Transcript
The Revolution with Steve Kornacki
Episode 6: Aftershock
Newt Gingrich’s glory lasts for about six weeks. Once he’s the center of attention, the majority of Americans don’t like what they see. He makes missteps as House Speaker, and by 1999, he has resigned and left Congress. But today, his legacy has far outlasted his time in the House — and he’s still making waves. How should we understand his impact on politics today? As the U.S. deals with partisanship, gridlock, and anti-Democratic forces in the Republican Party — how much credit or blame does Gingrich deserve? Steve talks with three longtime political observers: John Podhoretz, Eleanor Clift and Susan Page.
Steve Kornacki: In the run up to the midterm election of 2022, it can often feel like there’s more than a little 1994 in the air. We’ve got a Democratic president with low approval ratings, a Republican minority pressing hard to win control of the House. And not long before Election Day, dozens of Republicans gather for a made-for-TV event.
Guy Reschenthaler: But we’re all united behind Kevin McCarthy. He’s the one who unified the Party. He’s the one that came up with this plan. He’s the one that’s going to take us back to majority. And with that, it’s my honor to introduce my good friend, the next Speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy.
Kevin McCarthy: Thank you, my friend.
Steve Kornacki: Unlike 1994, though, these Republicans are not on the steps of the Capitol. They’re in Pennsylvania, at a manufacturing plant.
Kevin McCarthy: What we’re going to roll out today is a Commitment to America, in Washington, not Washington, D.C., but Washington County, Pennsylvania. And you want to know why? Because it’s about you.
Steve Kornacki: The Commitment to America is a one-page list of ideas and principles.
Steve Scalise: We cannot let this great nation fall. We’re not going to let —
Elise Stefanik: We will root out the corruption and return it to the people’s House. So —
Patrick McHenry: What everyone understands is that under Democrats, your taxes go up. Your —
Kevin McCarthy: Your community will be protected. Your law enforcement will be respected. Your criminals will be prosecuted. We believe in a future that’s built on freedom.
Steve Kornacki: Listening to this, you might think Newt Gingrich is still running the show on the Republican side. He’s not, of course, but he definitely hasn’t left the political stage either. In fact, he’s been helping the House Republicans this year. Here he is plugging their efforts on Sean Hannity’s show.
Newt Gingrich: I know the failures, as you pointed out, and I think that if you look at the Commitment to America and commitmenttoamerica.com, you’ll see all of this. What the Republicans in the House have done is they’ve matched up solutions against Biden’s Democratic failures.
Steve Kornacki: The populist wing of the Republican Party now, arguably, its dominant force speaks like Newt. And when it comes to the strategy of the Party’s House leadership, he sounds like he’s very much in the loop. In 2022, you can hear Newt Gingrich on a number of platforms. He’s got a podcast called Newt’s World.
Newt Gingrich: And let me say upfront, I believe that this podcast is with the next Speaker of the House. I do believe they’re going to win. I also have to say before introducing him, that I have known Kevin for a very long time. In fact, I think he was getting his boy scout badge —
Steve Kornacki: And he’s a regular pundit on Fox News.
Newt Gingrich: — Republicans that this is anything except a left wing power grab, financed by people like George Soros, deeply laid in at the local level. And frankly, I think that it is a corrupt, stolen election.
Steve Kornacki: Gingrich has aligned himself with Donald Trump. He was one of the first big name Republicans to do so back in 2016. Trump even considered making him his running mate that year, before settling on Mike Pence. And Gingrich continues to make news. In September, the January 6th Committee wrote to him, requesting an interview.
Allie Raffa: Thompson says that the committee has email evidence that the former House Speaker and longtime Trump ally was advising members of Trump’s 2020 campaign to run these TV ads, that were pushing false claims of election fraud, specifically, these false claims that Georgia election workers were smuggling in suitcases of fake ballots into these polling locations after the committee says —
Steve Kornacki: It can feel like Newt is everywhere in today’s political world, and yet, he hasn’t held elected office in a generation. It took him 16 years in the House to become Speaker, and just under four to lose it all. His reign as Speaker was brief, tumultuous, and consequential. So what happened?
This is The Revolution. I’m Steve Kornacki. Episode 6, our final episode, Aftershock.
Chris Farley: I’m reading a few new books right now. You might want to be interested in.
Steve Kornacki: Let’s go back to 1995. For all the fame Newt Gingrich had acquired inside Washington and among C-SPAN junkies, the Republican revolution made him a certified national celebrity. Here he was on Capitol Hill with the comedian Chris Farley, who portrayed Gingrich on Saturday Night Live.
Chris Farley: — when people call me landslide.
Newt Gingrich: I promise to smile when people call me landslide.
Chris Farley: I promise not to kill Big Bird.
