CHAPTER 20
The Boomsie Twins
In the mid-’90s, they were the nation’s two most powerful politicians—and America’s favorite frenemies. They were President William Jefferson Clinton and Newton “Newt” Gingrich, the Georgia Republican who would lead a conservative groundswell while serving as Speaker of the House.
The disparity in their core convictions reflected those of a bipolar electorate: blue vs. red, left vs. right, consensus vs. orthodoxy. One man, who’d been baptized at age nine, espoused a moral relativism that encouraged tolerance of diverse worldviews and belief systems. The other, a longtime Southern Baptist raised in a Lutheran home, would later convert to Catholicism. He believed in a universal morality for humanity at large. The two men were nothing less than the “leaders [of two] cultural armies fighting over the legacy of the decade,” in the words of Steven M. Gillon, author of The Pact, the definitive book on the Clinton-Gingrich rivalry.
Clinton we have already met in these pages. Gingrich, by way of introduction, was the man credited with coming to Capitol Hill and deliberately avoiding compromise as a tactic: a method for upholding one’s conservative principles, ramming through legislation, and provoking concessions from one’s opponents, even if it led to governmental paralysis. The 1990s, in fact, marked the beginning of “the Gingrich era of hyperbolic partisanship,” according to historian Geoffrey Kabaservice. “It was Mr. Gingrich who pioneered the political dysfunction we still live with… usher[ing] in the present political era of confrontation and obstruction.”
Gingrich was erudite, a history buff, and a blue-sky futurist. With his cherubic presence and silvery shock of hair, he evoked both the college professor of his early career and a right-wing Phil Donahue. And yet his playbook favored hard tackles and end runs. Gingrich was prone to bombast, to moralizing, to demonizing his foes—“a politics of anger,” in Time’s terminology. He was also, in the primeval days of reality TV, a master of the synthetic narrative. Sheryl Gay Stolberg would note in the New York Times that Gingrich’s ascension in the ’80s “coincided with the rise of C-SPAN, the cable channel that televised House proceedings.… Night after night, he would lambaste Democrats, speaking in an empty House chamber after the day’s legislative business was done. Mr. Gingrich would needle Democrats, challenging them to come forward and defend themselves. No one did, because no one was there.”
Then came 1990. That year, as part of a controversial budget deal, President George H. W. Bush broke his long-standing vow never to raise taxes—pure anathema to Reagan conservatives. This concession gave Gingrich and his band of mutineers an opening to wrest control of the party. And over the next several years they all but neutered the GOP establishment as they forged a new style of Republican: rebellious, contrarian, and partial to brinkmanship.
Newt Gingrich in short order became a quantum force in American conservatism. During his shining hour—September 27, 1994—he enlisted 367 men and women, all running in that year’s midterm elections, and assembled them as one battalion on the Capitol steps. As the cameras rolled, he made sure that each candidate affixed a John or Jane Hancock to a so-called Contract with America, its preamble purporting to install “a Congress that respects the values and shares the faith of the American family.”
To that end, Newt’s contract—beyond addressing popular bread-and-butter issues (tax breaks, street crime, an invigorated military, and the holy grail of a balanced budget)—focused on some of the same culture-war priorities that had been laid out at the 1992 Republican National Convention. The Personal Responsibility Act “discourage[d] illegitimacy and teen pregnancy” by revamping welfare and barring teen moms from getting federal funds. The Family Reinforcement Act dealt with adoption, child support, parents’ rights, and child-porn statutes.
The signing made for great political theater, even if opinion polls revealed that two-thirds of the country didn’t have a clue what was in it. But Gingrich had animated and unified the party. The fact that legions of potential legislators were in lockstep, as historian Gillon has observed, effectively “nationalized 435 local races… turn[ing] the election into a choice between the Republican agenda and the failures of the Clinton administration.” The contract prized Newt’s gravity over Bill’s perpetual motion.1
The Boomsie twins, differences aside, were cut from the same bolt of tie-dye. “The evidence keeps mounting that Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich were separated at birth,” ventured columnist Frank Rich. “Both men are self-invented American archetypes, presenting a persona more at odds with their origins than Mark Twain was from Samuel Clemens.… [Both] were favored eldest children, brought up by tough mothers who survived spouse abuse. As boys, neither knew his biological father and both had difficult relationships with their adoptive fathers2… These two ambitious boomers both smoked dope and ducked Vietnam.”
