THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT 
              Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: Monday, January 9, 1995                TAG: 9501070031
SECTION: FRONT                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Editorial 
                                             LENGTH: Short :   45 lines

WHO'S IN CHARGE?

It's been noted that President Bill Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich have a lot in common. Both are ambitious, intelligent overachievers who came from less than prosperous homes where they were doted on by mothers and had to deal with stepfathers. Neither served in Vietnam and episodes in their private lives haven't matched their public rhetoric.

But now we learn they share something really troubling: a taste for best-seller-list philosophy, pop psychology and bite-size management maxims.

Gingrich's enthusiasm for trendy futurist Alvin Toffler and business-writer Peter Drucker are already well-known. He has said he recognized his own trouble with marriage in the self-help tome Men Who Hate Women. And he used his first speech as speaker to recommend Morris Schechtman's Working without a Net to the nation. Weird.

Clinton's fondness for instant intellectualizing is captured by his annual attendance at the famed Renaissance Weekend where movers and shakers pretend to attend lectures while actually networking furiously.

But it gets worse. Turns out Clinton has been on retreat to Camp David with the author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey, who is also a Gingrich guru. Clinton also met with Anthony Robbins, former janitor, self-styled ``peak performance coach'' and ``turnaround expert,'' and author of Awaken the Giant Within. If he can rouse the Clinton presidency from its torpor, turn it around and clean up its act, his years as janitor won't have been spent in vain.

What are we to make of a government being run by a president and speaker who are suckers for New Age positive thinking, management malarkey and paint-by-numbers problem solving? And what's next?

Defense policy a la Tom Clancy? An Education Department where The Cinderella Complex and The Peter Pan Syndrome are required reading? Richard Simmons for surgeon general?

Actually, that last one might not be a bad idea. The thought of Gingrich and Clinton sweatin' to the oldies is more appealing than the thought of them governing according to self-help manuals. by CNB