Newt Gingrich: I promise not to kill Big Bird.
Chris Farley: I promise that my book will be way less boring than Al Gore’s book.
Steve Kornacki: But for Newt, the new national spotlight proved harsh. The provocative musings that had worked so well when he was giving late night speeches in an empty House chamber played differently with the whole country watching.
Lisa Myers: Gingrich created another furor by blaming a brutal murder, where a baby was cut out of a pregnant woman’s abdomen, on the Democratic welfare state.
Steve Kornacki: And politically, he miscalculated going to war with the Clinton White House in the fall of 1995.
Newt Gingrich: I don’t blame the President for wanting to negotiate in a tough way, but to not even sit down, when you basically have walked off and said, “Close the government down. I won’t talk with you.”
Steve Kornacki: The government shutdown of 1995 was supposed to be Newt’s way of finishing off Bill Clinton and the Democrats. Officially, the dispute was about Medicare funding. With Newt and his Republican allies arguing for cutting the rate of growth in the name of balancing the budget, smaller government, no more deficits, wasn’t this what the country had been crying out for in the revolution of ‘94? Surely, Newt figured the country would see it this way and turn on Clinton for good. But Clinton held firm and refused to sign off. He wasn’t for balancing the budget if it meant cutting Medicare, he said. In the contrary, it turned out was with him and not Newt.
Tim Russert: NBC News, Wall Street Journal, CNN, every poll I’ve seen, by 2 to 1, Mr. President, veto the Republican measures. It’s too harsh. It’s too extreme.
Bill Clinton: And you know why? Because the information they’ve been given is totally false.
Steve Kornacki: By the end of 1995, thanks to the government shutdown, Bill Clinton’s political fortunes had been revived and Newt’s were spiraling downward. They were ethics issues too. In December of 1995, the House Ethics Committee was deep into an investigation of Gingrich. That issue was a televised college course he taught while serving in Congress, how was it funded and had he used it improperly for political purposes?
Lisa Myers: To all charges, the Speaker denies any wrongdoing and blames Democrats.
Newt Gingrich: They are misusing the ethics system in a deliberate, vicious, vindictive way. And I think it is despicable, and I have just about had it.
Steve Kornacki: After attacking so many other members over ethical breaches, Gingrich was now getting a taste of his own medicine. And his poll numbers were tanking.
Tim Russert: Let’s look at the latest poll from NBC News and —
Steve Kornacki: By the middle of 1996, Gingrich was the least popular political figure in America.
Tim Russert: 61% negative amongst women, amongst black Americans 7% approval, 65, two at every three blacks, and independents key swing voters only 14% approval. What happened, Mr. Speaker?
Newt Gingrich: Oh, I think some of it was I was probably too rambunctious and I made some mistakes. Some of it, though, has to be attributed to the fact that there have been 10,800 commercials run in local markets in this country, attacking me, most of them paid for by union money.
Lisa Myers: Two years in, some Republicans were so upset with Gingrich, he barely was reelected Speaker.
Newt Gingrich: To the degree I was too brash, too self-confident or too pushy, I apologize.
Steve Kornacki: Remember those days after the 1994 revolution, when so many people, Democrats and Republicans alike, assume Bill Clinton was toast in 1996? Well, by the time that election rolled around, Clinton was running ads like this.
Clinton ‘96 campaign ad: The President bans deadly assault weapons, Dole-Gingrich vote no. The President passes family leave, Dole- Gingrich vote no. The President stands firm, a balanced budget, protects Medicare, disabled children —
Jim Miklaszewski: The sweeping victory for President Clinton. You know, he’s the first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to win a second term to the White House, taking states that should have gone to Republicans.
Steve Kornacki: Clinton went on to win a second term with ease. And while Newt did stay on as Speaker, with a reduced Republican majority, the ethics issues continue to dog him.
Lisa Myers: He became the first speaker ever reprimanded by the House for ethics violations, and was fined $300,000 for misusing tax exempt funds.
Steve Kornacki: By 1998, Newt was talking humility on WHYY’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
Terry Gross: In your new book, “Lessons Learned the Hard Way,” you have a whole chapter entitled “Learn to Keep Your Mouth Shut.” When would that have come in most handy for you?
Newt Gingrich: Oh, I think clearly the biggest single example was the Air Force One incident which —
Steve Kornacki: The Air Force One incident was a call back to the 1995 government shutdown when Newt had complained to the press that he’d been ignored in the official presidential plane by Bill Clinton. To many, it sounded like he was saying he was shutting the government down because his feelings were hurt. A famous New York Daily News cover pwned Gingrich with a caricature of him as a cry baby in diapers. Now here he was on Fresh Air, trying to be an adult.
