Gingrich’s Pseudo-Revolution : The First 100 days of the ‘contract with America’ are almost over. The result: Some reform, a dose of political bromides and all too many gimmicks.

It’s five days until zero hour for the House Republican “contract with America.” But if the Guinness Book of Records has a category for anti-climax, the letdown of April 7--when Congress adjourns--could be a contender. Right now, House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s job ratings and the prospects for the contract’s enactment are both losing air like pricked balloons.

Three conclusions are beginning to take hold: First, 30% to 40% of the contract will never reach the President’s desk and much of the rest will be watered down--by Senate Republicans, as well as by White House veto; second, it’s time for politicians and journalists alike to stop using Franklin D. Roosevelt’s famous First Hundred Days of 1933 as a relevant yardstick, and third, Gingrich has about as much chance of wiping away Roosevelt’s legacy as a prairie dog does of re-sculpting Mt. Rushmore.

Thousands of trees have died to provide newsprint for how the “contract with America” was a useful 10-point campaign manifesto but never should have been made the be-all and end-all of GOP success. True enough. But the deeper problem is Gingrich--the ex-history professor who’s misread history.

We don’t need to study the Depression to know that Roosevelt, in 1933, had a huge mandate and a lopsided Congress of his own party. The reason that Congress accepted half-baked, cross-your-fingers legislation was simple: a national economic emergency.

The United States of the 1990s, by contrast, faces major problems without a specific, energizing national crisis--and one problem is second-rate political leadership. The unhappy choice in 1988, between Michael S. Dukakis and George Bush, led to Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, to get rid of Bush; and then to Gingrich and a House GOP majority two years later, when voters wanted to curb Clinton. Affirmative mandates are few and far between.

Unfortunately, the “contract with America” rests on essentially the same premise as Reaganomics 15 years ago: Morning will come again in America if we go back to the principles that made this country great. Now, as then, this involves cutting taxes and pretending it’s 1926, or 1955, while praising traditional morality and insisting we can go back to McGuffey’s Readers and morning prayers. The reason voters are willing to listen again is that Gingrich, like Ronald Reagan, is playing off another recurrent weakness--a second-rate Democratic President.

But there is a critical difference between the first Morning Again, run by an actor (Reagan), and Morning Again II, run by a second-string history professor (Gingrich). The actor, a national father figure, was partly content with reading the script and being liked; the history professor, an obstreperous brother-in-law figure, wants to rewrite history. His burbling about taking a leaf from the Duke of Wellington’s peninsular campaign or following the late 18th-Century fiscal prescriptions of Pitt the Younger are just pseudo-intellectual puffery. What Gingrich really wants to become is what Reagan never tried to be: the genuine anti-Roosevelt, the man who rolls back history and destroys the so-called New Deal Welfare State.

That makes him more ideologue than serious historian. The American people merely want to trim the welfare state, not destroy it. Better historians, such as the authoritative Arnold Toynbee, had an appropriate description for the sort of renewal-cum-rollback advocated by politicians who insist, against the evidence, that great powers can re-create the triumphs of their early days. “Shadow empires,” Toynbee called them.

Toynbee’s shadows certainly haunt the GOP contract. About one-third is sound reform--overhauling congressional procedures, obliging Congress to follow the same laws as the rest of the country and blocking Washington from imposing mandated outlays on state governments. Another quarter is routine political falsity--tax cuts that won’t happen and term limits that leaders in both parties really don’t want. But the contract is nearly half “shadow empire” stuff--phony constitutional amendments and accounting gimmicks to go back to the mid-century days of a balanced national budget; tort reform that takes corporations back to the protective 1920s; welfare revision to let the poor slip toward late 19th-Century circumstances so they can try to re-enact Horatio Alger, and go-it-alone foreign policy so the United States can relive its happy days of splendid isolation.

Most of this won’t work, and some verges on caricature. Gingrich talks about recapturing Victorian character--including the 10-year-old Lancashire factory workers?--and in a burst of Orwell-speak, the House has renamed the old Education and Labor Committee, which just led the charge to take welfare away from children and to junk federal college loans, as the House Committee on Educational and Economic Opportunity.

Despite this talk about a blueprint for “renewing American civilization,” the Gingrich revolution may not even be able to measure up to the other late 20th-Century pseudo-revolutions: Clinton’s New Covenant, Bush’s New World Order, the Reagan Revolution, Richard M. Nixon’s New Federalism, Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society and John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier. The fancier the name, the less the basic pattern is changed.

Part of the pipe-dream quality of the supposed GOP revolution is institutional. The New Deal roared out of the White House, made only brief stops in the House and Senate and returned to Roosevelt’s desk as a Done Deal. The House-sponsored “contract with America”--the name itself is misleading because few people said they knew about it or voted because of it--has already started to hit the shredder. The Republican House will pass most of it, but the Republican Senate will repackage or even reject many ingredients, and the Democratic President will veto some of what’s left. As a final achievement, it will be marginal.

As Gingrich’s ratings tumble and 59% of Americans tell pollsters the principal danger in Congress is of the GOP going too far in helping the rich and cutting needed services for ordinary Americans, the idea of a political big-bang revolution is turning into a wet firecracker.

This was somewhat predictable. The one solid upheaval that the GOP achieved in 1994 was a mini-revolution in the House, promptly exaggerated, just as Clinton overstated his own 1992 victory and mandate. Clinton, too, was able to get most of his ideas through one branch of government--his own White House--but quickly lost his credibility in dealing with other branches, despite his own party controlling them--just as Gingrich has been scuttled on several major contract issues by the GOP Senate.

Gingrich is even repeating several Clinton mistakes. The first is exaggerating abstract public support for a position--health reform in 1993, sharply reduced government now--into serious backing for unpopular specifics. Another shared weakness is an inattention to the 19% of Americans who backed Ross Perot in 1992, with their contempt for Washington and its domination by lobbyists and interest groups.

Alas, new Republican or Democratic regimes that take over Washington--Clinton in 1993 and Gingrich’s crowd this year--seem to move toward the insiders like iron filings toward a magnet. Partly because Clinton disenchanted Perot voters with his insider deal-making and mere lip-service to campaign finance reform, Perotistas went 2-1 Republican in the 1994 House races. Now Gingrich and the House GOP are behaving the same way. Press analyses are humming with exposes of how Gingrich and other new GOP leaders, who ran against special interests, have been building unprecedented alliances with business groups and other lobbyists. Discussions of how contributions are needed to buy influence have rarely been so blatant.

Small wonder March polls show the same low level of voters who trust Washington--a bit under 20%--that we saw in September, before the GOP takeover of Congress. Small wonder March polls show roughly the same number of Americans (56%) favoring a new third party now as did last autumn. Even 48% of self-identified Republicans agree--evidence they’re not sanguine about the “revolution” led by their party. This doesn’t mean voters are turning back to Clinton; it does mean, though, that disenchantment is less focused on him.

To be sure, GOP senators and representatives don’t have to believe these polls. They can pretend this is the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. They can bet that next year’s voters will be just as eager to reward legislators for voting in lock-step with Gingrich’s Conservative Opportunity Society as their grandparents were to reward faithful Roosevelt supporters in 1934 or 1936.

But it’s unlikely. Voter pleasure over the contract’s early success is yesterday’s story. Growing disillusionment is today’s. When Professor Gingrich leaves on vacation next weekend, maybe he should take some new history books.