Man with a Vision

By KAREN TUMULTY

The crowd in the Hilton ballroom couldn't have been more excited if Elvis had turned up. Instead, this being Washington, the star was a fiftysomething politician, and as soon as his trademark helmet of white hair breezed through the door at stage right, 400 freshly elected conservative state legislators leaped to their feet and chanted, "Newt! Newt! Newt!" By the time Newt Gingrich had concluded his now familiar excoriation of the liberal welfare state, he had the faithful rushing the dais as if they were at a rock concert, shouldering each other aside just to be near their hero. An agile woman from Oregon exclaimed to her friends, "I touched him!"

Gingrich, newly anointed Speaker of the House and slayer of the Old Order, was naturally pleased by this adulation, but also somewhat shaken. True, he had presumed to plan months before the Nov. 8 election exactly how he would lead the Republican House that begins its work this week. But he hadn't planned on having strangers paw at his garments, nor on the intense public and press interest in his every casual utterance, nor on the spectacle of the President scrambling to pull himself aboard the Republican tax-cut bandwagon. Gingrich, who classifies most experiences as either neat or weird, pronounced these very weird. Yet he takes his new prominence quite seriously. On the morning after the Hilton speech, a rainy Saturday in mid-December, he met with a dozen of his top advisers and asked them, almost plaintively, "How would you use who I am becoming?"

Right now Americans are divided three ways on Gingrich: they love him, loathe him or can't figure out who he is. But what Gingrich is becoming is this: the pre-eminent political leader in America. As the new Republican * rulers of Congress converge on Washington to begin their reign this week, they will find the Democrats still in shock from their repudiation in the November elections -- and grumbling that they are leaderless to boot. President Clinton, they complain, has yet to frame any coherent strategy for dealing with a Republican-controlled Congress. Said a senior Administration official: "Part of the strategy, to the extent there is a strategy, is to wait and see what Gingrich and company do." The President's pre-Christmas promise of a middle-class tax break and wholesale cuts in Cabinet departments only seemed to ratify the G.O.P. agenda. Senate majority leader Bob Dole, meanwhile, has been distracted by travel and fund raising in pursuit of his presidential ambitions, and is playing the cautious establishmentarian. Into this vacuum Gingrich gladly rushes, seizing the initiative and setting Washington's agenda.

Though he can be meanspirited (suggesting that Democrats are somehow responsible when a woman in South Carolina admits to drowning her two young sons) and just plain goofy (sponsoring a bill to apply U.S. law to space colonies), Gingrich is providing the energy, imagination and confidence that, at least at this pregnant moment, seem lacking among other leaders of both parties. The new Speaker will gavel the House down to real work three weeks earlier than usual. He will move immediately to slash congressional staff and change the way it operates. He will seek speedy passage of a balanced-budget amendment, tax breaks, spending cuts and other measures the Republicans promised in their "Contract with America."

In this unfamiliar role of actually governing, Gingrich will be severely tested. "He's operated at the level of abstraction and generality," says Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank, one of Gingrich's frequent liberal foes. "Now he's got to tell us what his ideas are. He's got to get specific." For the past year Gingrich has deftly exploited the roiling discontent Americans felt toward Washington. But suddenly, amid Clinton's collapse and Dole's near silence, Gingrich is turning into something potentially positive and, to him, much more daunting. He is becoming a chubby repository of the tangled and contradictory hopes held by middle-income Americans, who want their Federal Government to stop meddling in their life and, at the same time, to improve it. Gingrich framed his task this way in an interview with TIME: "I'm for limited government, but a very strong limited government."

In the weeks after the election, Gingrich misstepped by opening up a debate about school prayer that proved divisive among Republicans. It is a mistake he does not intend to repeat, and he has quietly put off emotional debates over such issues until next fall at the earliest. As Pennsylvania's Bob Walker, who is Gingrich's oldest ally and closest friend in the House, put it, "We have to discipline ourselves to stick to the substance."

During the past three weeks, Gingrich granted extraordinary access to a TIME correspondent and photographer, who followed him into private meetings where he formulated strategy for his first months in office. Surprisingly for anyone who has seen him in full truculence on the House floor, Gingrich spends most of his time listening -- a skill, he admits, that he has had to work on in recent years. He also has an almost religious belief in delegation. At one point, the head of his transition team, Representative Jim Nussle of Iowa, suggested that Gingrich interview the leading candidates for top administrative jobs, so they would understand "who the boss is." Gingrich responded with the exasperation of someone who has had to make this point more than once: "I ain't their boss! I don't want to be their boss!" But of course, he is -- more so than anyone else who has had his job in recent history.

