Done with Newt

Much of what Newt Gingrich is having to deal with right now is still-raw scar tissue from his four years as Speaker of the House, a term that ended more than a dozen years ago — a lifetime in politics.  Gingrich was more responsible than anyone else in Congress for the Republican landslide of 1994, and he got most of the big, substantive stuff right.  He got Republicans off on the right footing in January 1995 by holding to the Contract with America’s pledge to bring up each of its proposals within the first 100 days of Republican House control; he was the most important driving force in Congress for balancing the budget while cutting capital gains taxes, and he played a critical role in the telecommunications, financial services, and liability reforms which Bill Clinton signed and which helped create the nearly transformational wave of growth of the late 1990s.  Many argued that on some things — Medicare reform, for example — he pushed too hard and imperiled the Republican majority, but I find it more likely that if he hadn’t pushed as hard in a forward direction, inertia and discord would likely have taken hold and Republicans would have been in even worse shape; if you’re not swimming, you’re sinking.

But the day-to-day stuff drove a lot of people crazy.  You could listen to him one day give an-off-the-cuff speech which beautifully synthesized hundreds of years of American history with current philosophical, economic, cultural, and technological trends in a way that made that year’s agenda the moral and political imperative of the age; the next day he’d say maybe the weirdest thing you’d heard in your entire career.  One day he’d walk House Republicans through an absolutely brilliant strategy for the coming year; the very next he’d undercut his own message, unnecessarily and in every media market in the country, with an idea he’d thought of while having breakfast.  (I worked closely with him on one issue, and I was incredibly impressed by his policy grasp and strategic focus, but I could also see what drove those closer to him nuts.)  What finally did him in — after he survived a coup attempt — was putting all his political eggs for the 1998 midterms in the Clinton impeachment basket.  But even if Republicans hadn’t come so close to losing their majority, he may well not have returned.  His colleagues were just that sick of him.

What’s impressive is that he hasn’t truly recovered in the eyes of many of his colleagues from that time.  Bill Clinton’s rehabilitation is complete, despite the fact that over the course of his Administration he arguably (1) sold out key Democratic constituencies on issues like NAFTA, welfare reform, and balancing the budget with capital gains tax cuts , (2) compromised the prestige of the White House (and possibly national security) by having a sleazy affair with a White House intern, and (3) proclaimed fundamental Democratic ideology since FDR obsolete (“the era of big government is over”).  Since leaving the House, Gingrich has been a solid Republican citizen, running his own think tank, being a leading thinker on health care reform, helping the party when asked, and — yes, it needs to be said — staying happily married.  Why can’t people who served with him — people like Joe Scarborough and Jim Talent, as different temperamentally as in political experience (Scarborough served three terms, Talent four, including a stint as a committee chair, and the another term in the Senate) — forgive and forget?

Mark Knopfler — formerly of the band Dire Straits but now on his own — put the reasons as well as anyone in a song called “Done with Bonaparte.”  Written in the person of one of Napoleon’s veterans after the disastrous invasion of Russia, the song recalls Napoleon’s vast promise:

“What dreams he made for us to dream

Spanish Skies, Egyptian sands.

The world was ours, we marched upon

Our little Corporal’s command.”

But then — reality:

“And I lost an eye at Austerlitz

The sabre slash yet gives me pain.

My one true love awaits me still

Flower of the Acquitaine.”

And finally, disillusion and anger:

“Save my soul from evil, Lord

and heal this soldier’s heart.

I’ll trust in thee to keep me, Lord

I’m done with Bonaparte.”

And that’s why, so many years after a Speakership in which, arguably, he did as well as anyone could reasonably be expected to do, Gingrich can’t find any of his colleagues to step forward for him.  They’re just done with him.  If he’s going to survive the scrutiny his record as Speaker is certain to get, he’s going to have to own up to those failings and convince people he’s changed.  Otherwise he’ll be done too.

Cameron’s Bet

We don’t hear that much in the mainstream press about the economist Paul Romer, mostly because he’s not interested in the kind of short-term macroeconomic analysis the the current policical environment is obsessed about.  Romer’s landscape is much broader and deeper.  He focuses on how ideas and innovation drive economic growth.  Previous economic models had simply assumed that innovation happens, on its own,  and that growth depended on factors like labor supply, investment, and consumer spending.  Romer’s theory — called New Economic Growth — argues that technological innovation (broadly defined) is very much a part of the picture of how an economy grows, and that innovation is driven by factors like rules and institutions.  David Warsh’s Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations does a great job capturing the development of Romer’s ideas as well as their slow, grudging acceptance by the economic community.

