The Political Interest

By Michael Kramer

We've been here before, remember? It wasn't so long ago that Ronald Reagan won the White House with a simple message: Americans were overtaxed and overregulated and reeling under the weight of Big Government. To illustrate those themes, the Master invoked stories of welfare queens driving Cadillacs and buildings full of bureaucrats, each taking care of a single Indian. Reagan's facts were so routinely off-base that his staff quit trying to explain them. In 1982 the President spoke glowingly about British legal traditions. In England, he said, it used to be that "if a criminal carried a gun, even if he didn't use it, he was tried for first-degree murder and hung if he was found guilty." Informed that the anecdote wasn't true, Reagan's press secretary said, "Well, it's a good story, though. It made the point, didn't it?"

In outlook, in prescription and also in his penchant for shaving the truth by the clever manipulation of easily grasped images, Newt Gingrich is Reagan's true heir. To appreciate Newt's World, consider just a few of the bombs the new House Speaker lobbed as he issue-surfed through his Dec. 4 appearance on NBC's Meet the Press:

THE COMMONSENSE OUTRAGE: To swipe at oppressive government regulations, Gingrich produced a first-aid heart pump. "What I want the American people to understand," he said, is that this pump that was "invented in Denmark increases by 54% the number of people with CPR who get to the hospital with a chance to recover. The Food and Drug Administration makes illegal ((a product)) that minimizes brain damage, increases the speed of recovery and saves money." Using this pump is just "common sense," Gingrich insisted, implying that the FDA's intransigence costs lives.

In fact: The pump Gingrich displayed was invented by two Americans who licensed it to a Danish company that still hasn't applied to the FDA for permission to test it in the U.S. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, who mistakenly believed they could test the device without FDA approval, conducted some early trials in a hospital environment. The device seemed promising, but cardiologist Michael Callaham, who oversaw the trials, says later field tests on 859 patients "unfortunately showed the pump to be of absolutely no benefit." The FDA stopped the study, says Callaham, "but we talked with them about it for five months, during which time we went ahead with our trials, as they knew we would. So the process worked well enough. The FDA's job is to protect the public. They're appropriately tough. You don't want bad stuff on the market."

THE FALSE PANACEA: To Gingrich, and to Republicans generally, the more power left in state hands the better. State Governors, said Gingrich approvingly in his example, urge Washington to "send welfare back home," where they will "get people into work, and it will be dramatically less expensive."

In fact: The states have proved they can better handle many governmental functions, but Gingrich's example supports a different conclusion: the states can also learn from Washington. Gingrich spoke of Massachusetts' success in cutting in half its $200 million-a-year program that supports disabled welfare recipients. "The first thing they said is, you have to go to a doctor before we approve you," Gingrich reported. "The following month 25% of the people dropped off the program, because they knew if they went to see a doctor they wouldn't be approved, and that doesn't even count the ones doctors turned down."

Gingrich missed the key point. "We finally got smart," says an aide to Massachusetts Governor William Weld. "Before we changed, it was like Lucy -- 'The shrink is in for 5 cents.' All people had to do was come in with a note asserting a disability. Now claims are reviewed by a panel of doctors. We modeled our program on the one used by the feds; it works."

THE SHOCKING TRAGEDY: Aping Reagan's fondness for Hollywood history, Gingrich restated his support for orphanages. First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, he said, should "rent Boys Town," the uplifting but highly idealized movie about the Nebraska home run by a priest who insisted "there are no bad boys." Declaring that orphanages were better than Dumpsters, Gingrich claimed that in Washington alone, 800 babies a year were left in the trash.

In fact: Not quite. According to the district's human-services department, there are currently 1,200 children in foster care, wards of the city because their parents neglected them. There are currently only nine "border babies," infants born to drug-addicted mothers unable to care for them. In just four well-publicized cases were kids actually placed in Dumpsters this year, which is shocking enough. Yet because of liberal policies, Gingrich said, "we say to a 13-year-old drug addict who's pregnant, 'Put your baby in the Dumpster; that's O.K.' "

THE ATHEIST SACRILEGE: In support of his call for a constitutional amendment permitting prayer in schools, Gingrich asserted that "most people don't know it's illegal to pray. When they learn that a 10-year-old boy in St. Louis was put in detention for saying grace privately over his lunch, they think that's bizarre . . . That's what we used to think of Russian behavior when they were the Soviet Union."