The Boomsies, in the ’60s, supported the civil rights movement. They made their maiden runs for office in the ’70s—as southern populists. They were insufferable wonks who came to relish the Beltway rumble. They were self-involved, surely, but worked hard for working- and middle-class Americans. They were temperamental tricksters, passably handsome devils in their day, and, on occasion, hot pockets of hot air.3 And both politicians were sexually adventurous, sometimes devastatingly so.
We have read herein about the president’s past. But Gingrich too was a man of appetites. Mother Jones in 1984 would report on an incident from the ’70s, citing a former campaign aide who insisted that one day while he was escorting Gingrich’s daughters through a parking lot, he had passed a car and saw the candidate sitting inside “with a woman, her head buried in his lap.” (The aide would later clarify, “Newt kind of turned and gave me this little-boy smile. Fortunately [the daughters] were a lot younger and shorter then.”) In a 1995 Vanity Fair profile by Gail Sheehy, Gingrich had allegedly prefigured the president in appearing to treat fellatio as Sex Lite. A former campaign volunteer, according to Sheehy, claimed that she and the congressman began a relationship while both of them were married: “‘We had oral sex,’ she says. ‘He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, ‘I never slept with her.’”4
The Times’ Maureen Dowd—a serial skewerer of Newt—would reduce his marital history to a single scathing paragraph: “His first wife, Jackie, was his former high school geometry teacher. The family-values pol cheated on her and left her when she was fighting uterine cancer. He then married his mistress, Marianne, and worked on books and politics with her until he cheated on her and left her when she was fighting multiple sclerosis. He then married his mistress, Callista, and now he produces agitprop with her.”5
Clinton and Gingrich. Exemplars of public service. Defenders of their parties’ bedrock principles. Creatures of the flesh.
These were the two men in whose hands lay the fate of a nation.
But before moving on to the great Clinton-Gingrich clashes, a question arises. Why, in the ’90s, was there a sudden surge in the sex appeal of politics and politicians?
Power in twentieth-century Washington, with a handful of exceptions, had always been about as sexy as contract bridge. Yet Clinton and Gingrich came along at a time when high office was beginning to acquire an added allure. And no one recognized this as intuitively as a lawyer and editor named John F. Kennedy Jr.
The photogenic son of a perpetually photographed First Couple, Kennedy was a bachelor in 1988 when People magazine christened the twenty-seven-year-old “The Sexiest Man Alive.” Three years later, he began toying with the idea of putting out a magazine focused on the intersection of politics, personality, and popular culture. Its mission was simple, cooked up by his friend Michael Berman: why not make politics more relevant to the masses at a time when other such publications (the National Review, the New Republic et al.) were stiff as a starched shirt? Kennedy and Berman hoped their magazine would apply a glossy brush to individuals in and around Washington power in much the same way that Manhattan, inc. in the ’80s had seductively portrayed the business elite as mighty titans.
“John and I began talking about it as early as the campaign of ’92,” recalls attorney Gary Ginsberg, a White House staffer under Bill Clinton who’d known Kennedy when they attended Brown and who joined the magazine’s start-up team in the mid-’90s. (Ginsberg would go on to lofty corporate communications posts with News Corp and Time Warner.) “[John] was particularly fascinated by how Clinton used the leverage of popular culture to promote his campaign and how, in his mind, there was a real confluence of politics and entertainment: [appearing on the] Arsenio Hall [talk show on] late-night television and playing the saxophone. [Courting] Hollywood. He’d seen vestiges of this in his father’s relationship to Hollywood, but you really hadn’t seen it flourish in the thirty years since.”6
Clinton and Gore’s 1992 victory cinched the deal. “By ’93,” Ginsberg remembers, “he began writing his business plan”—securing financial backing from the French publishing company Hachette. And when the first issue of Kennedy and Berman’s magazine, George (as in Washington), was unveiled at a 1995 news conference, the cover, shot by Herb Ritts, featured supermodel Cindy Crawford as Washington, in a powdered wig and an open waistcoat, showing off her abs. Subsequent covers had Drew Barrymore playing Marilyn (cover line: “Happy Birthday, Mr. President”); Claudia Schiffer wearing a Clinton-Gore banner (and nothing else); and a naked Christy Turlington straddling a TV set (for the Media Issue). Even Kennedy himself, for an editor’s letter on the subject of temptation, decided to pose nude—with an Eden-esque apple. In the accompanying column, he disparaged his romantically entangled cousins Joe and Michael Kennedy as “poster boys for bad behavior.”