This week the real work starts. From the moment the House convenes on Wednesday, Jan. 4, and through the next 99 days, Gingrich and his new Republican majority will be rushing to pass the 10 major initiatives they spelled out in the contract. "We're going to do marvelous things in '95," Gingrich promised last week. "Come watch us on the fourth; it will be the longest, most working opening day in the history of the U.S. House, and you're going to love it." First on their agenda -- indeed, within minutes of taking their oaths of office -- they will begin changing how Congress does business, starting with cutting the number of committees and their staffs by one-third. From there, in a series of rapid-fire votes with 20-minute intervals of debate, the House will put new budget procedures into place; put six-year term limits on committee chairmen; ban members from voting by proxy at committee sessions they do not attend; require committees to open their meetings to the public; require a three-fifths majority to approve tax increases; hire an outside auditor to hunt out waste, fraud and abuse; and pass a bill requiring Congress to live under the laws that it passes for the rest of the country, like occupational health-and-safety and antidiscrimination statutes.

Fully 80% of the legislation called for in the contract must first pass through two House committees: Judiciary, which handles constitutional and crime-related issues, and the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, which will also handle welfare reform and Medicare cuts. Enough hearings are scheduled for three C-SPANs.

The balanced-budget amendment will be the first major piece of legislation to come to a vote in the full House. Incoming Judiciary chairman Henry Hyde of Illinois expects to have the bill out of his committee next week and ready for floor action by Jan. 19. It will be followed in short order by a bill giving the President a line-item veto and the first round of budget cuts.

From there, however, the picture becomes murkier, as the bills head to the Senate -- the place where, as Dole puts it, "there's going to be some reality set in." The House will be able to pass the balanced-budget amendment in a matter of hours, for instance, but debate in the Senate could easily take weeks. Indeed, the contrast will be evident from the opening day, on which the Senate's business will be limited to the traditional swearing-in ceremonies and receptions for visiting constituents. By the end of the week Dole hopes to have begun debate on the bill applying Congress's laws to itself -- if, that is, he can manage to convince every single Senator to go along with the idea. On that bill, as with others, if anyone balks it will take a 60-vote majority to move ahead. The filibuster was a weapon the Republicans employed routinely when they were in the minority. Before long, Dole observes dryly, "I assume the Democrats will have discovered you only need 41 votes to hold up things." Senate minority leader Tom Daschle insists that his 47 Democrats are eager to cooperate where they can, but adds, "We're not going to be at all reticent about confronting the Republicans with whatever means we find prudent."

The trickiest business in either house could be dealing with the contract's promised tax cuts, which Gingrich hopes to have approved in the House by the end of April. First, Gingrich will have to confront hordes of tax lawyers and lobbyists awakened to the exhilarating smell of a major tax bill brewing. With no new spending programs in the works, the tax bill will be the only game in town for those who make their millions winning special breaks for special interests. Even if Gingrich uses the formidable power of the Speaker's office to assure that a coherent piece of legislation emerges from the House, he could be tripped up by the rules of the Senate, which allow unlimited amendments. Says Democratic Congressman Bob Matsui, a Ways and Means veteran of many tax fights: "I don't see the Senate being able to sustain that kind of discipline. They never have."

Before he can even get that far, Gingrich has promised to do something even harder: find the money to pay for the tax cuts. The first place the Budget Committee and the appropriators will look is this year's budget, but with the fiscal year already three months old, they will not find the big money they need there, even if they obliterate several existing programs. Next, in separate legislation, they will turn to future years, but will have to balance the tax-cut goal with another of the contract's promises: beefing up the Pentagon budget. The job is particularly difficult for the House's relatively inexperienced Republican staff, which finds itself in a brand-new world of reality. As a former G.O.P. Budget Committee staff member put it, "When you are in the minority, you have the luxury of knowing that nothing you do will ever really happen. You can cobble the numbers together for maximum political effect."

Now Gingrich's Republicans are already in the dizzying position of being the leaders and watching the Democrats starting to play the spoilers. Weeks before the session began, House minority leader Dick Gephardt, determined to prove that his Democrats are still in the game, came forward with a tax-cut plan that is both cheaper than Gingrich's and more closely targeted to the middle class. One of Gingrich's recent planning sessions came on a morning when the Washington Post had announced what would have seemed preposterous before the election: the Clinton White House was actually thinking about killing an entire Cabinet agency, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Incoming Budget Committee chairman John Kasich, 42, a tousle-haired Dennis- the-Menace look-alike who has been known to brandish a bullwhip on the House floor, exulted, "This is our stuff!"

