Tough Love for Newt
BARNES, FRED
Tough Love for Newt by Fred Barnes Over dinner with friends the evening before he announced how he was going to pay his $300,000 ethics bill, Newt Gingrich argued strenuously with vin Weber, his...
...i can't think of a House speaker in modern times who influenced foreign policy, but that is Gingrich's aim...
...If the administration wanted to send a powerful signal to China," changing these plans would do it...
...He's got to educate his troops," says Weber, and Gingrich has already started...
...With a slim GOP margin in Congress and a Democratic president, that can't happen...
...Gingrich faces an immediate budget test in May with a supplemental spending bill (to cover flood aid, Bosnia, etc...
...in his speech, Gingrich will argue for renewal of most-favored-nation trade status for China, despite conservative opposition to MFN...
...Executive editor Fred Barnes appears weekly on Fox on Politics on the Fox News Channel...
...Now he means to read speeches from texts...
...His problems come when he's doing well...
...But they'll have to accept "slightly higher discretionary spending" in the agreement...
...Gingrich has promised not to talk publicly about the details of GOP strategy and tactics...
...A good budget deal and a strong foreign policy presence would restore Gingrich's power, and his goal remains to be speaker through 2002...
...The deeper question is whether we are going to see action that backs up the speeches...
...And in order to quiet objections that he received a sweetheart loan from Bob Dole, Gingrich will also begin making payments on the $300,000 soon...
...Here Gingrich has two problems...
...But he wants to limit the extension to six months, not one year, "sending the signal" to the Chinese that what they do in Hong Kong after the July 1 takeover will affect the relationship with the United States...
...One is that Republicans don't have much of an agenda...
...That means signaling the Chinese people that we take them seriously and want to work with them, while "arguing with the Chinese dictators...
...It allows other Republicans to dismiss his words out of hand and contributes to the public image of Gingrich as extreme and out of control...
...But rhetoric isn't sufficient...
...Gingrich isn't there yet...
...The hard part is regaining the allegiance of House Republicans and enacting key elements of the Republican agenda...
...He favors attaching a continuing resolution to keep the government operating in case there's no budget deal...
...He recognizes what he calls "a heartbreaking vacuum" in foreign policy leadership and realizes that his own fame means his views will get attention worldwide...
...All that is the easy stuff on Gingrich's road to recovery...
...The exchange of visits is "a great boon for the Chinese dictatorship," the speaker says...
...in a budget deal with President Clinton, the speaker says Republicans can achieve "a significant reduction in all government spending, . . . pretty good tax reduction, . . . [and] a stronger defense than liberals will want...
...Rather, says Paxon, he'll stick to "the big overview" and seek to appear more a visionary and less a schemer...
...So what's needed is for Gingrich to redefine victory in more realistic terms...
...Gingrich's penchant for personal attacks was demonstrably unhelpful, Weber told Gingrich...
...It's not the right tool," he says, to force China to make concessions on human rights and trade...
...Tough Love for Newt by Fred Barnes Over dinner with friends the evening before he announced how he was going to pay his $300,000 ethics bill, Newt Gingrich argued strenuously with vin Weber, his former colleague...
...David Mcintosh, who represents the sophomore class at GOP leadership meetings...
...Gingrich has conferred privately with the noisiest GOP renegades, and some have come around...
...Matt Salmon of Arizona issued a press release that declared: "Newt Gingrich has begun to exhibit the strength of leadership that made him speaker in the first place...
...Joe Scarborough of Florida said Gingrich's decision to pay his ethics bill out of personal funds "increases his stature tenfold...
...John Linder of Georgia, and Paxon...
...He is also sharply limiting his public appearances...
...He turned down This Week on ABC on April 27, a hard call for a guy who loves to hold forth on Tv...
...Rough as he was on Reno, Grassley insisted he wouldn't go as far as Gingrich had when he said Reno's action "was something you might have expected from John Mitchell in 1973, but it's very sad to see Janet Reno doing it in 1997...
...Gingrich also wants Clinton to consider cancelling Chinese president Jiang Zemin's visit to America later this year and the president's own trip to China in 1998...
...if Gingrich doesn't get the continuing resolution, Republicans will be disappointed in him...
...The day before, Weber had seen a Tv interview in which Charles Grassley, the Republican senator from Iowa, criticized attorney general Janet Reno for refusing to seek a special prosecutor in the White House fund-raising scandal...
...Bill Paxon of New York calls Gingrich's "tough-love team"—majority leader Dick Armey, whip Tom DeLay, Rep...
...The other is that many Republicans still believe they can make revolutionary changes quickly in shrinking the role of government and slashing taxes...
...Rep...
...Will he make it...
...The other changes...
...Nor is this all...
...Gingrich believes Clinton's foreign policy lacks seriousness of purpose...
...Mark Neumann said it "sounds like the old Newt's back...
...His speeches are back on track," says Rep...
...But if he does manage to ride high once again, it will be because he has managed to keep quiet about it...
...And that image is not appropriate for a House speaker, Weber maintained...
...Where he may have the most clout, however, is foreign policy...
...Rep...
...That's when, in the words of another adviser, he "gets cocky and cranks one off...
...For two hours, Gingrich resisted, but in the end, he agreed he ought to refrain from personal attacks...
...Count it as a lesson learned, for now at least...
...So is his public posture...
...Gingrich used to deliver speeches merely by reading a one-page description of his audience and a few clips about issues they cared about in the car on the way to the event—leading to the sort of improvisation that gets him in trouble...
...On China, he says, "we should have a very aggressive, pro-freedom position...
...He's pretty good when he's down," says Weber...
...This is one of the behavioral changes Gingrich has vowed to make, mostly at the insistence of what Rep...
...Then it becomes anti-democratic...
...These are not the ingredients of a deal likely to thrill self-styled revolutionaries...
...They did on his trip to China this spring and will again when he outlines his views, especially on China, in a speech this week...
...And, he says, China should get no special treatment in its effort to join the World Trade Organization...
...And he'll try to make bread-and-butter Republican issues the chief issue in Congress—not Newt Gingrich...
...He's at his most dangerous when he's riding high...
...The U.S., Gingrich says, must be careful "not to turn Chinese nationalism into anti-Americanism...
Vol. 2 • May 1997 • No. 33