George attracted a sizable dual audience—for a time drawing more female than male readers, a rarity for a journal covering politics. But the magazine failed, if not spectacularly, then consistently. Its nose was too close to the glass. Its mix of stories was confounding (“Top 10 Hunks in History”—by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.; “Why Hillary Won’t Be Senator”). To those in the media and at other political publications, George seemed flyweight. “[Our competitors] viewed politics as an intensely serious affair,” Ginsberg avers. “They thought we were silly, simplistic, we dumbed it down, that we were doing a disservice to the electorate by focusing not on the issues that were important but on the personalities and the process. And they were ruthless.”
What George had gotten right, though, was the premise that the world of politics had a new mystique—right, left, and center.7 The attraction was a result of more media play being devoted to political personalities; younger people on the stump, in field operations, and working for consultants and the press; and the seamless and often shameless way that politicians were publicly trading on their personal lives. There was also a sense that the countless scandals involving unbuckled belts in the Beltway implied that “everybody’s getting it—Democrats, Republicans,” recalls journalist Judy Bachrach. “It was all about the sex appeal of power.” Washington, she says, quoting a local adage, had come to be referred to as “Hollywood for the ugly.”
One sign of the more intimate D.C.-L.A. tango was the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner. For years the gathering had been a staid affair. Members of news organizations that covered the Washington scene would don formal attire and listen politely (seated beside their invited sources—elected officials, power brokers, and their aides) as the president and an emcee delivered comic monologues. Then, in 1987, journalists began competing to invite what Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter would call “novelty guests.” At first the most notorious of these tablemates were women made famous by scandal or romance: Fawn Hall, the assistant to Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North at the center of the Iran-Contra mess; Gary Hart’s honey Donna Rice; model and actress Marla Maples, the year America learned of her relationship with Donald Trump.8 But by the mid-’90s, film and TV figures, from Warren Beatty to Ellen DeGeneres, were crowding the ballroom of the Washington Hilton. And Hollywood, D.C., and the media, trading off one another’s cachet, began to call it what it was: The Nerd Prom.9
Jennifer Rider, a respected consultant and adviser to CEOs, helped handle communications for Republican candidates like Bob Dole and Christie Whitman in the ’90s. (She has since become a Democrat.) Rider considers the decade a political game-changer. “The people running for office, the pundits, the campaign staff were younger and more charismatic,” she says. “There was a buzz. Bill Clinton was this dynamo—brilliant, articulate, a babe—after twelve years of Reagan, Bush, and Quayle, apple pie and the boy next door. Both parties needed ‘youthful and sexy’ on their bench.
“It was a point in time before blogs [or] social media,” she recalls. “You had to be on TV, and the ’90s changed everything: Fox News and MSNBC launched”—more on this shortly—“so there were more chances to be ‘on air.’ The entire country was suddenly hot and heavy for political news. And you had this wave of smart, sexy, badass women—Dee Dee Myers, Lisa Caputo, Susan Estrich, Mandy Grunwald, Laura Ingraham, Monica Crowley, Ann Coulter, and Arianna Huffington” (then a formidable presence on the right) “rising up as strategists and TV [commentators], which used to be mainly balding-guy territory.10
“Young women—age twenty-five, twenty-six,” Rider explains, “came to D.C. thinking that it was sexy to be young and Republican. I remember being around that age [when I arrived, and] years later the first guy who hired me for a political position admitted that one of the two main reasons he did was because of my legs. It’s always about the legs.” Looking back, Rider admits to having gotten the bug after seeing a thatch of premature gray. “I became a Republican because of Jack Kemp. He was an ex-football star—big on tax reform but also a can-do social activist who was into urban renewal. His story made me feel Republicans were suddenly cool and relevant.