In a few talks over the last few years (Long Now Foundation and TED), Romer has been talking about how to accelerate growth by innovating the rules which influence how ideas are created and then brought to market.  Over time, he argues, the creation of new countries, able to start a legal and regulatory structure from scratch, has had a lot to do with economic growth.  Bankruptcy law which allowed risktakers to start fresh after failures and  corporate law which let investors limit personal losses, for example, helped America leapfrog the rest of the world in the last half of the 19th century.  Today’s international framework makes creating new countries highly unlikely, but technology is making it possible to create entirely new cities, and it’s in the new megacity that Romer sees opportunity for policy innovation and growth.  If given the necessary freedom from their host countries, these city-states could bring enormous growth by starting with modern rules friendly to innovation and idea creation.

London may yet wind up an example, given David Cameron’s decision to part ways with the rest of the eurozone countries over a new pact which would tighten centralized control over member country budgets and regulatory structures.  Reportedly the final straw was the continent’s insistence on centralized oversight of London’s dominant financial markets — the hub of the UK’s economy.  Cameron pushed back, France and Germany held the line, and finally Cameron left the talks.

Cameron is being criticized for marginalizing and isolating the UK, but most of this criticism is based on the assumption that European countries are stronger individually when they’re acting as a unit.  Diplomatically and militarily, this makes perfect sense.  And economically, in an economy based on production and manufacture, I think it it holds up.  In an economy of things, the EU nations are going to be each others’ biggest trading partners, simply because of geography.  A common regulatory structure means something made in Germany doesn’t have to go through an entirely different regulatory checklist when crossing the border to Denmark or France, which both makes markets more efficient within Europe and gives European manufactures a competitive advantage (perfectly fair) against non-EU members.

But it doesn’t work so well when your economy has more to do with innovation and intangible products, like financial services.  London’s financial markets have been so successful because they have global reach and because their rules respond to needs of investors everywhere, not because they’re close to Frankfurt and Paris.  Cutting free from Brussels might cost them business from the continent, but much more probably will help them compete for more promising demand from the rest of the world, particularly South America and the oil states.  That logic doesn’t stop with financial service firms; the country’s economy is one of the most thoroughly globalized in the world, and in industries like media, energy, pharmaceutical, and aerospace, it has worldwide leaders.  The mere fact that English is recognized as the international language of business gives the UK a huge advantage in an increasingly global marketplace.

So by passing on the demands of the continent’s big powers, Cameron might actually be setting the UK up to compete much more successfully in a new economy, one marked by information, innovation, and growth in the developing world.  He might be turning England’s back to its traditional partners in Europe, but also facing much more directly new opportunities in much more promising parts of the world.  And by retaining domestic control over regulation and policy, England might be setting itself up as the kind of entrepreneurial role in regulation that Paul Romer talks about in reference to newer, less developed nations and city-states.  Again, he’s being roundly criticized, but I can’t help but think that this is the smart move.  If you were running England, where would you make your bet:  on being a good neighbor within the EU, with its bureaucratic culture and desperate demographics, or on tending to and servicing the rest of the world?  I think I know my answer.

Old School, New School

My favorite single quote about how schools should treat their students (and our kids) came from Eleanor Acheson, mother of Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson.  In the early part of the last century, the younger Acheson was a student — barely — at the Groton School, whose Headmaster was the legendary Endicott Peabody.  Peabody, frustrated at Acheson’s independence and resistance to authority, told Acheson’s mother that he doubted “we can make a Groton boy out of him” and perhaps she should find another school for him.  Mrs. Acheson replied, “I am not asking you to make a Groton boy of him.  I am asking you to educate him.”

So the younger Dean stayed and, despite Peabody’s inability to shape him to Groton specs, managed to lead a fairly successful life as Secretary of State, architect of a post-World War II diplomatic and defense structure that ultimately (and bloodlessly) brought down the Soviet Union, and eminent Wise Man to many Presidents.  No doubt this shocked many a Groton Don, more aware of how the teenage Acheson missed Groton’s mark than what was so special and unique to the boy who would become the most brilliant of all American diplomats.

In its concern with what a “Groton boy” (the school became co-ed in 1975) should be like, Peabody’s philosophy is consistent with most prep schools today, each of which has its own distinct personality within an admittedly narrow range of the educational spectrum.  Most see this as a competitive advantage, which is increasingly necessary in the prep school market because they’re competing not just against other secondary schools but against college and even future grad school for finite educational dollars.  If you’re a parent, you want to know what you’re getting, and you want a sense that your child will fit, so — when boarding tuition can top $30,000 a year — a certain clarity and consistency within each school isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

But it’s not enough, nor is the promise that each child will have a better shot at getting into a good college (in part because college admissions officers are veering away from prep schools).  The current trend among private schools is more.  More exotic programs (more study abroad, more immersive language courses, more intense science curricula), more glitzy resources (high tech infrastructure, athletic facilities), more high-profile outreach.  But the focus is still the institution and the history and tradition which support its prestige.  There might be varying degrees of freedom for each student to pick and choose from the various goodies available, but at the end, it’s still about the institution — about making Groton/ Andover/ Exeter/ St. Pauls/ Hotchkiss boys and girls.

