A Speaker Falls

The Republican revolution is over. Speaker Newt Gingrich, the confrontational rebel who engineered the GOP's 1994 takeover of the House after more than four decades of Democratic dominance, announced Friday that he would resign from the Congress, just three days after midterm elections which reduced the Republican advantage to a thin 11-vote margin.

Gingrich was the victim of an uprising among fellow Republican representatives who were infuriated by his inability to exploit a politically weakened president or to present a coherent agenda of his own.

He went out spouting characteristic vitriol, calling members of the same conservative wing of the GOP that was crucial to his success "cannibals," and claiming he had been "blackmailed" into resigning. Following Gingrich's resignation, a throng of Republicans announced their candidacy for the Speaker's post and other leadership positions. Rep. Christopher Cox (R-Calif.) and Rep. Robert Livingston (R-La.)--both of whom preach the radical notion of working with the minority party--have emerged as top candidates to replace Gingrich.

Neither is as uncompromising or confrontational as Gingrich was, and this is good news for the GOP: it was Gingrich's intransigence on the budget that paralyzed the government in 1995 and cost the party seats in the 1996 elections, and it was the Speaker who approved the last-minute onslaught of recent Clinton-directed attack ads that many point to as a cause of Republican losses last Tuesday.

Still, both Cox and Livingston are staunch conservatives, and it appears the GOP will miss this opportunity to change the ideology of its leadership. If the midterm elections showed anything, they showed a polarized Republican party: moderate Republicans like Gov. A. Paul Cellucci and Texas Gov. George W. Bush were successful, while the more conservative wing suffered losses in gubernatorial and senate races from Alabama to California.

The GOP is in the midst of an identity crisis, and the races for Speaker and Majority Leader are a rare chance for Republican leaders to hold a referendum on their party's future. Returning social conservatives to these positions will only reaffirm the current leadership's increasingly extremist stance on gay rights and abortion, to name a few issues. The party would be better off heeding the message voters sent Tuesday and finding a more moderate leader.

The most pressing concern for both parties, however, should be recovering from Gingrich's tenure. The Speaker can retire with the satisfaction of having revolutionized his party's leadership and ended years of Democratic domination in the House. But his confrontational tactics have poisoned Congress, and his mean-spirited politicking has enraged voters.

The time for Gingrich's brand of politics has passed; as House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt said last week, "Whoever succeeds Newt Gingrich as Speaker will immediately begin the process of repairing the damage that was wrought on this institution over the last four years."