“Even Newt Gingrich found a way to appeal to the rebel-chick and surly-guy types. His Contract with America connected with independents and Republicans and young people and libertarians who saw big government as the enemy. The GOP wasn’t as hard right [as it is now], so moderates like me could still join in, and it felt like something huge was happening.”11
Lisa Baron is the author of the political tell-all Life of the Party, who worked for Republican operations, including Dole’s, during the ’90s. She would ascend to the role of spokesperson for Ralph Reed, the head of the Christian Coalition.12 “Girls like me,” she says, “were called ‘press tarts.’ You have to think about men like Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde et al. as struggling musicians. Then, when they hit the big time—becoming the party of power—they become rock stars. And we—the staffers—were groupies. The [political] conventions were like Woodstock for wonks.”
Baron remembers an evening during her first year in Washington when, after countless rounds of drinks with a male political coordinator from the Republican National Committee, she says she ended up naked, along with her new friend, on the front lawn of the Capitol. For a young politico, she recalls, “It was just a big party. It was like being in college almost. Everybody’s running around with everybody—not necessarily having sex [because then] you’re deemed a slut and written off.”
Manhattan had its own young conservative scene, and for a time, its nexus was a monthly salon. The so-called Vile Body parties of the ’80s and early ’90s were started by writer Terry Teachout and a few cohorts. The soirees were held in the library of an Upper East Side town house that had once belonged to songwriter Alan Jay Lerner. The first Wednesday of each month, attendees were served popcorn, libations (from a cash bar), and right-of-center discourse. Its members were chiefly younger Boomers, sired too recently to have been on Kesey’s bus. They believed that the free-radical values of their older, liberal sibs had sunk the blinking country. “We definitely saw ourselves as representatives of an ideological break with the older Boomers,” Teachout says today. “Young conservatives, neoconservatives, and libertarians… felt a bit isolated in the sea of Manhattan liberalism, and found that we enjoyed spending time with and talking to politically and culturally like-minded writers and intellectuals our own age.”
Participants were Brainy Young Things such as David Brooks, Richard Brookhiser, Andrew Ferguson, Maggie Gallagher, and John Podhoretz, along with Wall Street types and editors and writers from conservative journals. The Vile Body had “a vaguely Oxbridge-ish sense,” recalls Sam Tanenhaus. (Its name referenced the party-mad crowd of Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 novel of the same name.) “This was the New York beachhead of the [conservative] movement [that had won] three presidential victories in the 1980s.… The Young Right had recomposed itself in frothing hatred of Bill Clinton.”
Not entirely. The soirees in fact began in the mid-’80s, a period when Clinton was on no one’s radar. And when it came to the newfound allure surrounding political power and opinion, Teachout attributes that change not to the bright-eyed Boomer from Arkansas but to an ex-actor from Hollywood. “That transformation,” he tells me, “I connect directly to Reagan’s presidency. To be sure, it got glossier later on, as evidenced by George magazine. But it had already happened.”
Another reason for the sizzle, especially on the right, was the press itself. And the four most distinctive and politically influential media voices to emerge in the ’90s were all angry, tough-talking, and staunchly conservative.
First in line was talk radio’s high priest of the right, Rush Limbaugh. A looming presence during the Reagan years, Limbaugh by the ’90s was reaching twenty million listeners a week. He was hardly a hottie: physically imposing, fond of cigars, and a pro-abstinence promoter. But he talked muy macho as he bitch-slapped the Clintons. He liked to segue into snippets from Steppenwolf and the Pretenders. And he amassed a loyal fan base, becoming a bestselling author, a late-night TV host—and an overnight guest at the White House. (George H. W. Bush is said to have personally schlepped Limbaugh’s bag to the Lincoln Bedroom.)
Limbaugh’s program mainly consisted of Angry White El Rushbo, alone in a room. Yet he delivered his color commentary on the culture war with a peculiar urgency and gloom, as if he were the last man alive in the press box, covering Doomsday. His secret sauce was his comedy, into which he sprinkled a spice cabinet of biting insight and outrage. In a 1992 Limbaugh profile for Vanity Fair, political journalist Jeff Greenfield would tell Peter J. Boyer that the broadcaster had grown his audience by opening the conservative tent to include listeners who were “working-class, younger, humorous. They love satire, they love rock ’n’ roll music.… It’s generational.”