Which is pretty much counter to current innovation trends of education, which are all about individualizing education.  In New York City, for example, former Education Commissioner Joel Klein established a pilot program called The School of One to use technology to develop individualized curricula for students and to assess how well they responded to different modes of instruction; if one particular method worked especially well one day, they’d be able to make changes in how the student was taught the very next.  Taken to its logical conclusion, that means students wouldn’t ultimately be assessed in terms of how they respond to specific methods of instruction, but more broadly on how well they’re learning and how well they’re becoming the students they’re capable of being.

I went to one of the aforementioned prep schools (Andover), and it has a new Headmaster who, presumably, has his own vision of how the school needs to evolve.  What I’d love — LOVE — to hear him say is this:  We believe every child we admit is special and unique.  We need to act on that belief — in fact, we need to make it the lodestar of everything we do.  Our goal, starting today, is to find what’s most special about each of our students — their strengths, their passions, how they think and learn.  And we’ll build on those special qualities, we’ll serve them.  We’re going to stop caring so much about whether our kids meet our standards and start obsessing about how we can meet and exceed theirs.

This is important because schools like Andover have the resources to lead this wave of educational innovation and the prestige to make new ideas stick. Innovation happens this way:  leaders spend money, try, fail and learn, and what they ultimately come up with can then be disseminated broadly and affordably.  It’s important for this kind of individualization to continue, because right now a lot of public schools — faced with the need to maintain political support in harsh budgetary times — have gone the other way, toward mass teaching methods and mass standardized testing.  Given an economy which increasingly values the distinct, the special, and the creative, that’s a terrible way to educate kids, but it’s what lots of school districts are doing.

So somebody has to lead, to show not just how to evaluate and educate kids in terms of their differences and strengths, but to make it viable, important, accepted, and even prestigious.    I’d love to see my old school try.

Newt

Early on, you could see the fall of the Perry and Cain candidacies even as they rose.  Both were new, both were fresh, both were saying and doing interesting things in — respectively — their states and the debates, and (maybe most important) both seemed to represent a viable alternative to Mitt Romney.

But at the same time, both were untested, and this is ultimately why they receded and why Romney is still strong.  The national press hadn’t put the kind of pressure on Cain’s world that can reveal baggage which can normally stay secret; it hadn’t put the kind of pressure on Perry’s record and ability as a campaigner that would ultimately show him to be a relative lightweight.  When the press and the pressure showed up, they crumbled.  Romney has already been through it all; there’s no shoe about to drop, no damaging story threatening to derail his credibility or viability.  He is — unlike Cain and Perry — who we think he is.  There are downsides to this — there’s no sense of drama or discovery as we get to know more and more about him as a person as the campaign unfolds.  But there’s something to be said for stability as well, particularly when the party is as desperate to win the White House as it is.

So normally, even though the base distrusts him, Romney would be a shoo-in for the nomination, the steady tortoise to everyone else’s mercurial hares.  The only reason he’s not is that his most visible rival is perhaps the most distinct and special Republican politician since Ronald Reagan.  And understanding why he’s so special (not necessarily good, but special) is key to understanding why he’s such a potent candidate.

Let’s take as a given his deep and broad imagination.  Yes, he’s got a lot of ideas.  Some of them are good, some are batty.  Assume as well his tremendous gifts as a debater — maybe the best five-minute debater in the history of the House of Representatives — and deep connection with the Republican base, built over decades of campaigning for local candidates.

What makes Newt so special is that these particular attributes — which would be enough for most politicians operating at a national level — are just the tip of the iceberg.  He is a brilliant political strategist and tactician, who not only identified what Republicans would have to do to win back the House in the mid-1990s, but devised the Contract with America as a way to convert what could have been a freak anti-incumbent election into a long-term governing majority.  He also understood before nearly anyone the degree to which consultant-driven negative campaigning had turned off voters (“the only thing we learned from the 2004 election,” he said at the American Enterprise Institute, “is that slightly more people hated John Kerry than George Bush.”), and much of his current strength comes from the sense he’s broken past this and into new, positive ideas.  He’s also a fantastic planner.  In 1995, I was one of hundreds of young House Republican staffers whom Gingrich personally briefed on a thoughtful, shrewd strategic plan for Medicare reform, which he knew as the one single issue which could lose the majority in the 1996 elections (he was right – it almost did).  He understands organizational leadership, he understands how to communicate an issue as well as anyone in national politics (most politicians do well communicating their own identities but lousy on ideas), and he understands how to build and manage a staff, which seems easy and not terribly important until you actually have to do it, when you find out it’s very hard and vital.  And nobody — nobody — understands the Republican base better.  He’s so good, so self-sufficient as a political unit that when a number of campaign staff quit on him this summer because they doubted his commitment (he was taking a cruise of the Aegean Sea with his wife instead of fundraising), you got a sense all it did was lower his overhead.