Dressed in a maroon turtleneck and khakis, Kasich had dropped by Gingrich's office to present his latest proposals for one of the biggest challenges in selling the "Contract with America": making the numbers add up. Most of the . other new G.O.P. leaders had gathered around the coffee table where he sat, anxious to see how Kasich was faring with a job that defies political physics: figuring out how to spend more than $100 billion over the next five years on an income-tax cut, as well as numerous tax breaks for wealthy investors and business, while beefing up spending for the military and without increasing the deficit. Throw the balanced-budget amendment on top of all that, and it would seem that he was well into the realm of the impossible.

Kasich, though, seemed undaunted. Let Clinton talk about killing one department, he said. He had plans to zero out four and eviscerate a fifth. (He declined to allow those departments to be named.) Kasich also figured he could whack more than one-fifth of the foreign-aid budget during the next five years without touching Israel's share, and cut another $26 billion from food stamps in the same period.

Passing around a list of every function in the budget, Kasich said, "All of these groups will be looked at under the prism of can it be eliminated, can it be privatized, can it be cut?" Hearing the magnitude of Kasich's plan for the first time, Gingrich was concerned. "The other committees are all going to jump on you," he warned Kasich. Soon-to-be majority leader Dick Armey of Texas added a stern caution of his own: "If you get out too far ahead of us, you're going to be out there alone. You can't be out there naked."

They agreed that Kasich would submit another list the following Monday -- one, Gingrich instructed, that would begin with the 70% of the budget that is hardest to cut. Kasich interrupted, "I can give it to you now -- Medicare and Medicaid."

Separately, Gingrich learned that the White House had launched a subterranean assault on another G.O.P. budget proposal. Treasury Secretary-to- be Robert Rubin was talking privately to Wall Street economists about the dangers of the Republican plan to change the government's accounting rules to make tax cuts appear less expensive. A negative reaction by the financial markets could discredit many of the Republican taxing and spending plans. Typically, Gingrich's planned response to Rubin was a counterassault, inviting 25 top Wall Street economists to Washington to suggest they were "being stupid" to buy the White House line.

The session with Kasich had been arranged hastily, and was the only meeting that day in which Gingrich actually discussed the substance of legislation. - The rest of his day, Gingrich wrestled with logistics. There were meetings to parcel out office space, much of which the new Speaker had never been allowed to see until after the election. There were meetings to decide whom to hire, as well as which of Congress's more than 10,000 jobs to abolish. Among the first to go in the campaign to show that Gingrich's team is serious about rooting out waste: the scores of people whose political connections have landed them full-time jobs punching buttons on automatic elevators. Gingrich has even held meetings to decide what meetings he should be having. Before the meetings begin, he often tries to squeeze in an early-morning walk among the monuments and museums of Washington's grassy Mall. Before he goes home each night, he insists upon a session at the House gym, part of his losing battle to keep the button on his suit jacket within striking distance of its buttonhole. ("Remember! Exercise today! Every day!" he barks at his scheduler.)

Gingrich is imposing extraordinary discipline on his troops as well. In the manner of most successful revolutionaries, Gingrich is moving first to make himself stronger, exploiting the broad authority granted the Speaker by the Constitution, at the expense of not only Democrats but fellow Republican Congressmen who have waited decades for their own taste of power. Though he has yet even to try out the big leather chair from which he will preside, some are saying that his could be the strongest speakership since the legendary Republican Speakers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. "These were Speakers who were the dominant figures in Congress," says Rutgers University political analyst Ross K. Baker.

Gingrich already has moved to recapture much of the power that had drifted into the hands of committee chairmen. In recent decades, Democratic barons such as Commerce Committee chairman John Dingell and Ways and Means chairman Dan Rostenkowski had been able to run things pretty much as they pleased, battling each other for jurisdiction over important matters such as taxes and health care. But the Republicans who replace those chairmen will see their power sharply curtailed. Along with putting term limits on chairmen, Gingrich plans to take tighter control of scheduling by requiring that each committee submit to him a monthly "planning document."

The new Speaker has also stacked key committees with freshman lawmakers, who are least inured to habits of bipartisan back scratching and who feel strong personal loyalty to Gingrich and his vision. Thirty-three of the 73 G.O.P. freshmen, in fact, were recruited and trained by Gingrich and his political organization, GOPAC.