Limbaugh expressed pride in having coined the term “femi-Nazi.” He railed against educators who would read books such as Heather Has Two Mommies to first graders, thereby “indoctrinating students with the false notion that homosexuality is as normal as heterosexuality [despite] overwhelming evidence that homosexual behavior statistically reduces one’s life span.” Such incendiary speech, along with his race-baiting, earned him entire zip codes of detractors. It also attracted a following sizable enough to land him on the cover of Time.
Limbaugh, stridently un-PC—and presaging the twenty-first-century rise of the Tea Party and, later, Donald Trump—emerged as a sort of Republican id, to the consternation of many of the party faithful. Michael Lind, for one, would observe in a 1995 Dissent article that Limbaugh personified the “collapse of intellectual conservatism” and, quite possibly, of the public intellectual. Lind, a political writer and editor, would declare, “In 1984, the leading conservative spokesman in the media was George Will; by 1994, it was Rush Limbaugh. The basic concerns of intellectual conservatives in the eighties were foreign policy and economics; by the early nineties they had become dirty pictures and deviant sex.”
The media’s second booming voice on the right was that of journalist David Brock. He would make his mark writing books as well as articles for conservative journals, capitalizing on a new kind of “ideological publishing,” as he would put it, “that became very hot in the late ’80s and early ’90s.” To leaders and readers on the right, Brock was the decade’s fair-haired hatchet man. He helped dispense, in his own words, “hypocrisy, smears, [and] falsehoods… abandon[ing] the conservative traditions of restraint and civility for Gingrichian ends-justify-the-means radicalism.”
It was Brock, funded by conservative backers in the shadows, who flushed out political sex scandals for vindication and profit. Brock slimed Anita Hill; spread slanderous and unproven stories that Governor Clinton had used state troopers to escort him to trysts; and outed a former Arkansas state employee, Paula Jones, as the object of the president’s alleged advances, triggering what would become Jones’s pivotal lawsuit. Brock was not just a soldier but a deadeye sniper taking aim from his perch in the “vast right-wing conspiracy” that Hillary Clinton would quite accurately describe. He became the New Right’s media pet. “My friend Ann Coulter,” Brock would recall, “told me that when I walked into a room full of conservatives, it was like Mick Jagger had arrived. Ann was joking, but I believed her.”
An evening hang at Brock’s town house, in the company of the haut monde of conservative Washington, would become one of Georgetown’s most coveted invites. Indeed, in 1995—on the night Gingrich’s congressional class first convened—many of the movement’s young turks (from humorist P. J. O’Rourke to Andrew Ferguson, from Danielle Crittenden to David Frum) would share cocktails Chez Brock “to the strains of Smashing Pumpkins and 10,000 Maniacs,” according to James Atlas in a New York Times Magazine story, “drinking and laughing and comparing Newt sightings.” They were, said Atlas, the Counter Counterculture. (Brock, as stated previously, would eventually abandon the movement, join the enemy camp, create a journalism-watchdog group and Democratic strategy organization, and become a key fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton.)13
If Limbaugh and Brock, playing Elvis and Mick, were the right’s old-media rock stars of the ’90s, they had nothing on the decade’s most transformative conservative voice: Fox News. The right-of-center cable network, devised by Rupert Murdoch and developed by Roger Ailes, premiered in 1996. At the time, CNN was being derided on the right as unapologetically leftist; some called it the Clinton News Network. (CNN in fact had been the ’70s brainchild of a Murdoch bête noire, billionaire Ted Turner, the left-leaning mogul and then-husband of Hollywood icon Jane Fonda, an über-liberal in her heyday. “I thought about killing him,” Ted would say of Rupert, shortly after Fox News debuted. “In his [news]papers, he said… I’m insane. [So] if I did shoot him, I’d get off.”)14
Fox News was formulated during the GOP’s stunning Gingrich-led resurgence. It went on air as Bill Clinton ran for reelection. And Roger Ailes would prove to be its ideal architect: a TV sage with McLuhanesque instincts; a political strategist who had helped shape hard-right “brands” such as Nixon, Limbaugh, and, in time, Donald Trump. Ailes recognized Turner’s genius for turning a traditional money loser (TV news) into a cash cow. But he envisioned cable news with a twist. Headlines, truth be told, were bland. The real heat and throb and tang, Ailes believed, came from analysis of the news, as evidenced by the success of right-wing radio. If at times the debates turned into verbal cockfights, all the better. (From day one, the channel featured alpha-dog hosts Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly on evening shows.) The channel would build its head of steam on the rancor of the disenfranchised, a public itch for tabloid stories, and a moral seething about the Clintons and the culture’s progressive drift.