Newt Gingrich: It got covered terribly. It sounded like I was whining and whimpering. And it was probably the worst single press I got in three years in terms of just something that was totally unnecessary, that they didn’t have to do. And that, as a result, weakened us for no good reason.
Steve Kornacki: Politically, Newt was such a liability to his Party that a group of House Republicans tried to oust him in a coup in 1997. And they nearly succeeded. He was weakened further, and then —
Lisa Myers: In his final months, Gingrich led a bare-knuckle battle to impeach President Clinton, which backfired with the public. Republicans lost seats in the ‘98 elections. Under his leadership, the party’s approval rating had plummeted from 50% to 33%.
Steve Kornacki: Betting on impeaching Bill Clinton and losing at the polls, within days of that 1998 midterm election, Newt read the writing on the wall.
Gwen Ifill: Sources say House Speaker Newt Gingrich worked the phones today, desperately trying to save his job.
Joe Johns: In his first public statement since last night’s stunning decision to give up his job after the weak Republican showing in the elections, Speaker Newt Gingrich said he did it to head off damage to his Party.
Newt Gingrich: I could hardly stand by and allow the Party to cannibalize itself in that situation, and I thought it was best for all of us.
Gwen Ifill: Among the unhappiest Republicans in Washington today, members of GOPAC, a Republican activist —
Newt Gingrich: I can’t pretend to any of you that I saw it coming because, frankly, I thought I was in one world at 6 o’clock and was in a different world by midnight. I think it’s something all of us have to look at. Let me just say to all of you that with your help, as I leave public office and rejoin the ranks of active citizenship, the venue changes and the cause lives on. Thank you. Good luck and God bless.
Steve Kornacki: That was November of 1998, Gingrich was forced from the speakership and announced he would resign from the House entirely. It was all over, or at least the congressional phase of Newt Gingrich’s career was over. Gingrich was out of the House, but the populist tide he’d written to win the majority still hasn’t receded. These days, a generation later, the country feels bitterly divided, and Gingrich himself remains a polarizing figure in our politics.
To wrap up this series, we wanted to take some time to consider the legacy of Newt Gingrich in the 1994 revolution. Coming up, I’m going to talk with three close observers of politics, people who have watched Newt Gingrich, interviewed him and witnessed so much of what we’ve covered in the six episodes. So after the break, I’ll talk with Eleanor Clift, John Podhoretz and Susan Page.
Steve Kornacki: We had hoped to talk with Newt Gingrich for this podcast. We made multiple requests for an interview. He was never made available. But his story deserves thorough consideration. So I spoke with three various astute political journalists and observers. First, Susan Page, she’s USA Today’s Washington bureau chief. She has been covering politics for more than four decades.
Susan Page: Yeah, when I was covering the White House and I can say that the President and the First Lady and I were all equally shocked at what we saw happening on that election night.
Steve Kornacki: Next up, John Podhoretz is the editor of Commentary Magazine, and he hosts the magazine’s podcast. He’s also a columnist at the New York Post.
John Podhoretz: I did the first long profile of Gingrich in early 1984 and no one had done a big, you know, one of those like style section profiles of him.
Steve Kornacki: And Eleanor Clift, she started covering politics for Newsweek in the 1970s. And now, she’s a columnist for The Daily Beast. She’s the author of many books, including one that she co-authored about Washington in the mid-1990s, with a chapter on Newt. It’s called “War Without Bloodshed: The Art of Politics.”
Eleanor Clift: Well, his aides over the years always used to say there was a good Newt and there was the bad Newt. And the good Newt was very, very good and the bad Newt was very, very bad. And in his office, there was a big box that was labeled Newt’s Ideas, and then there was a much smaller shoebox-sized box that said Newt’s good Ideas.
Steve Kornacki: Eleanor helped kick off our conversation by reminding us of Newt’s unique relationship to the media.
Eleanor Clift: Gingrich had courted the press from his early days. And I first met him in the early 1970s when I was working in Atlanta for Newsweek, and he was a professor at West Georgia College. And he had written a paper about how politicians could use television, which now seems like, yeah, pretty obvious. But it was an extensive paper and he wanted people to read it. And he would stop by the Newsweek office, I was the only one who paid any attention to him and I wasn’t even a reporter then.
But he went to the Atlanta Constitution, and he befriended all the top editors at the Atlanta Constitution because he wanted to know how the newspapers worked, you know, how reporters made their judgments. He really studied, like an anthropologist, how the media and politics worked. I mean, the planning that went into this, he was not an overnight success, although the country treated him that way and the media treated him that way.
