Cartoonists Welcome New Subjects for Sharp Needles : Satire: Not only do they have Clinton and the liberals for fodder, but Rep. Newt Gingrich and Sens. Bob Dole, Alfonse D’Amato and Jesse Helms are now at center stage.

Get ready for more caricatures of a politician with grayish, big hair and a pudgy face. Except now Newt Gingrich, not Bill Clinton, may be dominating the editorial cartoons.

“It’ll be great drawing a Speaker of the House named after a lizard,” laughed Steve Benson of The Arizona Republic.

Well, actually a newt is an amphibian. But this isn’t rocket science.

“Newt’s cut out of the mold cartoonists like. There’s that shock of hair, and he speaks his mind without much forethought,” Benson added. “We have a whole new cast of characters. This is going to make great and invigorating upheaval on the editorial pages.”

Even conservatives like Benson are enjoying the upheaval that put the Republicans in control of the House and Senate.

Not only do they have Clinton and the liberals for fodder, but Gingrich and Sens. Bob Dole, Alfonse D’Amato and Jesse Helms are now at center stage.

“It’s morning in America for me. I’ve been born again professionally,” said Signe Wilkinson, a Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist for the Philadelphia Daily News and a self-professed liberal. “The electorate never lets us down.”

In her cartoons, Wilkinson draws Pennsylvania’s Sen.-elect Rick Santorum with a chain saw because he wants to cut government. Santorum unseated Clintonite and health care champion Sen. Harris Wofford in the November elections.

The satirists who spoof politicians are gleeful because the crowd taking control of Congress is straightforward about what it stands for.

And for those looking to underscore the folly and foibles of political policy, clarity is a plus when your medium is usually a single-panel cartoon.

“Polarization makes for easy targets,” said Rob Rogers, an editorial cartoonist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette who is syndicated by United Features.

“One of the hardest things about drawing Clinton was you never quite knew where he stood. With these guys, it’s pretty black and white. They tend to be caricatures of themselves.”

For an idea of what the new leaders will look like in print, Rogers sees Gingrich as “the Pillsbury Doughboy meets Donahue,” while the eye-brow heavy Dole “looks like Boris Karloff or Dr. Jekyll.”

Newsday’s Doug Marlette, who packaged his Clinton cartoons into a book called “Faux Bubba,” sees the Republican leaders as “a cast of gargoyles. . . .

“A cartoonist looks at national trauma the way a plastic surgeon looks at crow’s feet or cellulite.”

The new crowd in power has already felt the sting.

Gingrich, the fiercely partisan Georgia congressman who will ascend to House leadership next year, described as “vicious” and “offensive” a Mike Luckovich cartoon that appeared in The Atlanta Constitution in early November.

Gingrich said the newspaper will be banned from his appearances until it runs a retraction.

The cartoon depicted the congressman flanked by two brazen-looking beauties labeled “D.C. highrollers,” with the three of them hovering over the hospital bed of a sickly looking woman labeled “Georgia constituents.” The overline: “I want a divorce.”

According to the paper, Gingrich discussed divorce with his first wife while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer. The episode became a issue in Gingrich’s 1992 campaign.

“We have invited his office to write a letter or to make a statement putting forth his concerns,” said Ron Martin, editor of the Constitution. He added that the newspaper will still cover Gingrich.