What is the significance of the gingrich revolution

Welfare reform. Those were just three of the 10 points of the Contract with America, Newt Gingrich's conservative plan, signed by plus Republican candidates and presented at a press conference just six weeks before the midterm elections.

The proposal by Gingrich, then Speaker of the House, has been credited with the "Republican Revolution" that ensued at the polls, with the GOP easily taking control of the U. House and Senate, gaining 12 governorships and regaining control in 20 state legislatures. Republicans had long been in the minority in Congress and the key to the Republican sweep, says Paul Teske, dean of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado, Denver, was in making the campaigns national.

Boumediene v. Snyder v. Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association. Town of Greece v. Susan Galloway, et al. Burwell, Secretary of Health and Human Services, e Trinity Lutheran Church of Columbia, Inc. Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. Republican Contract with America. Contract with America. Green Party Platform First Inaugural Address Report on Presidential Nomination Timing and Sched Commercial Republic.

Civil Rights Act of Chapter Political Economy at the End of the Address to the Nation on the Economy.

Reflections on the Commons. Speech to the American Enterprise Institute. District of Columbia v. Special Address to the Nation on Syria.

Containment and Radical Islam. Men, Women, and Biblical Equality. The Tyranny of Petty Coercion. Speech on the National Day of Prayer and Remembran Address to a Joint Session of Congress. Thanksgiving Proclamation Second Inaugural Address Citizenship and Faith. Unfortunately for him, an entire generation of Republicans have come to power adopting his strategy and his message, but failing to appreciate the distinction between means and ends.

Today's "Freedom Caucus" has embraced Gingrich's strident political style, but they lack his appreciation of the art of governance. They seem nostalgic about the Gingrich-led government shutdowns in his first year as Speaker, but they forget that after initially overreaching, Gingrich worked closely with Clinton on a number of important legislative achievements, including a balanced budget bill and legislation to reform welfare.

In the months before the Clinton impeachment, the Speaker was meeting secretly with the President plotting to create a new bipartisan coalition to reform Social Security and Medicare. Gingrich's willingness to work with Clinton outraged conservatives -- many of whom he had helped elect -- who attacked him for making deals with the devil.

After an abortive coup, they eventually forced him out of office. Boehner, although more cautious than Gingrich and less eager to make negotiate with President Obama, has suffered a similar fate. Republicans are now searching for a new leader, but personality and charisma will not heal this deep divide between politics and governance that has plagued the party for more than two decades.

It may be the greatest unintended consequence of the Gingrich revolution. Do you have information you want to share with HuffPost? News U. Politics Joe Biden Congress Extremism. Special Projects Highline. HuffPost Personal Video Horoscopes. Follow Us. The speech received little attention at the time. Gingrich was, after all, an obscure, untenured professor whose political experience consisted of two failed congressional bids.

But when, a few months later, he was finally elected to the House of Representatives on his third try, he went to Washington a man obsessed with becoming the kind of leader he had described that day in Atlanta. The GOP was then at its lowest point in modern history. But Gingrich had a plan.

The way he saw it, Republicans would never be able to take back the House as long as they kept compromising with the Democrats out of some high-minded civic desire to keep congressional business humming along. His strategy was to blow up the bipartisan coalitions that were essential to legislating, and then seize on the resulting dysfunction to wage a populist crusade against the institution of Congress itself.

Gingrich recruited a cadre of young bomb throwers—a group of 12 congressmen he christened the Conservative Opportunity Society—and together they stalked the halls of Capitol Hill, searching for trouble and TV cameras. Their emergence was not, at first, greeted with enthusiasm by the more moderate Republican leadership. They even looked different—sporting blow-dried pompadours while their more camera-shy elders smeared Brylcreem on their comb-overs. Gingrich and his cohort showed little interest in legislating, a task that had heretofore been seen as the primary responsibility of elected legislators.

Bob Livingston , a Louisiana Republican who had been elected to Congress a year before Gingrich, marveled at the way the hard-charging Georgian rose to prominence by ignoring the traditional path taken by new lawmakers. For revolutionary purposes, the House of Representatives was less a governing body than an arena for conflict and drama. And Gingrich found ways to put on a show. He recognized an opportunity in the newly installed C- span cameras, and began delivering tirades against Democrats to an empty chamber, knowing that his remarks would be beamed to viewers across the country.

Although Congress had been a volatile place during periods of American history—with fistfights and canings and representatives bellowing violent threats at one another—by the middle of the 20th century, lawmakers had largely coalesced around a stabilizing set of norms and traditions.

Entrenched committee chairs may have dabbled in petty corruption, and Democratic leaders may have pushed around the Republican minority when they were in a pinch, but as a rule, comity reigned. This ethos was perhaps best embodied by Republican Minority Leader Bob Michel, an amiable World War II veteran known around Washington for his aversion to swearing— doggone it and by Jiminy were fixtures of his vocabulary—as well as his penchant for carpooling and golfing with Democratic colleagues.

Michel was no liberal, but he believed that the best way to serve conservatism, and his country, was by working honestly with Democratic leaders—pulling legislation inch by inch to the right when he could, and protecting the good faith that made aisle-crossing possible. More important, Gingrich intuited that the old dynamics that had produced public servants like Michel were crumbling.

Tectonic shifts in American politics—particularly around issues of race and civil rights—had triggered an ideological sorting between the two parties. Liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats two groups that had been well represented in Congress were beginning to vanish, and with them, the cross-party partnerships that had fostered cooperation.

Rather than letting the party bosses in Washington decide which candidates deserved institutional support, he took control of a group called gopac and used it to recruit and train an army of mini-Newts to run for office. Gingrich hustled to keep his cause—and himself—in the press. Effective as these tactics were in the short term, they had a corrosive effect on the way Congress operated. But Gingrich looks back with pride on the transformations he set in motion.

And no one was noisier than Newt. It was , and he was 15 years old. His family was visiting Verdun, a small city in northeastern France where , people had been killed during World War I. The battlefield was still scarred by cannon fire, and young Newt spent the day wandering around, taking in the details. He found a rusted helmet on the ground, saw the ossuary where the bones of dead soldiers were piled high.

His mother struggled with manic depression , and spent much of her adult life in a fog of medication. Gingrich moved around a lot and had few friends his age; he spent more time alone in his room reading books about dinosaurs than he did playing with the neighborhood kids. But this is not the stuff Gingrich likes to talk about. Those family picnics at the zoo that he has been reminiscing about all day?

It was in Verdun that Gingrich found an identity, a sense of purpose. The next year, Gingrich turned in a page term paper about the balance of global power, and announced to his teacher that his family was moving to Georgia, where he planned to start a Republican Party in the then—heavily Democratic state and get himself elected to Congress.

Gingrich immersed himself in war histories and dystopian fiction and books about techno-futurism—and as the years went on, he became fixated on the idea that he was a world-historic hero.