Two cheers for Newt.

LAST month a crack about the 104th Congress and, implicitly, Speaker Newt Gingrich made the rounds: For the first time in forty years, the Republicans have a chance of taking Congress. In 1995 they bestrode the narrow world like colossi; in 1996 they were anxiously playing the odds.

There was back-handed praise for Gingrich in the gibe, though, if one thought about it. The GOP took the House in 1994 when no one gave it a chance. Joe Martin, the last Republican Speaker of the House, gave up the gavel in January 1955. I was born in February. That is how long it had been. Yet Gingrich pulled it off. Now the GOP has succeeded a second time. Give Newt a tip of the hat for that.

But the Gingrich revolution was supposed to have been about more than office-holding. The peroration of Newt's stump speech was a litany of urgent responsibility. "It is impossible to maintain civilization with 12-year-olds having babies, 15-year-olds killing each other, 17-year-olds dying of AIDS, and 18-year-olds getting diplomas they can't even read." For the last year, all we heard of the 104th Congress instead was gridlock and Medicare. What went wrong?

The Speaker's personality undoubtedly played a role in this reversal. The sunny side of Newt is energy, curiosity, and even (in groups disposed to like him) charm. But these come with rough edges. There is an odd impersonality about the man. The happiest I have ever seen Gingrich is in the photo of him with the binturong, the Southeast Asian zoo creature that jumped on his head and bit him. If Bill Clinton is a people person, Newt Gingrich is a binturong person. He can also be temperamental, especially when those he has trusted (perhaps unwisely) let him down. The symbol of these cross-currents came when Gingrich griped about Clinton's etiquette on the flight back from Yitzhak Rabin's funeral. Popular anxiety about his flaws was already there. But politicians must take care to avoid moments that crystallize their defects.

The policy turning point for Gingrich was the decision in the fall of 1995 to try to balance the budget without a Balanced Budget Amendment. The House had passed nine of the ten items in the Contract with America. The wise thing, as Kate O'Beirne said at the time, would have been for Republicans to admit defeat, blame the Democrats, and move on. Instead, Gingrich and his cohorts decided that they could achieve the same goal by legislative rather than constitutional means. But this meant addressing entitlements at a time when a President of the opposite party lay poised to descend upon their flank.

Reasonable political considerations drew Gingrich into the debacle. Budget balancing had been the theme of the first Perot campaign, and the Perot voters went Republican in 1994. But the main factor was the hubris that infected all congressional Republicans in 1995. In Gingrich's case, hubris was amplified by philosophy.

Gingrich's philosophy is schizophrenic (see "Tout Newt," NR, March 20, 1995). Half of it consists of devotion to the Founders and Tocqueville. The other half is a spurious theory of history, learned from Alvin and Heidi Toffler. The Tofflers teach that there have been three phases of human existence, characterized by agriculture, industry, and information (newly emerging). It is mind candy, Marxism for computer geeks. But like other three-phase theories, it is a promise of power: he who knows the next phase, and attaches himself to it, rules. The witches in Macbeth expound a similar theory, hailing Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor, and King hereafter. Winning the Speakership made Newt Thane of Glamis; passing the Contract made him Thane of Cawdor. Balancing the budget would make him King hereafter.

A final reason Gingrich took on the budget may well have been discomfort with the other issues that beckoned -- the social issues, and the issues making up the "national question." Take quotas. Here was an issue that was sure to be in the public eye, thanks to CCRI. There existed a bill (co-sponsored by Bob Dole) that would have addressed the question. Why did Gingrich punt? "Newt thinks in pictures," a member of the House leadership told me early this year, "and he could not see himself taking a position on affirmative action which J. C. Watts [the black GOP congressman from Oklahoma] would be opposing." The Republican Congress tackled partial-birth abortion, gay marriage, and welfare. But many another issue fell by the wayside, for Pat Buchanan to fondle. Some conservatives have lost patience. "We got our people into leadership," Paul Weyrich, Beltway Macher and long-time Gingrich ally, complained, "but we are not getting different policies."

The longest conversation I have ever had with Gingrich was about George Washington. He recommended, along with Gordon Wood and Henry Cabot Lodge, a Howard Fast novel about the Revolution. In the fall of 1776, Washington abandoned New York, leaving over two thousand men in a fort at the northern end of Manhattan. Young Nathanael Greene, one of his best generals, told him the fort could hold out, but the British took it. Washington tells a wretched Greene that things are bad, and will get worse. But they will go on.

Maybe Gingrich has been telling himself this. It's time for a Battle of Trenton.