GOP Freshmen Seek to Separate Selves From Gingrich : Politics: They’re launching a media drive to alter their image as the controversial speaker’s foot-soldiers, while holding firm to party’s agenda.

House Republican freshmen, concerned that House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s growing unpopularity could hurt their revolution and their political futures, are launching a media campaign to attempt the delicate task of separating themselves from him--but not from the GOP agenda.

Several of the freshmen, working with a GOP pollster, have divided their class into “tiger teams,” which will meet with major news organizations later this week and appear at televised round-table discussions on at least one network and cable station. More than half of the 73 GOP freshmen are participating in the campaign.

The goal is clear: to dissolve their image as foot soldiers for Gingrich (R-Ga.), who polls show has a negative image with most Americans. Failure to do so, they say, risks their agenda as well as their reelection prospects.

“Our revolution is bigger than any one person and we feel we need to get that message out,” said Rep. Andrea Seastrand (R-Santa Barbara).

“I think it’s pretty clear that the Democratic Party would like to morph every member of the House into Newt Gingrich during the campaign,” said Rep. Zack Wamp (R-Tenn.), referring to the video illusion of melting one face into another. “We freshmen believe we will win every time if our agenda is the issue and not [Gingrich’s] personality.”

The freshmen have their work cut out. Distancing themselves from Gingrich while maintaining ownership of the Republican agenda will require deft surgery, given that the man and the mission have been inextricably linked since the 1994 election resulted in Republican control of the House for the first time in 40 years.

Democrats say it can’t be done.

“Newt Gingrich embodies the revolution because he’s personalized the revolution,” said Rep. Robert T. Matsui (D-Sacramento). “If he’s popular, the revolution will be popular. If he falls, they will fall.”

An indication of the extent to which Gingrich has become a disadvantage to Republicans--as well the success of a GOP candidate’s efforts to steer clear of the speaker--should emerge today in San Jose’s 15th Congressional District. Democrats have sought to turn the race to replace Democrat Rep. Norman Y. Mineta, who decided to leave Congress for a private job, into a referendum on Gingrich. And when Gingrich showed up in the district to campaign for Republican Tom Campbell, the candidate was conspicuously absent.

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Still, some Republican political analysts see great risk in trying to extract the speaker from the agenda. “He’s the only one with a long-term vision of where the country needs to go, and he’s the only one who can articulate it in a way that’s forceful and compelling,” said Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster.

Even so, Gingrich is now a liability. A new Time-CNN poll found that 56% of those surveyed gave Gingrich an unfavorable rating, an increase of 9 percentage points since September.

The new poll was taken in the middle of last week, just as the House Ethics Committee was reporting that Gingrich had violated House rules by misusing the resources of his office. The committee also announced plans to hire a special counsel to investigate another possible ethics violation.

Those developments came just weeks after Gingrich said that a perceived slight by President Clinton while both were aboard Air Force One angered him so much that he was less willing to compromise on a temporary budget measure. The budget standoff between congressional Republicans and the White House forced much of the government to close for a week.

Even before the Ethics Committee announced its findings, Gingrich had begun scaling back his public appearances. Several colleagues had advised as much at a meeting in late November.

Republicans are careful to credit Gingrich as the mastermind of their revolution, and most are fervent in his defense.

“One of the speaker’s problems is that anybody who is a leader of the revolution is going to be a lightning rod of negative press,” Wamp said. “Others should be allowed to carry the message, and this is exactly what this is about.”

Gingrich has long warned his troops they would dip in the polls--especially as the spotlight focused on the GOP push for cuts in the growth of spending for Medicare--but promised that they would recover as the public grasped the importance of the party’s agenda.

The freshmen’s job, Wamp said, is to take the lead in selling the GOP agenda because Americans do not associate them with politics as usual.

“The freshmen should be more on the point on the issues,” Wamp said. “We should be out front because we’re the freshest faces.”

But the freshmen are not the only Republicans trying to shift attention from Gingrich. Veteran members also have encouraged the party leaders to have others step into the limelight. The likely candidates include Ohio Reps. John R. Kasich, chairman of the Budget Committee, and John A. Boehner, chairman of the GOP Conference.

A portion of the broad new strategy to repair the GOP image was rolled out last week. After months of relative silence, Republican proponents of the welfare-reform initiative held a series of press conferences and a hearing on the issue to try to persuade the public that their party is driving the initiative to disassemble the welfare system.

Democrats charged that the hearing, held after the welfare-reform packages have already passed the House and Senate, was a transparent attempt to improve GOP poll ratings. During the session, Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) asked Ways and Means human resources subcommittee chairman Rep. Clay Shaw (R-Fla.): “What can we learn from this testimony that could help us?”

Rep. Harold E. Ford (D-Tenn.) jumped in with an answer: “The Medicare bill has embarrassed the Republicans and they want to bring the welfare package back into the media.”