By centralizing power, as independent congressional experts have recommended for years, Gingrich hopes to keep House Republicans tightly focused on the agenda -- most of it economic -- that they spelled out in their "Contract with America." Lately the former history professor, who believes there is a precedent to fit any situation, has been checking out every book that the Library of Congress has on the Duke of Wellington's 1808-14 Peninsular War campaign, when Britain sent troops to help the Spanish in their revolt against Napoleon, which Gingrich regards as simultaneously "one of the great focused efforts of all time" and "a very weird experience." The lesson of that war, he says, is that "victory is the avoidance of being crushed."

The House Appropriations Committee will serve as the ultimate battleground between Gingrich's priorities and Clinton's. It is also a place where Democrats and Republicans have traditionally enjoyed a cozy relationship based upon mutual support for pork-barrel spending on highways and "research" projects in each other's districts. Gingrich has tried to break that system by requiring any Republican taking this plum committee assignment to reaffirm in writing that he is committed to the contract -- and, implicitly, to the Speaker's wishes. "I needed to really drive home for them, right now, how different their committees are going to be by summer," Gingrich told TIME. But, he conceded, "some of them don't quite get it yet."

Congressmen from both parties predict that Gingrich will succeed in imposing his will on the House, where the rules allow a disciplined majority to have its way. But the Senate is another matter. There, on several issues dear to Gingrich -- including term limits and the balanced-budget amendment -- several Republican Senators could well join the opposition. Gingrich retorts that he is prepared for that fight, that if a minority of Senate Democrats tries to block legislation favored by majorities in the House and Senate, he stands ready to take his case to the public. The Democrats, Gingrich told his advisers, "had better break us in the next six months, because if we're still standing in July, the country is going to believe."

In this contest Gingrich enjoys what the political philosopher Machiavelli described as the greatest advantage in politics or war: to be underestimated by the enemy. The White House, Democratic lawmakers, even some of Gingrich's numerous detractors among Republicans are united in the faith and hope that he will self-destruct in short order. A White House official suggests that waiting him out is the answer, because Gingrich is "a sprinter" poorly suited to the marathon of major-league politics. That is a misreading that Gingrich's adversaries have made over and over again. "It would be an error to devise a strategy built around Gingrich making mistakes," says Howard Paster, who was the top lobbyist for Clinton on the Hill during the first year of his presidency. "((Gingrich)) has to be engaged. He has to be dealt with."

In fact, any examination of Gingrich's setback-studded career shows that he has risen to where he is through stamina, a willingness to take outrageous risks and -- most important -- a ruthless and slavish devotion to his vision. "There is a certain brilliance factor, an ability to make your own luck," says a veteran Democratic House aide with grudging admiration. "Newt has it. None of our guys do."

Yet after riding to power on a populist appeal, Gingrich faces another pitfall in putting forward a program that will benefit upper-income Americans more than anyone else. Says Representative Frank: "He's not for smaller government. He's for different government. He's for government that serves a different set of interests." The White House pushed that hot button last week when Donna Shalala, Secretary of Health and Human Services, said her department estimated that 5 million children would lose their welfare benefits under the House G.O.P. plan known as the personal-responsibility act. Republican House members quickly pointed out that while children would indeed be cut off, the plan would be phased in over five years. The G.O.P.'s Bill Archer accused Shalala of using "scare numbers."

The fireworks have only just begun. The balanced-budget amendment, for instance, would certainly bring about massive cuts in programs like Medicaid and Medicare that benefit the poor and middle class, but in its current form it would protect many of the tax loopholes that benefit the wealthy. And though Republicans have made much of their plans for a "middle-class" tax cut, the Treasury Department estimates that a $50,000-income household would find taxes taking a 1.4% smaller bite of their income, while taxes for those earning more than $200,000 would fall by twice that.

Though he would be Speaker in a matter of weeks, Gingrich was still operating in mid-December from his old command center, a single, cramped office near the House chamber. Outside the heavy double doors, the footsteps of an occasional tourist or two punctuated the thick silence of the otherwise empty corridor. Inside, Gingrich was in a frenzy, carrying on simultaneous conferences with his staff, Armey's staff, chief political adviser Joseph Gaylord and Gingrich's mother, who had phoned from Pennsylvania. His major concern was the volley that had just landed from the Democrats: Michigan's David Bonior, the Democratic whip who was emerging as Gingrich's chief critic, was calling for an outside counsel to investigate whether charges that Gingrich had used the college course he teaches -- a course financed by tax- deductible contributions to foundations -- to further his political agenda. Gingrich remarked to his aides that if Democrats were looking for a fight, he'd happily oblige them by raising a few questions about some of the political-action committees that they operate.

