ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, December 28, 1995 TAG: 9512290017
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-8 EDITION: METRO
WHY, some people are asking, did Time magazine name Newt Gingrich "Man of the Year," when he has become an embarrassment to himself and fellow Republicans?
Why? Because he deserves it.
No one dominated America's agenda more in 1995 than Gingrich did. He is responsible, as much as anyone, for organizing the GOP congressional triumph last year, then reshaping the House of Representatives this year from an arena of balkanized fiefdoms into a staging ground from which a disciplined majority zealously pursued its vision.
The speaker has helped change the frame and terms of American political debate. As Time noted in its essay: "Not so long ago, the idea of a balanced budget was a marginal, we'll-get-to-it-someday priority. Today, because of Newt Gingrich, the question is not whether a balanced-budget plan will come to pass, but when."
Credit Gingrich, too, for saying what's on his mind, doing what he says he'll do, and showing some political courage in the process. Whatever its flaws, for example - and they are considerable - we know what Gingrich's balanced-budget plan is. Do we know what Clinton's is?
The speaker has been, no doubt about it, his own worst enemy.
The man who hounded Jim Wright from the speakership seems himself to have a blind spot where ethics are concerned. He faces an independent counsel's investigation that can't be written off entirely as a partisan attempt to wound him. The probe may yet bring him down.
Gingrich also shares, with Bill Clinton, a habit of talking too much for his own good: blaming murders on Democratic policies, for example, or bizarrely tracing the first government shutdown in part to a presidential snub aboard Air Force One.
Some of Gingrich's policy positions - typically offered with glib certainty and self-righteousness - have with cause offended Americans who still believe in the common good and a commitment to ameliorating poverty, and can discern the unfairness in the "Contract with America."
Gingrich's claims to be a reformer also have been belied in part by congressional Republicans' eagerness to troll corporate America for big checks while putting off campaign-finance reform, promising tax breaks for the well-off and writing business lobbyists' wish lists into legislation.
Even so, the speaker may yet enjoy the last laugh. His plunge in the polls could seduce Democrats into thinking they can get by with attacking him instead of producing an alternative vision of their own.
That might assure continued successes for the Gingrich agenda, following a remarkable run in the pivotal year of 1995.
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