GINGRICH PAYS PRICE; GOP LOOKS FOR LESS STRIDENT SALVATION.

Byline: Alison Mitchell The New York Times

It seemed somehow the ultimate irony of this strange political year, the year stigmatized by President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. Instead of Bill Clinton being the one to fall, it was Newt Gingrich.

Four years after the Georgia Republican was hailed as the visionary who won control of Congress for his party in 1994, Gingrich stepped down Friday night, facing a mutiny from Republicans who insisted that his flaws could cost them the very majority he had created.

In more heady days, the mercurial Georgia Republican had called himself a ``transformational figure'' and a ``definer of civilization.'' But Friday evening at 6:30 p.m. EST, facing a leadership challenge, Gingrich told his fellow House Republicans in conference calls that he was ``a target'' and would step down for the good of the party. He was not just leaving as speaker; he was leaving Congress at the end of this year.

Republicans said that he tried to discuss his decision with dignity. But they said he could not hide his bitterness and sadness as he spoke of those who would ``cannibalize'' the party because they wanted things their way or no way.

Gingrich's sudden fall came just four days after a midterm election that dealt Republicans a setback even more unexpected than their 52-seat pickup which he organized in 1994. But losing five seats was the occasion, and yet not the cause, for the antagonism that brought Gingrich's turbulent rein as House Speaker to such an extraordinary end.

The anger against him had been building all year, and Republicans say that by Friday Gingrich's troubles ran extremely deep - fueled by his miscalculations on election strategy, his persistent unpopularity with the public and his failure to rally the divided House Republicans around an agenda.

In 1994, House Republicans ran and won on an organizing theme, the Contract with America, which stressed less regulation, tax cuts, term limits and a balanced budget. But once they worked out a balanced budget, with tax cuts, in 1997, they seemed an ideologically spent force.

The Republicans went into this year's election largely running on the past. And its result provided one more reason for change.

Gingrich is almost universally disliked by House Democrats, and some Republicans said that now that they have an almost unworkable six-vote majority, they need a speaker who can work with Democrats, not infuriate them.

``What I believe desperately needs to take place is to heal the alienation that currently exists,'' said Rep. Steve Largent of Oklahoma, a conservative football Hall of Famer who announced his own challenge Friday to Gingrich's second-in-command, Rep. Dick Armey. Largent cited the rifts not just inside the Republican caucus but between House Republicans and Democrats, House Republicans and the White House.

He didn't adjust

The heart of the speaker's problems, many Republicans said, is that he had never made an adequate adjustment from minority to majority, from intense backbench opposition to governing.

``Revolutionizing takes some talents - many talents,'' Gingrich's challenger, Rep. Bob Livingston of Louisiana, said as he announced the candidacy for speaker that drove Gingrich from office. ``My friend, Newt Gingrich, brought those talents to bear, put the Republicans in the majority. Day-to-day governing takes others.''

As a minority firebrand, Gingrich attacked Democrats, including Speaker Jim Wright, over ethics issues. Throughout 1996, they returned the favor, and as Congress convened in 1997, he was barely re-elected speaker and then reprimanded and fined $300,000 for bringing discredit on the House by using tax-exempt money to promote Republican goals.

The hard-edged partisan bite that worked for Gingrich in the minority came across as stridency in power, Republicans said. ``Whenever we try to go on the offensive, the White House tries to make Newt the issue; and whenever that happens, we lose,'' said Peter King.

Clashes with Clinton

In fact, Gingrich and Clinton have been locked for years in a strange symbiotic competition. It was Clinton's failed attempt to pass national health care that helped bring Gingrich into the majority. It was the speaker's gamble on shutting down the government in the winter of 1995-96 that assured Clinton his own re-election. And this year, it was Gingrich's misreading of the public mood on impeachment that helped bring about his own demise.

But most of Gingrich's problems had nothing to do with Clinton. In a fractured Republican caucus struggling to define itself, he could never satisfy every ideological instinct and faction. So at the end he came under attack from moderates and conservatives, and was not even defended eagerly by some of those for whom he raised hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign funds.

It was those same ideological divisions that made it so hard for him to craft an agenda for his party this year, even on fiscal issues which once unified Republicans.

When Gingrich allowed Rep. John Kasich, the budget committee chairman, to try to rally House Republicans around a conservative blueprint for more than $100 billion in new savings, the moderates refused to back it.

When House Republicans supported a $70 billion tax cut, Senate Republicans refused to pass it. The disarray was so complete that Congress for the first time since 1974 failed to ever pass an actual budget.

That stalemate put the Republicans in the weakened state that left them with little alternative in October but to reach an agreement with Clinton on a massive $500 billion spending bill that alienated their conservative base on the eve of the election.

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PHOTO (Color) Newt Gingrich

Couldn't hide bitterness