To many, Fox News, despite its tabloid-TV production values and occasional wingnut commentators, was a breath of fresh air, with earthy notes of blood and musk. The above-mentioned Lisa Baron believed the network was essential, she says, in having brought “a new, sexier image to the face of the party and what a Republican can look like. Women on Fox were generally foxier than those on other cable networks. Viewers watched and thought about lower taxes—and Brazilian waxes.… The stereotype was always: Republicans have hotter women than Democrats. Because a woman encountering a Democrat would think: tree-hugger, they don’t shave, they don’t shower, they’re wearing clothes for the third day in a row. I one hundred percent think Fox helped that.”15 (Not so, says a left-leaning colleague of mine who requests anonymity. “You’ve got to wonder,” he translates, “what most viewers think when they watch these dweebs. Everyone knows: it’s always someone too well coiffed and too well tanned who has a secret to hide.”)
In time, the channel—tempestuous and incestuous (many of its commentators were GOP stars)—would become the party’s 24/7 infomercial, a handmaiden of the right’s sustained successes into the next century.16 And all the while the network would advertise itself as politically evenhanded—what Sam Tanenhaus, the conservative historian, would describe as a “sardonic parody (‘fair and balanced’) of a mainstream media [that] it assumes to be rife with contempt.”
The fourth horseman in this posse was a man named Drudge. He grew up as a Beltway boy who delivered the Washington Star. He moved to Hollywood, settled into a job managing the trinket shop at the CBS Studio Center, and in 1995 started a gossipy email blast. Matt Drudge, age twenty-nine, had a nose for scandal and hewed to libertarian views. He called his creation the Drudge Report—the first comprehensive online aggregator of opinion, headlines, and celebrity and political poop. For a while, his target audience was the rumorati within Washington, Hollywood, and the media itself. But by June 1997, once AOL started cohosting his site, Drudge had become a Web-wide phenomenon and the darling of American conservatives.
With his Web links and gossip droppings, Matt Drudge was a national nemesis and a guilty pleasure. He linked to far-right columns and home pages, some of them borderline batshit—and gave their rants and rumors equal weight with wire-service items. He reported on other reporters’ reporting-in-progress—and got the biggest political newsbreak of the decade. (More on this later.) Drudge became the model of the gallant ruffian to which other young geeks aspired. “For seven premillennial years, I’ve covered the world from my Hollywood apartment, dressed in my drawers,” he would write in his 2000 book Drudge Manifesto. “There’s been no editor, no lawyer, no judge, no president to tell me I can’t. And there never will be. Technology has finally caught up with individual liberty.… The Elites, fearing loss of power, see chaos and anarchy.”
A notorious recluse, Drudge was a walking, blogging paradox. “In his own life, Drudge maintains ironbound privacy,” Philip Weiss would note in New York magazine, “but his Website has grown by seizing on incidental, personal actions of public figures and blowing them up, at times viciously.” Even as Drudge pioneered a new news medium, he was a throwback to the days of hot type (press arbiter Gabriel Snyder has called him “the best wire editor on the planet”), adopting as his trademark the bygone fedora, years before it became a hipster accessory.
In short, Limbaugh, Brock, Ailes, and Drudge, respectively, ruled right-wing radio, print, cable, and the Web. Together, Rush and Roger would mobilize literally millions against the Clinton agenda and the Clintons themselves. Brock and Drudge, for their part, would become the young sensei of conservative crypto-journalism, scandal-mongering, and innuendo inflation—nearly torpedoing Bill Clinton’s presidency.
In the ’90s, media types would debate whether the ethical standards of mainstream newsmen and -women applied to bloggers and their ilk. But within a decade, that question was moot. Journalism was journalism, whether delivered traditionally or electronically. And thanks in part to this rogues’ quartet, the dividing lines were ever less distinct between news and rumor, between information and entertainment, between the media’s treatment of one’s public and private behavior.