John Podhoretz: Well, you know, Steve, one of the really interesting things about Gingrich that Eleanor gets at is that he was a very rare combination, in fact, wasn’t even a combination. He was like 80% a brilliant strategist and 20% a functional politician, by which I mean, ordinarily, we would think of somebody who came up with this long-range plan for a Republican resurgence or surge, as being somebody who is, like, works for the politician, not the politician themselves. But he was far better a strategist-tactician, looking at House rules to jimmy with them, figuring out that there was this way to get on C-SPAN every night with this one-minute speech at 7 o’clock, that Republicans came to dominate, all kinds of little bits and pieces.
When he finally took power in 1994 and 1995, he had grave organizational weaknesses. He had grave leadership weaknesses. He was too focused on himself. And he really did his head swell that he believed he was coequal to the President. And he ended up with his, you know, after four years and some ill-advised decisions and some other things going on, with a party and open revolt against him, even though he really was the architect of this takeover. But once the building was built, managing the building was really not in his wheelhouse.
Steve Kornacki: Yet, Susan, I’m curious, what did it feel like in the immediate aftermath of the election, the early, you know, January ‘95 when the takeover happens, you know, Newt had this vision, obviously, not just of a Republican majority of the House, but just a top to bottom conservative Republican majority. This was like, in some way, ‘94 was the start of finishing off modern liberalism. Did it feel like that was happening?
Susan Page: I don’t think we all understood fully the long-term consequences of the vision that Newt Gingrich had. I think we knew something big had happened, that it was a different kind of politics. You know, part of it was policy, because Gingrich had more of just kind of a staunch conservatism, a splash of populism. But a lot of it was his tone, it was his willingness to be so fiercely partisan. And here came Newt Gingrich, who not only had a very specific agenda that he wanted Republicans to push. He wanted his members to live in their districts, leave their families in their districts, so that they spent less time in Washington, which gave them less time to even know people who served on the other side of the aisle.
He had a willingness to compare his opponents to traders who didn’t wish well for the country, and his side as patriots. He used the kind of language that has now become quite routine, but at that moment, was shocking. We should have understood more because there have been signs of the public’s dissatisfaction with the way politics as usual is going. And certainly, the Clinton administration laid the groundwork for upheaval by being so inept those first two years. But I don’t think we understood how thoroughly politics was about to change and for the long haul.
Eleanor Clift: Well, the Contract with America had all those steps. One after another in rapid fashion, they passed it through the House. I think it was Chris Farley on Saturday Night Live, did a wonderful impersonation of how this legislation was just flying out of the House over to the Senate, where Bob Dole thought nothing of it. And you know, today, it’s commonplace. The majority leader doesn’t schedule anything, or the minority leader blocks things. But then, there was a lot of animosity between Dole and Gingrich, because Dole wasn’t going to be Gingrich’s handmaiden. And not much of that Contract with America went anywhere. But it created the illusion that the Republicans, these new Republicans were really in charge.
And then the Oklahoma City bombing happened. And Clinton went out there and gave one of his speeches, where he really was the leader of the country, the healer. People wanted to hear from him. And in the end, Gingrich and Clinton actually worked together. And each for their own interests, they balanced the budget. They got the welfare reform bill through. Gingrich and Clinton actually loved each other because they had the same intellectual wandering minds, where they could talk about anything for hours. And Clinton quickly figured out he could charm Gingrich and get something done. And he figured out what to do and how to salvage his presidency.
Steve Kornacki: We’ve talked to a lot of people, you know, a lot of D.C. characters from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, about the 1994 revolution and what it means long term. But I’m wondering, each of you, when you look back with the benefit of hindsight, what does it mean to you? What about you, Susan?
Susan Page: Gingrich was Speaker for only four years, and he changed everything. He is the godfather of the politics we see today. He shaped the Republican Party, both ideologically and in terms of its tactics, in ways that they continue to play out. That changed the way many Democrats responded. It laid the groundwork for our most disruptive president, Donald Trump. For guy who wasn’t actually in charge for that long, he did a lot.
Eleanor Clift: Yeah.
John Podhoretz: I wonder, I mean, I think that Gingrich had this four-year reign that his contribution in American history, whether you like it or you don’t like it, was in bringing down the one-party rule in the House, which was, you know, not that we have that much history, but a historical anomaly and a very weird set of circumstances. Where we are now is probably where we should be. We’re a pretty divided country, ideologically and politically. And so, the control of the House and the Senate should be up for grabs in every election. That’s what elections are for, not to sort of ritualistically enshrine one-party control of one or the other body, or the presidency over time.
He was brilliant at that, and terrible at managing and being a kind of national leader and national figure. His edges were too jagged. The material that he had honed, sort of the culture war material that he had honed, rang falsely on the ears of people who were not already in agreement with him. And indeed, the reaction to him, not just to Clinton, but to him, was what made the George W. Bush presidency. Remember, he ran as a compassionate conservative. Why did he say that? Because he was saying, “I’m not Gingrich. I don’t want to balance the budget on the backs of the poor,” George W. Bush said.