But as good as Good Newt is, there’s a Bad Newt — largely drawn from his four years as Speaker and his own marital (and extramarital) history.  Basically, as well as Good Newt understood what and how to do things, Bad Newt couldn’t execute them.  As orchestrator of the 1994 elections and the Contract with America, Gingrich had no peer, but as Speaker he managed to alienate… well, nearly everybody: his leadership team, the freshman class he’d helped elect, and rank-and-file who stuck with him through a failed coup because Republicans Don’t Like Coups.  Bad Newt changed his mind frequently, threw temper tantrums in public, wouldn’t listen to bad news, made huge decisions without consulting others, and rushed into major change initiatives without a backup plan or strategy.  (He also had an extramarital affair with a staffer at the same time he was pushing the House to impeach Bill Clinton for having an affair with an intern, maybe not the best judgment).  Bad Newt can be very, very bad, which might explain why few of his former top House staffers (among the very best on Capitol Hill) are working for his presidential campaign; the painful memories linger.

So the big question right now is whether Bad Newt is still lurking in the shadows, and whether Good Newt can overcome Bad Newt’s potentially fatal flaws; eleven years is a long time.

The more precise questions are, in no specific order:

Short-term judgment.    Again, will he put his foot in it?  His confrontational, no-holds-barred style serves him well in that his overstatements tend to be most offensive to the constituencies that the Republican base loathes — the mainstream media, the Washington elites, anybody who has ever watched MSNBC on purpose; to the base, they’re mother’s milk.  But he has shown a tendency to do things totally at odds with the values he talks about with the greatest conviction, and not wanting to hear bad news is a common politician’s disease.  Most worrying here is his lack of a strong, discreet advisor who can be brutally candid with him about mistakes he needs to correct or avoid — that’s a sign that although he might understand the problem, he hasn’t actually done anything concrete about it.

Clarifying the Vision.  Newt’s strategy thus far has been to use the relatively narrow bandwidth available in the debates to articulate better than anyone else Republican skepticism and hostility towards commonly accepted foes, whether in office (Obama, Pelosi, Barney Frank) or not (the mainstream press, the bureaucracy, “Warshington,” cultural elites).  Then, secondarily, he’ll discuss his own ideas.  His actual policy instincts are probably overrated; he’s given credit for the party-defining Contract with America, but in fact all of those ideas had been Reagan Administration initiatives which polled extremely well but had been pushed aside by the Democratic Congress.  As the primaries turn into a two-person race against Romney, he will have to better articulate his positive vision and  prioritize his policy agenda, and this will require a level of discipline and rigor he has yet to show.

Building and Maintaining an Organization.  He’s put together a number of enterprises since leaving the Capitol, but none have required the kind of agility and resilience that a Presidential campaign requires.  So far, the campaign has been all about the debates, and he’s been able to be both candidate and campaign manager.  Soon that will change; he will have to focus almost entirely on his public performance, and delegate the rest to others.  (Consider how important James Carville, Paul Begala, and George Stephanopoulos were for Bill Clinton, arguably the most skilled and knowledgeable Democratic politician and strategist since FDR).  The concerns, based on his history as Speaker, are huge — epically so — and unresolved.  In 1984, Gary Hart — also relatively organization-free — was able to ride a wave of short-term buzz and lack of excitement about frontrunner Walter Mondale to the brink of knocking him off in the early primaries because so many of them came so quickly after his dramatic win in New Hampshire.  Today, it’s possible to think that social media could also make such a surge possible, but more likely that he’s peaked too early to ride that kind of spontaneous crest.

Other Candidates.  The sweet spot of the Republican primary ballot is to be the conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, and now that Gingrich has it, others like Rick Perry and Ron Paul will start focusing their rhetoric on him.  Can he survive this?  In 2004, Howard Dean looked as though he’d wrap up the Democratic nomination even before getting to the southern primaries, but Dick Gephardt — worried that a Dean nomination would be death for House Democrats and reconciled with his own likely loss — took it upon himself to wound Dean’s candidacy in Iowa, and Dean’s third-place finish crippled his chances.  Could Gingrich face a similar barrage of not-entirely-accidental-friendly fire, either from a rival candidate (like Ron Paul) or conservative group (like the Club for Growth).  Could he survive it?

The point about Gingrich is that by any conventional measure, his campaign should be on a death watch by now.  That it’s not means he has a chance, and if can survive through the southern primaries, it will show he’s been able to answer the biggest concerns about his candidacy.  In which case — watch out.