The Political Interest: Newt's Believe It or Not

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In fact: Behind that bluster are some sobering calculations. Gingrich correctly states that current projections assume a 5.4% increase in federal spending over the next seven fiscal years and a $319 billion deficit in 2002. Hold the growth rate to 3.2%, as Gingrich proposes, and the budget could indeed be balanced -- but only if Newt forgoes the additional defense funding and tax cuts he favors.

The problem comes when Gingrich rules out tampering with the budget-busting entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare. A 3.2% growth rate would probably allow cost-of-living increases for the 42 million people now receiving Social Security. But during the seven years of Newtonomics, 6 million more Americans will become eligible for Social Security, and there won't be a cent for any of them. Gingrich presumably wouldn't allow that, so he would have to cut somewhere. To balance the books Newt-style, which means hands off Social Security and the Medicare programs, Gingrich would have to whack all other government programs except defense 43%.

& Gingrich dismisses such criticism by attacking the "socialist" accounting practices every reputable U.S. economist agrees on. Money will pour in once taxes are cut because investors will have more to spend, he says. But that's exactly what Reagan tried in the 1980s, and Reaganomics didn't compute either. In the wake of Reagan's revenue cuts, income tax receipts went down until 1986. To the degree overall revenues rose in the mid '80s, the increase was due almost exclusively to the whopping and regressive rise in payroll taxes imposed in five of the six years before 1987.

Since Meet the Press, Gingrich has been chastised for charging that "a senior law-enforcement official says that up to 25% of White House staffers" used drugs in the four-to-five-year period prior to their current work. Gingrich hasn't backed off the claim, although his aides quickly point to the qualifying words "up to." Nevertheless, Gingrich now says he "regrets" saying something that had "a larger effect than I intended." But of course the damage has been done -- and that's the key to the Newt Method.

On another TV show five days before Meet the Press, Gingrich said, "I am learning that everything I say has to be worded carefully and thought through at a level that I've never experienced." Gingrich would strain credulity to assert that every kernel of truth he popped into a bald exaggeration or outright falsehood on Meet the Press wasn't worded carefully and thought through in advance. He is in fact following a course he set years ago, an M.O. he routinely urges on other Republicans. Gingrich today controls a political action committee, GOPAC, that trains candidates to attack their opponents like pit bulls. GOPAC's how-to textbook, which Gingrich calls "absolutely brilliant," advises candidates to "go negative" early and "never back off." Use "minor details" to demonize the opposition, it suggests, citing as a good example the 1988 G.O.P. campaign attack on Michael Dukakis for allowing Willie Horton out on furlough.