And of course, you know, that was an incredibly close election with Al Gore. But when Bush came in, he ran a different kind of politics. He said, “I can work with Democrats.” His first major piece of legislation was a bill that Bush negotiated with Teddy Kennedy, the No Child Left Behind Act. And then 9/11 happened, and again, the political table of the United States was reset in an entirely new way. It’s possible that Trump coming in, kind of reflected stuff that Gingrich had had nascently. But there was a big, long period of time in which it was not a dominating fact in the Republican Party, which nominated John McCain and Mitt Romney, after it had nominated and elected George W. Bush twice.
And then, more, more Perot than Gingrich comes Trump, a guy from the outside who says, “You all stink. It’s all broken. Everything is terrible. I alone can fix it.” So I don’t know that Newt was anything but a figure of his time. And that I know there’s this idea that this all sort of bubbled over time. But you know, if the Iraq War had gotten better, there never would have been a Trump. If the Iraq War had gotten better, you know, there wouldn’t have been an Obama. Like, its historical agency in the 2000s had much more to do with where the Republican Party is now than whatever forces Newt Gingrich corralled to have this limited but very important effect on one House of Congress.
Steve Kornacki: Eleanor, how about you?
Eleanor Clift: Well, If Ralph Nader hadn’t run in 2000, we wouldn’t have had an Iraq War either. We would have had Al Gore. You can play the what-if game a lot. But Gingrich, for his first 15 or 16 years in Congress, was seen as a bomb thrower, a backbencher, somebody who didn’t matter. Okay, he took those tactics, and he inspired a whole new generation of Republicans to use those tactics. And then they moved further to the right than he was. I don’t know, maybe “to the right” isn’t the right word, but more populous, more disruptive. And he ultimately couldn’t control them. And every Speaker since has had that problem.
John Boehner lasted the longest, and he went shuffling off singing Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah after, I guess, there were two failed coup attempts within the Party to get rid of him. No Republican Speaker has managed to accomplish anything since, because to get where they are and to get ahead, they create worse versions of themselves in this sort of disruption category. And we’re seeing the same thing with McCarthy. Look at all the election deniers who are going to be in the new Congress. And the new piece by Robert Draper, where Marjorie Taylor Greene says, “He’s going to give me a lot of power and leeway,” because he can’t be Speaker, he can’t get votes or anything unless he has that element to the Party. And that element to the Party has gotten more and more outrageous each cycle.
Maybe we can trace it back to Gingrich. But Gingrich looks, to me, like kind of a weak, intellectual version of what we see today. He did actually have some thoughts about the country in the future and all of that. People today, all they care about is how they come across on social media and how they can raise money. And they’ve discovered that you do that just by being totally outrageous.
Steve Kornacki: Susan?
Susan Page: Look, politics is never a straight line. But Newt Gingrich was a pivot point in our politics, that if you take a 30,000-foot picture, we’re still on the course that he set us on.
Steve Kornacki: One more area I want to explore with you would be, I view the 1994 midterm as the first nationalized midterm election. And I feel we are now totally immersed in almost purely nationalized politics, meaning that whatever corner of the country you live in, whatever state, county, neighborhood, you’re in, your voting decisions now really are driven by what you’re seeing on the national stage, and what you’re consuming from national media or social media, or wherever it’s viral on social media.
And I think back to one of the things we’ve talked about in this podcast before is, you know, Newt coming to the House, when Tip O’Neill was speaker, and Tip O’Neill’s famous line was “All politics is local.” And it was back in this era when people would vote for a Democrat for one office or Republican for another office, and they’d split up their votes. And that in 1994, there had been an evolution in the media, the rise of talk radio, cable news, you know, CNN at that point existed, MS and Fox were on the way. The media was evolving in a way that was creating fertile ground for the nationalization of politics. And then that started in ‘94, or reached critical mass in ’94, and has really accelerated since. Is that something you see?
Eleanor Clift: Well, there’s no local media. And candidates, they do grassroots stuff, but they can’t be everywhere. So it’s all filtered through the national media and in the interests of the two parties.
John Podhoretz: I had dinner with, you know, a civilian, someone who is not in the media and not in politics. And he said this very interesting thing to me, he said, “Why should I, living in Manhattan, care about who the governor of Texas is? I shouldn’t care about who the governor of Texas is. I have a gubernatorial race right here in my own state. But I get five emails a day from Beto O’Rourke, asking me for money. Why is Beto O’Rourke asking me for money?” And if you actually think about it, it’s really kind of a brilliant point.