Yet the drumbeat is not likely to stop anytime soon. Gingrich backed away last week from a controversial book deal in which he was to get a $4.5 million advance for writing two books for HarperCollins, a publishing house controlled by media mogul Rupert Murdoch. The deal had prompted Democrats to charge that he was violating the time-honored Washington tradition of waiting until he was out of office to cash in. Bob Dole, whose lack of fondness for Gingrich could make theirs the most interesting relationship since the Dallas Cowboys' ill- fated management team of Jimmy Johnson and Jerry Jones, noted pointedly that the new Speaker's book bonanza was hardly the most savvy political move as the party prepares to slash programs for the poor. "It's not too popular around people who talk to me," said Dole. "They think it's a lot of money." By week's end Gingrich had changed the deal so that he will get only a $1 advance and will be paid in future royalty payments instead. He explained that he didn't want to give his critics "something to run around and yell about."

In backing off the deal, Gingrich showed that he was suppressing his first instinct, which is to strike back. He may be learning that the street-fighting tactics that worked so well for him as a backbencher can look unseemly when they are tried by the Speaker of the House. And the vast, multimillion-dollar network of political and charitable organizations that he has built to spread his gospel could be a difficult target to defend. All of them draw their financial support from overlapping groups of business executives and other wealthy supporters whose identities Gingrich has resisted disclosing until recently. The donors range from restaurant and bar operators to the owners of vast mail-order operations. They will now be looking to the Republican Congress to stave off a hike in the minimum wage, resist health-insurance mandates and block any ideas to shift taxes from income to consumption. Controversial as they are, Gingrich's outside enterprises are probably as important to him as being Speaker. In some ways, they are what made him Speaker. GOPAC was a major force in giving last year's election its national theme. Through its seminars and training tapes, it helped G.O.P. candidates hone their messages, which, not so incidentally, were Gingrich's as well. Among his other endeavors are a think tank, the Progress and Freedom Foundation; a syndicated talk show called The Progress Report; and his 10-week college course, "Renewing American Civilization." Even with all he needs to get done in the first 100 days, Gingrich plans to shut down House business by 3 p.m. each Friday so that he can fly to Georgia in time to make his Saturday- morning teaching stint at Reinhardt College in Waleska. His advisers speak of reaching hundreds of thousands of people through that class, in which Gingrich spells out his vision of the world in 20 hours. It is marketed through an 800 number, broadcast on the conservative National Empowerment Television network and offered through colleges around the country. "We need a clarity and a simplicity, because people are going to be listening," Gingrich told the organizers of the course as they met to plan this semester's curriculum.

Yet not everyone is impressed. "Newt's got everybody scammed," says Frank, one of the most respected liberal intellects in the House. "Newt doesn't have ideas. He has ideas about how nice it would be to have ideas." Gingrich's fellow Republicans, especially the moderates, are skeptical too. Senator Mark Hatfield, the Oregon Republican who will chair the powerful Appropriations Committee, believes that his party will succeed in passing most of Gingrich's contract into law, but he dismisses much of it as "symbolism." Hatfield and ) other G.O.P. moderates warn that their party, including Gingrich, will be judged by a sterner standard: they must cut federal spending, taxes and borrowing in a way that will be seen as both prudent and equitable, rather than just showering new tax breaks on the rich while leaving the bill to the young. Gingrich is well aware that if Republicans fail, voters will send them packing as brusquely as they did the Democrats. In his first public speech to his members, Gingrich cautioned that the electorate has twice since World War II granted Republicans control of the House only to take it away again in the next election. But in private moments, Gingrich allows himself a fabulously optimistic daydream. "I think we'll have a good run," he said contentedly last month. "My guess is it will last 30 or 40 years."

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 800 adult Americans taken for TIME/CNN on Dec. 7-8 by Yankelovich Partners Inc. Sampling error is plus or minus 3.5%

CAPTION: DO YOU THINK NEWT GINGRICH HAS GOOD IDEAS FOR THE COUNTRY?

IS GINGRICH A LEADER YOU CAN TRUST?

With reporting by Laurence I. Barrett, James Carney, Suneel Ratan and Elaine Shannon/Washington