POLITICS : Newt Is <i> the </i> Issue as Democrats Ignore All Else

Republicans now have a serious political problem: Newt Gingrich. How big a liability is the speaker? We’ll get a clue on Tuesday.

Be on the lookout for an earthquake in the San Jose area that day. It won’t be measured on the Richter scale. But if it happens, the political shock waves will reverberate nationwide.

Former House Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill said, “All politics is local.”

“Oh yeah?” Republicans said last year, as they proceeded to run a national campaign against President Bill Clinton in every congressional district.

It worked. Now the Democrats have figured out that they, too, can play this game. They’re testing their new national strategy in Tuesday’s special election in California’s 15th Congressional District.

It all started when Democrat Norman Y. Mineta announced he was leaving Congress in October for a job in the private sector. The GOP had a ready candidate--Tom Campbell, a former congressman, U.S. Senate candidate and popular state senator. Shellshocked Democrats couldn’t find a well-known candidate. They settled on Jerry Estruth, a San Jose stockbroker and former city councilman.

Enter the national Democratic Party. Remember last year’s “morphing” ads, when the GOP turned every Democrat into Clinton? “If you like Bill Clinton, you’ll love Joe Prather,” said one ad, as a photo of Democrat Prather morphed into a likeness of . . . who could it be? Is it . . . Satan? No. It’s the dreaded . . . Clinton!

Well, this year, Democrats discovered a juicy target they can use against the GOP. The Newt-Monster! Run for your lives!

The Democrats tried an anti-Gingrich strategy in the race for governor of Kentucky last month. It worked. The Democrat won a narrow victory. The chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee advised House candidates, “Your opponent’s middle name in the election is Gingrich.”

The national party is staging a trial run in California. True, Campbell seems a perfect fit for a swing district full of affluent, well-educated, high-tech voters. He’s fiscally conservative and socially liberal. He supports abortion rights and gay rights. Campbell was attacked as a “liberal” in the 1992 GOP Senate primary. Not exactly a Gingrich clone.

But Gingrich’s ratings are two-to-one negative in the district. And when Campbell was in Congress, in 1989, he voted to elect Gingrich as minority whip. That’s what started Gingrich’s rise to power.

The Democrats’ strategy is to “Newter” Campbell--relentlessly. Estruth ties Campbell to Gingrich in every speech, every piece of campaign mail and every ad. The Democratic state chairman even offered Gingrich a plane ticket to San Jose so he could campaign for “his old friend and ally, Tom Campbell.”

Actually, Gingrich did show up in the district briefly in October. But Campbell was nowhere to be found.

It’s reminiscent of a story about George S. McGovern’s disastrous 1972 campaign for president. McGovern’s campaign manager reportedly telephoned a Democratic candidate for Congress in Ohio. “I have good news.” he said, “Sen. McGovern is going to be in your district to campaign.”

The candidate said, “Oh gee, I’m sorry. I’ll be in Florida, visiting my mother.”

“Wait a minute,” the campaign manager said. “I never told you when Sen. McGovern will be in your district.”

“It doesn’t matter,” the candidate said. “Whenever he shows up, I’ll be in Florida, visiting my mother.”

The Democrats’ strategy may be working. Campbell’s large lead has reportedly narrowed to single digits.

Can Democrats run against a speaker? The GOP tried in 1980. Remember the ads showing a doddering O’Neill driving a beat-up car that was running out of gas? That campaign failed miserably.

But O’Neill didn’t have anything like Gingrich’s negatives. Just look at how the speaker’s unfavorable ratings have grown in the Gallup poll since the start of the year: from 38% to 53% among men, from 37% to 58% among whites.

Gingrich’s problems are partly substantive and partly personal. The voters are becoming nervous about the GOP spending cuts. Sure, they believe balancing the budget is important. But they believe other things are more important--like protecting Medicare and Medicaid. When the GOP took on those programs, along with others important to the middle class, such as student loans and environmental protection, they were asking for trouble.

What made it worse was Gingrich seems to epitomize a harsh, uncaring attitude. He goes out of his way to be provocative and confrontational: us vs. them. That was terrific in a minority leader. It rallied the GOP troops and kept their spirits up when all seemed hopeless.

It’s a terrible quality in a national leader, however. When Gingrich’s name comes up in focus groups, people use words like “blowhard” and “reckless” to describe him. Recklessness is not a quality people want in a national leader.

Gingrich seems to provoke a controversy a week--orphanages, women’s hormones, blaming Democrats for horrifying crimes, his treatment on Air Force One, predicting a stock-market crash.

Last week, the House Ethics Committee voted unanimously to investigate him. The committee also found that he violated House rules on three occasions. As for the famous $4.5-million book deal, the committee said, “At a minimum, this creates the impression of exploiting one’s office for personal gain.”

Remember--Gingrich has never had the benefit of a national campaign. Nonetheless, after last year’s election, the press declared him president, and he quickly seized control of the agenda. A lot of Americans wondered when it was that they had voted for Gingrich.

The evidence is growing stronger that the speaker is hurting the Republican Party, the image of Congress and the standing of GOP front-runner Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole (R-Kan.). In one poll last week, Clinton was running 19 points ahead of Dole--a landslide.

After the president’s speech to the nation on Bosnia last month, a CBS News poll asked people who they trusted more to make the right decisions on foreign policy, Clinton or “Congress.” The public said Congress, 49% to 35%. The president’s decision to send troops to Bosnia is not so popular.

The USA Today-CNN-Gallup poll asked a slightly different question: Who do you have more confidence in when it comes to handling the situation in Bosnia, Clinton or “the Republican leaders in Congress”? In that case, people said Clinton by nearly two-to-one.

The mention of Bosnia is not what attracted people to Clinton. What made the difference was the mention of “the Republican leaders of Congress.” People hear that and think, “Gingrich.”

Democrats believe they’ve hit pay dirt with “the Gingrich issue.” Gingrich has said he wants to chair the GOP convention. That’s fine with Democrats. In 1988, Gingrich attacked them because they “allowed Speaker Jim Wright to chair the Democratic National Convention, even though the Ethics Committee had unanimously voted to investigate him.”

The investigation of the speaker is likely to take months--into next year’s election. Clinton will run against Gingrich no matter whom the GOP nominates. His message will be, “If you elect Dole or Phil Gramm or Lamar Alexander, Gingrich will be running the country. Be afraid. Be very afraid.”

Gingrich’s troubles look like a godsend for the Democrats. No national political figure has been this unpopular since, well, Richard M, Nixon.

But that should be a sobering lesson for gleeful Democrats. Democrats prospered --for a while--as a result of Nixon’s downfall. They made big gains in Congress in 1974. Two years later, Jimmy Carter got elected president.

But the Silent Majority did not disappear with Nixon. It was resurrected a few years later by Ronald Reagan. The anti-government coalition that produced the GOP presidential majority stayed in place.

Gingrich’s troubles may sidetrack the Republican revolution, but won’t necessarily derail it. Last year, when Republicans won their first congressional majority in 40 years, most voters had never even heard of Gingrich.

What holds the GOP majority in place is not the view that Gingrich is good. It’s the view that big government is bad.