Susan Page: So John, first of all, congratulations on having dinner with civilians.
John Podhoretz: Thank you very much. Yes.
Susan Page: That’s very big minded of you.
John Podhoretz: Yes, yes, yes.
Susan Page: And possibly useful, maybe we should all have dinner with civilians more often. The fact is I think Americans increasingly see the things, issues they care about affected by people who are elected in other places. And nothing exemplifies that more than the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs, right? That was a result of the election of Republican presidents who got to put justices who oppose abortion rights on the court and overturn a precedent that had stood for 50 years.
So when people think about why should I care about the election in some other state, they know that Senators confirm judges, and that’s important. And they know that if they want a tax cut, it matters that they have a Republican elected to their House districts. So I think, especially as the parties got sorted out, so whether you’re a Republican in North Carolina or New Hampshire or Oregon, you’re going to stand for basically the same things. It’s not quite a parliamentary system yet, but it has persuaded people that party affiliation is just as important as the character of the candidate that they have running locally.
John Podhoretz: More important, obviously, because character matters almost not at all, from what we can tell.
Steve Kornacki: Well, in very big picture, though, Susan, what you were just describing, it seems to me that was Newt’s animating vision. It was the nationalization of politics. It was to get the Republicans in North Carolina or New Hampshire or Texas, or wherever, to all basically sound the same, and for that matter, the Democrats. And the calculation there was that that would work out to 60-40 Republican advantage, and he’s gotten it, but what it actually worked out to is 50-50.
Susan Page: Yeah. If you want the Contract with America, it applied no matter where the Republican was running in 1994. So if that’s what you support, vote Republican, yeah. And once you’re sorted out in these parties, there’s like no turning back, right? And don’t you think we’re just going to be living with nationalized elections forever? Forever, foreseeable future?
Steve Kornacki: What about you, Eleanor?
Eleanor Clift: Once upon a time, there were no battleground states. I know when Jimmy Carter ran in ‘76, he went everywhere. Some states weren’t more important really, except for how many electoral votes they might have. I’m not sure what year the election basically came down to, you know, half a dozen, 10 states.
John Podhoretz: Well, I think it was ’88. I mean, if you think about it, supposedly, George H.W. Bush was down 17 points to Dukakis at the beginning of September in ‘88. I sort of doubt that could possibly be true since he won by seven or eight. But they ran as though they were, and they went to states where they could dominate.
And then, of course,’ 92 happened, then you had this very bizarre map because you didn’t know whether this third-party candidate might or might not win a state or two. And there was this idea, right, that the Republicans had an electoral lock on the Senate because of the solid Democratic South had turned into a solid Republican South. And James Carville said, “We picked the electoral law.”
Eleanor Clift: We picked the lock. Right.
John Podhoretz: Right?
Eleanor Clift: Well, have people’s priorities changed? I mean, what’s changed since then, the way the media operates? That’s kind of one of the issues. The media has changed, but also the character of the campaigns and the personalities underscored, especially since Trump, the importance of personality.
John Podhoretz: I mean, I think two things happened after the ‘94 elections. I mean, you mentioned that, you know, Fox and MSNBC both were sort of incepted in 1995, I think ‘96. But there were these two nationalizing events. Again, not just the politics gets nationalized because somebody thinks of issues to nationalize. But the Lewinskygate and the impeachment of Bill Clinton was the first, which is what made these cable channels. It gave them something to do 24 hours a day for 10 months. And anybody in the media knows this.
Like, if you were somebody around, you got five phone calls a day. Can you go on this chat? Can you go here? Can you be in this Brady Bunch checkered box to talk about what happened today in impeachment at 8:00 in the morning, at 11:00 at night? It didn’t matter. There was this inexhaustible MA (ph). It’s all anybody talked about. And these networks were launched essentially after two years of, you know, very slow, not quite sure who they were, what they were, just covering impeachment.
And then 9/11 happened. And 9/11 really was foundational. You know, this whole country believed that we had been attacked, that we were in something together, that there was something large and fundamental and existential that happened. And those things also ended up being the things that helped advance the sort, like really, really, really have people say which side are you on. Where do you stand?
And these nationalizing events then I think dovetailed with this change. You know, it was also a larger American change. I mean, you know, regionalism that has been on the wane for the last half century. Go to any city, you know, every mall has the same shops. Every strip of gas stations has the same 12 fast food places and a Cheesecake Factory. It doesn’t matter where you are in the United States, everything sort of looks the same. And so we also have a nationalized politics because we have nationalized everything.
Susan Page: So Johnny, it always comes back to food for you, right? Dinner, The Cheesecake Factory, and all that.
John Podhoretz: Yeah.