A clean line can be drawn, attests Sam Tanenhaus, from Matt Drudge in the 1990s to Donald Trump twenty-five years later. “It all goes back to Drudge in Hollywood,” Tanenhaus says, in an assessment of Trump’s brain trust: “From Drudge to the late alt-right news pioneer Andrew Breitbart and then to Steve Bannon, President Trump’s chief strategist. It’s not just the alt-right. It’s alt-politics—outside the two parties, all via sensationalist media.” Over the course of a generation, these new-media, ultra-right conspirators were complicit in disseminating rumor, agenda-bent “alternative facts,” and the long and gnarly anti-Bill-and-Hillary thread. Also in the cauldron: the late Roger Ailes, godfather of the whole Fox brood and a media mentor to GOP presidents and to Bannon, former overseer of Breitbart News.
That blurring, and the far right’s accusations of a “liberal bias” by a supposedly monolithic mainstream media, turned much of the public myopic. Many saw the press as the problem. They demonized an entire profession that since the time of Edmund Burke had been valued as an essential Fourth Estate (that looked after the public interest) and served as a necessary check on government (that was often prone to overreach). In the digital age, print publications began folding their tents. Traditional media companies shed staffers by the thousands. And despite the invaluable journalism still being practiced in valiant quarters, many members of the cut-and-paste press, along with all the blow-dried bloves, became mired in the rant and pant and shame game.
But back to the conflict in question.
It was Fight Night, midterm elections 1994, as America went to the polls to elect the incoming congressional class. In the right corner: Gingrich and his shock troops. In the left: Clinton, who would soon be on the ropes.
As the early results came in, the president, by his own account, was “profoundly distressed.” In state after state, GOP candidates were projected to win big. By evening’s end, it was a rout. “Nowhere,” historian Taylor Branch would put it, “did a Republican incumbent lose for Congress or governor, while Democrats across the country lost eight senators, eight governors, and fifty-four representatives. Republicans gained control of both legislative chambers in the biggest midterm shift since 1946, the year Clinton was born.” It would come to be called the Gingrich Revolution.
And a revolt it was—as well as a harbinger of populist resurgence and anti-Clinton anger that would lead to Trump’s Electoral College triumph twenty-two years later. “We got the living daylights beat out of us,” Bill Clinton would write in his autobiography. “I had contributed to the demise by allowing my first weeks to be defined by gays in the military… and by trying to do too much too fast in a news climate in which my victories were minimized, my losses were magnified.” His party’s outlook seemed particularly bleak below the Mason-Dixon line. “Democrats had held the majority of House seats, Senate seats and governorships in the South—all the way back to Reconstruction,” NPR correspondent Ron Elving would observe. “All that changed in one day.”17
Clinton’s political future was suddenly in play. Many wondered how he could be an effective executive—let alone win a second term—with a Congress dead set against his agenda. Gingrich, the new Speaker, and his incoming freshman class of disrupters were “going to force change, not make deals,” wrote American history scholar Steven Gillon. The insurgents, he observed, were soon referred to as “‘Gingrich’s children,’ and they reflected his combative style of politics. They were young—over half were under the age of 45. They viewed themselves as outsiders, not professional politicians.” And they swiftly implemented most of the provisions of their family-values contract in an attempt to roll back big-government policies, some begun under FDR’s New Deal.
Gingrich was hailed as the party’s savior. His program was heralded by conservative Jeffrey Gayner, of the Heritage Foundation think tank, as the third great revolutionary “transformation of [postwar] American politics” (after Barry Goldwater’s creation of “the modern conservative political movement” and the solidification of conservative power under Ronald Reagan). For the moment, Gingrich ruled Washington. He pushed bills through Congress with a fury. He dominated the news cycle, even as the public cooled to his brusque and haughty manner. (His disapproval index nearly doubled, from 29 to 56 percent.) But he would go on to hold the Speaker’s gavel from 1995 to 1998 as the culture-war battle lines would become ever more firmly drawn.
After the midterms, the president went into a months-long funk. Robert Reich, Clinton’s secretary of labor, commented on his boss’s state of mind, telling the New York Times, “He was lost, he was completely lost. He just didn’t know what to do. It was a real crisis.” Clinton during this rough patch was inadvertently reflecting the condition of countless American men who in many ways considered themselves lost in the woods.