In fact: Only organized prayer is prohibited in schools. Kids can pray privately all they want as long as they don't disrupt student activities. St. Louis school officials are contesting the case in court. They deny the allegation and imply the child was disciplined for behavioral problems unrelated to praying.

SMOKE AND MIRRORS: Mixing Reagan's enthusiasm for supply-side economics and Ross Perot's love of visual aids, Gingrich offered a chart to support the no- pain fiscal proposals he says will balance the budget by 2002 without draconian spending cuts. "We're never, ever talking about cutting spending," Gingrich said. "We're talking about a slower rate of growth."

In fact: Behind that bluster are some sobering calculations. Gingrich correctly states that current projections assume a 5.4% increase in federal spending over the next seven fiscal years and a $319 billion deficit in 2002. Hold the growth rate to 3.2%, as Gingrich proposes, and the budget could indeed be balanced -- but only if Newt forgoes the additional defense funding and tax cuts he favors.

The problem comes when Gingrich rules out tampering with the budget-busting entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. A 3.2% growth rate would probably allow cost-of-living increases for the 42 million people now receiving Social Security. But during the seven years of Newtonomics, 6 million more Americans will become eligible for Social Security, and there won't be a cent for any of them. Gingrich presumably wouldn't allow that, so he would have to cut somewhere. To balance the books Newt-style, which means hands off Social Security and the Medicare programs, Gingrich would have to whack all other government programs except defense 43%.

& Gingrich dismisses such criticism by attacking the "socialist" accounting practices every reputable U.S. economist agrees on. Money will pour in once taxes are cut because investors will have more to spend, he says. But that's exactly what Reagan tried in the 1980s, and Reaganomics didn't compute either. In the wake of Reagan's revenue cuts, income tax receipts went down until 1986. To the degree overall revenues rose in the mid '80s, the increase was due almost exclusively to the whopping and regressive rise in payroll taxes imposed in five of the six years before 1987.

Since Meet the Press, Gingrich has been chastised for charging that "a senior law-enforcement official says that up to 25% of White House staffers" used drugs in the four-to-five-year period prior to their current work. Gingrich hasn't backed off the claim, although his aides quickly point to the qualifying words "up to." Nevertheless, Gingrich now says he "regrets" saying something that had "a larger effect than I intended." But of course the damage has been done -- and that's the key to the Newt Method.

On another TV show five days before Meet the Press, Gingrich said, "I am learning that everything I say has to be worded carefully and thought through at a level that I've never experienced." Gingrich would strain credulity to assert that every kernel of truth he popped into a bald exaggeration or outright falsehood on Meet the Press wasn't worded carefully and thought through in advance. He is in fact following a course he set years ago, an M.O. he routinely urges on other Republicans. Gingrich today controls a political action committee, GOPAC, that trains candidates to attack their opponents like pit bulls. GOPAC's how-to textbook, which Gingrich calls "absolutely brilliant," advises candidates to "go negative" early and "never back off." Use "minor details" to demonize the opposition, it suggests, citing as a good example the 1988 G.O.P. campaign attack on Michael Dukakis for allowing Willie Horton out on furlough.

The White House, all atwitter, hasn't yet determined how to neutralize Newt. Chief of staff Leon Panetta likened Gingrich to an "out-of-control talk-show host," an unsubtle reference to Rush Limbaugh. But Limbaugh is also the most popular of the breed -- and like Rush, it doesn't seem to matter that a lot of what Newt says is mostly not true. Audiences love it -- as they loved Reagan -- even when they know that what they're hearing is often baseless. For many | who applaud Gingrich and Limbaugh, the catchy rantings are acceptable caricatures of a caricature they already despise -- government. Falsity is forgiven because the target of Gingrich's critiques (like Limbaugh's and Reagan's) is deemed worthy of vituperative attack. As an aspiring congressional candidate in 1978, Gingrich admonished a gathering of college Republicans. "Don't try to educate ((the public))," he said. "That's not your job." Gingrich clearly sees his job as acquiring and holding power for as long as possible by any means necessary. Ronald Reagan is surely smiling.