to have been doing - is kicking them in the *** and tell them to behave. Get started.
You didn't have any guts 12 years ago (and, frankly, looking at how the media is covering the incoming Democratic majorities in Congress, none now).
You don't have any glory now.
Want some? Make up for the last 12 years: cover all of the Republican scandals. Will they call you "liberals?" Sure. This country was founded by liberals. All the best things about this country came from liberals.
Republicans haven't accomplished anything of any substance since Teddy Roosevelt, and he would be considered liberal by the likes of Trent Lott, Mitch McConnell, and Rush Limbaugh. Who gives a *** what they think? Republicans don't believe in a free press anyway; why be nice to them? They're a bunch of thugs anyway.
What you all in the media need to be doing - to have been doing - is kicking them in the *** and tell them to behave. Get started.
If you don't make pots of money, you are unqualified to advocate free markets?
If you are against big government, then you should stay in the private sector? (So the only people who are permitted to serve in government are those who believe in big government? Ingenious!).
If you have an extramarital affair, you can't vote to impeach a President for perjury? Huh?
You have to have worn a uniform before you are entitled to have an opinion about whether we should go to war? Was F.D.R. a hypocrite for serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and getting us into WWII?
Newt Gingrich and Tom DeLay are cut from the same cloth? ...Eyes but you see not!
Newt Gingrich's favorite target was the sexual immorality of Democrats? What a grotesque fib!
Kennedy's "best and the brightest" were great leaders and intellectuals who inspired and motivated one another to extraordinary achievement? That's funny. And I thought David Halberstam coined the term "the best and the brightest" to describe the geniuses who got us mired in the quagmire of Vietnam.
By your own account, you failed us back in 1994. One thing hasn't changed.
Good riddance? I wish.
Oh, and Lucian. Didn't your mother tell you it high time you were in bed?
Ian Maitland
To a man -- and they were all men -- they evinced enormous resentment of anyone who partook of the freewheeling 60's, instead of sitting it out as they so obviously did, members firmly in hand as they studied old Hoover and Taft speeches in their dusty dorm rooms, while outside demonstrators marched and partook of stuffl like *** and drugs and rock and roll.
Far too little attention has been paid to the pathology that connects the Republican dots of the last 30 years: They're a bunch of angry, ***** men to married the first woman they ever went to bed with, and to whom they found themselves forever bound due to the so-called "values" promoted by their party and themselves.
And one other thing Meyer left out: how much fun it's been to watch these resentful rats go down, one after another, in such obvious, boring ways. Back in '98 when they were frothing at the mouth under the delusion they were crushing Clinton rather than themselves, if you had pitched a novel or a movie with a story that turned out the way this one has, you would have been turned down across the board. No one would have believed that (1) so many of them were so boringly corrupt, or (2) that they would go down in such gloriously appropriate flames.
Lucian K. Truscott IV
Wrong. So completely wrong. That is exactly what you are meant to do. The press has a special place in - and receives special protections from - our Constitution. There is a reason for that. Have you ever heard the term "Fourth Estate?"
It is precisely the job of the press to "call a duck a duck," as you put it.
Would highly recommend reading Helen Thomas' latest book, "Watchdogs of Democracy." You could learn a few things. Thomas is a great journalist who understands the role of the press in a functioning democracy.
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