NEWT GINGRICH'S WORLD

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They worked on the idea of running in 1996 against one man, Newt Gingrich, a vividly inviting target who virtually poses for cartoons of himself. Enemies picture Newt as the Simon Legree of school lunches and Medicare, the golfing partner of capital gains, the Churchill from K Mart, the nerd pistolero of the punitive right, the all-purpose villain.

IF GINGRICH WERE TO RUN for president, of course, he might be applying for a job inferior to the one he has created for himself as Speaker of the House. Whatever his fortunes in the polls and in the hands of a special counsel to the House ethics committee, Gingrich has the American genius for reinventing himself. The Gingrich Republicans, however, may be in danger of exercising their party's perverse talent for throwing away its advantages with both hands. Clinton is a superb campaigner, himself a gambler with a gift for new lives. And Republicans underestimate him.

Americans in 1995 kept a wary, ambivalent eye on both Clinton and Gingrich, the famous fraternal twins of American power, yin and yang of the Baby Boom, polar extremes of Pennsylvania Avenue. A generation or two ago, leaders were father figures. For better and for worse, Clinton and Gingrich--powerful yet indefinably immature--give off a bright, undisciplined energy, a vibration of adolescent recklessness.

Justice Holmes judged that Franklin Roosevelt had a "second-class intelligence but a first-class temperament." Newt Gingrich has a first-class intelligence that fires through a strangely refracted temperament that is not exactly second-class but agitated and sometimes grandiose enough to make Americans nervous. He has proved himself an impresario of leverage in using Congress to change America, a sort of hothouse genius. Americans may discover in 1996 whether Gingrich can evolve outward--as a truly popular leader in the open air.