Susan Page: Restaurants are the same. But I would – there’s a little bit of a chicken and egg here when you talk about the nationalized media. I mean, the politics got more nationalized. That encouraged the media to become more nationalized. That encouraged the nationalization of our politics. And I think, as John said, big events, big actual events, not the dreams of politicians have pushed us in that direction as well. And we’re just a different kind of country than we were 50 years ago, 40 years ago, I don’t know, since 1994, in terms of like the world in which we picture ourselves.
Steve Kornacki: Coming up, Susan, Eleanor, John, and I talked about Newt Gingrich’s alignment with Donald Trump in the state of the Republican Party today.
Steve Kornacki: I’m wondering, this question of a through line, you know, potentially from Newt in ‘94 to the present day. I wonder, though, you know, Newt didn’t totally disappear after he left the speakership, a prominent commentator, runs for president in 2012.
And there’s this famous moment in South Carolina, where he’s languishing in third place in the polls. And he’s asked the question by John King, the moderator at the debate, about accusations from one of his ex-wives that he had asked for an open marriage. This is four years before Trump. You would think this is a very damaging allegation. And he completely turns it around into an attack on the media, and literally gains 30 points, wins the South Carolina primary in a runaway. He doesn’t win the nomination. But it’s a moment that tells you there’s something there that he’s tapping into.
And then when 2016 comes along, you know, so many Republicans waited so long to get behind Trump, but Newt didn’t. Newt was onto him early. Could you imagine the Newt of ‘94 being attracted to the politics of the Trump of 2016? Is there something consistent?
John Podhoretz: I think there is an absolute behavioral throughline from Newt to Trump. Newt went to places as a leading American politician, had an aggressiveness quality that was new in modern politics. And he deployed media like the C-SPAN minute, in an inventive new way, in a weird way similar to Trump. And he understood that there was a world of people, they were so full of rage, that if he could reflect their rage, this what Joe Klein had called the radical middle that even though we think of Gingrich as being, you know, a total rock-ribbed, hysterical, right-wing Republican.
But you know, this was the force that got Perot 19% of the vote, and Gingrich understood it better than any other politician in Washington did in ‘93 and ’94, and harnessed that a little bit. And that is exactly what Trump was. Trump was the Perot voter 22 years later, added with the World Wrestling Federation voter and the Alex Jones listener, and this weird proletarian right, you know, non-college educated, never voting, dispossessed white men. And was that part of Gingrich’s coalition? Yeah, but a very small part, and then it became a kind of dominating voice in Trump and what Gingrich toyed with.
Trump just, you know, like, as he always did, stripped the bark off and was unambiguous about. You know, he just put it front and center. This is who we are. They’re stealing the country from you. They’re taking everything away from you. I’m going to give things to you. They give them to all these wealthy people and elite people, and I’m going turn around and give it to you, because that’s all Washington does is give things and I’m going give them to you.
Steve Kornacki: Susan, how about you?
Susan Page: Trump could maintain enormous political power after losing office, which he continues to exploit to this day. Gingrich did not never figure that out, right? Once Gingrich left Congress, it’s not that he doesn’t want to be powerful, he’s still on the fringe. He runs for president in 2012. And despite South Carolina, he doesn’t do very well in 2016. He wants to be Trump’s vice president. That didn’t work out either. I can understand why some of these younger Republicans don’t have any clear picture of Gingrich and his contribution, because it ended like in 1999. But I think it is hard to deny that they’re living with it, even if they don’t understand that.
John Podhoretz: Right. But there was a category error that Gingrich made, that’s very important here, and relating to, you know, Trump, look, got 74 million votes in 2020. That’s a huge number of people voting for him. And then he said he didn’t lose, and a bunch of them think that he didn’t lose, and so he’s standing there still as a political player.
Gingrich made this horrible category error in 1995. He thought he was toe to toe with the President of United States. Clinton got 40 million votes. Gingrich got 115,000 in his district. These are not coequal figures. He was Speaker of the House because he was voted speaker by 260 people, not by the country. He won no electoral votes.
Like, when he decided to go toe to toe with Clinton and like played chicken with Clinton on shutting the government down, or when he wanted to whine and complain that he didn’t get a good seat on the Air Force One going to Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral, he was out of his league, just simply as a matter practical American politics. And he overplayed his hand, he thought he was more powerful than he was. And we in the media are partially responsible for that because, you know, he became the most important person in American politics, in part, because we were so blown away by what he had accomplished, and because it was an incredibly interesting story, and he fell for it.
Eleanor Clift: Gingrich, he wants to be relevant. And the way you’re relevant today, if you can’t be powerful, you hang around someone who is powerful. And that’s why you can see him in the outer fringes of the Trump crowd. I would love to ask him whether he has any regrets, but I think I know what the answer is, and the answer would probably be no.
