As Julian Zelizer shows in his briskly entertaining (if politically dispiriting) new book, Burning Down the House, an ambitious and impatient Republican from Georgia by the name of Newton Leroy Gingrich long ago figured out that corruption was a useful charge for a young upstart to deploy against establishment politicians — a way of turning their vaunted experience against them ... Zelizer writes about all of this with aplomb, teasing out the ironies and the themes, showing that what made Gingrich exceptional wasn’t so much his talent as his timing. He happened to seize power at a moment when a post-Watergate ecosystem paradoxically selected for politicians like him — legislatively useless, for the most part, but freakishly talented at political warfare and self-promotion, wielding idealism as a cudgel while never deigning to be idealistic themselves. You don’t have to be nostalgic for the old political era of smoke-filled back rooms to wonder if the public was better served by an arsonist bearing a blowtorch and a Cheshire cat grin.
Although Burning Down the House is not the first history to cast Gingrich as lead assassin in the murder of bipartisanship and effective governance, it is an insightful if deeply unflattering portrait of Gingrich himself, highlighting his signature traits of arrogance, ferocity, amorality and shoulder-shrugging indifference to truth. It’s not surprising that Gingrich declined the author’s interview request. And the book’s narrow time frame, which stops well short of Gingrich’s leading the House Republicans to their 1994 electoral triumph and his subsequent elevation as speaker, supplies a detailed and nuanced historical context that makes Gingrich’s actions more understandable if not excusable ... Zelizer provides a moving description of Wright’s farewell address, in which the resigning speaker decried the 'mindless cannibalism' that had overtaken politics, and he delivers an eloquent indictment of all those responsible for Wright’s downfall.
... stops short of the 1994 Gingrich Revolution when Republicans overwhelmingly won the midterms, and also does not analyze how his time as speaker changed the norms of American politics. But by plunging into this early crusade against Wright, Zelizer unfurls how the congressman managed to gain enough power to claim the speakership for himself only five years later ... Zelizer writes this tragic story with authority. The historian has again proved his ability to make a dismal juncture in American politics into a lively and exceptional read. Zelizer gives Wright equal weight in the book, emphasizing just how impressive — and unnerving — it was that Gingrich successfully impugned the Democrats’ leader on thin evidence and set a precedent of governance that emphasized no-quarter blood sport over cooperation. Four decades later, the House still plays by the same rules.
Zelizer is not the first to suggest that Gingrich 'broke politics,' as a recent article in the Atlantic put it, but his book provides an engaging, unsettling and, alas, timely look at the torch that Gingrich took to our system of self-government ... Many readers will know how the story ends, but Zelizer tells it with authority, investing it with tension as Gingrich conjures the storm and wrecks, perhaps permanently, the political landscape.
... a powerful illustration of politics as blood sport. Author Julian Zelizer focuses on the two men at the heart of the struggle, the powerful but flawed Wright and his nemesis, the aspiring Congressman Gingrich. The war for the future of the legislative body proves captivating in its telling.
Today’s hyperpartisan politics can be traced to Republican congressman Newt Gingrich’s 1989 ouster of Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright, according to this meticulously researched account. Zelizer (coauthor, Fault Lines), a professor of history at Princeton University, sketches Gingrich’s working-class background, frustrated career in academia, and two failed attempts to flip Georgia’s sixth district from blue to red ... Zelizner’s witty, well-informed narrative occasionally bogs down in an excess of insider details, but successfully presents this episode as a foretaste of congressional warfare to come. Political junkies will be thrilled.
Politics is war without blood, said Mao, but Newt Gingrich emerges as red in tooth and fang in this thoughtful study of his politics in action ...
There are few admiring moments in the book since Gingrich is not an admirable man, but the author does give him points for chutzpah ... [a]
sharp, lucid portrait ... A masterfully written political road map for anyone wondering how we got to where we are, a bad place indeed.