Steve Kornacki: I’m curious too, to separate Newt from 1994, if you see, if the legacy or part of the legacy of 1994 is just the kind of sorting out, they call it the great sort, the big sort that’s taken place here where, I mean, I see this myself whenever we look at elections and election returns. So much of it is predictable ahead of time in terms of there’s geographic and cultural and demographic divide between the parties that are vast and that are deep and have led us to this place where we’re basically a 50-50 nation. But almost everybody is on one team or the other. And there’s this vanishing number of swing voters. And I wonder, Susan, if 1994 is a critical point in the development of that.
Susan Page: Yeah. Not teams, tribes. 1994 was part of the process of becoming political tribes instead of teams, and you see that in both parties. Remember those southern Democrats who opposed civil rights legislation, they wouldn’t be Democrats today; or those New England Republicans who once played a big role there, hardly any of them left. In 1994, it was one big step in that process.
Steve Kornacki: What about you, Eleanor?
Eleanor Clift: Well, the Republican Party today, it’s completely radicalized. There’s no way for it to be a governing partner to the Democrats. There is no Republican Party today that’s recognizable as a governing entity, and I don’t see that changing. So for a country that’s had this really strong two-party system forever, this is really a frightening time.
And so, you know, we can’t lay all this on the feet of Gingrich or even on Trump. It’s something in the American people that yearning for some sort of simplistic, you know, power that will save them and not really thinking through what they’re voting for, or against the pouring of money in the ads and everything that really, I think, pollute our politics. That’s only gotten worse. But, you know, to talk about controlling political spending, I mean, you’re spitting into the wind. I mean, I feel there are so many forces that we can’t control, and they’re only bound to get worse.
John Podhoretz: Well, one thing about Republicans in the midterms that we learned in ’94, with this incredible victory in ’94, you know, sort of earth-shaking victory in ‘94, and with let a lesser earth-shaking, but nonetheless, you know, essentially era ending victory in 2010 that brought the sort of activist presidency of Barack Obama to an end, that they don’t know what to do with power once they get it. And it’s very hard for them to know what to do, even if they have a Contract with America, or they have a tea party that, you know, nominally has ideas about what to do.
And they bungled it, and bungled it in very, very similar ways in 2011, 2013, and in 1995, which is they shut the government down, thinking that that was a good move and was going to be helpful to them, and that the country was behind them, and the country was never behind them, because one thing the government isn’t supposed to do is shut down. And the people who say, “We’re shutting it down,” are blamed for shutting it down.
So interesting thing is, as we move into the future, whether Republicans, you know, look back to this not very distant past and say, maybe there are things that we should not do, even though we don’t like Joe Biden, and we want to sort of, you know, not have any more liberal activism. Maybe there are things we can learn from Newt Gingrich’s overreach, and the 2011 government shutdown, the 2013 Ted Cruz government shutdown. Maybe there are things we can learn about how not to do this.
Steve Kornacki: Well, thanks, everyone, for taking part in this. I really enjoyed the conversation.
Susan Page: Hey, thank you.
John Podhoretz: Thanks.
Eleanor Clift: Thank you, Steve.
Steve Kornacki: I’ve been talking with columnist John Podhoretz of Commentary Magazine and the New York Post, and Eleanor Clift of The Daily Beast, and with Susan Page, Washington bureau chief for USA Today.
And that’s it for The Revolution. Thank you for coming along on this journey with me.
We made multiple requests to speak with Newt Gingrich for this podcast, but he was never made available. And then, after this series was released, we did hear from him. You’ll hear that conversation in episode 7.
From MSNBC, this is the final episode of The Revolution. If you like what you’ve heard, please give us a 5-star rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. And be sure to tell your friends and follow on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you’re listening right now.
The Revolution was written and hosted by me, Steve Kornacki. And if you want to know even more about the roller coaster of politics in the Newt Gingrich era, I wrote a book about it, it’s called “The Red and The Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism.”
The series is produced by Frannie Kelley, Ursula Sommer and Adam Noboa. It’s edited by Alison MacAdam. Our associate producer is Eva Ruth Moravec. Sound designed by Ramtin Arablouei. Bryson Barnes is our technical director, and he wrote our music. Soraya Gage is our executive producer, and Madeleine Haeringer is our head of Editorial.
Our musicians are Danny Wolf, Liz and Jon Estes, and Russ Glenn. Many, many others helped make this podcast possible, including Betsy Korona, Jessica Baker, Robin Gradison, Susan Sullivan, Jean Roseman, Nick Offenberg, Reid Cherlin, Frank Radano, Alexa Corea, Larry Kelley, our excellent NBC News and MSNBC marketing team, and Rashida Jones and Noah Oppenheim.