The American Spectator 

Conservatives Inside Out: Lessons Learned the Hard Way, A Personal Report by Newt Gingrich, HarperCollins / 229 pages / $25 

The Freshmen: What Happened to the Republican Revolution? by Linda Killian, Westview / 463 pages / $28 

The great national political story of the century’s closing decades is the collision of conservative ideology and political reality–that is, what happens when conservatism tries to govern. The answer has been unfolding since the election in November 1994 of a Republican Congress that, notwithstanding a Democrat in the White House, promised a “Revolution” in Washington. Almost four years later, with the GOP still in power on Capitol Hill and that same president coasting at his highest approval ratings ever, many ideological conservatives deem the result a disaster–and blame it on the failure of elected officials to fight for their principles. Most Republican officeholders, on the other hand, don’t consider themselves any less conservative now than in the exuberance of 1995; they claim incremental success in the face of extraordinary opposition and ask for patience.

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The American Spectator 

Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber, by David Gelernter, The Free Press / 160 pages / $21

Had circumstances been kinder, David Gelernter might have lived his life merely as the remarkable man of letters he is. A computer scientist and professor of technology at Yale University and well respected in his field, he nonetheless stands apart from it as one of our most thoughtful critics of the progress of technology. In a field given over to boosterism and instant millionaires, Gelernter has managed to achieve sufficient distance to describe both the good and the bad of the computer revolution. He is in the microworld but not of it. His true loves are elsewhere — painting, musical composition, poetry, writing. He has produced thoughtful essays on a wide range of subjects in Commentary magazine, and he is the art critic for the Weekly Standard. And then there are the pleasures of playing baseball with two young sons.

An extraordinary man in rather ordinary circumstances — until one morning in June 1993, when Gelernter opened a package in his Yale office that had been mailed by the Unabomber. Drawing Life is the story of the aftermath of the blast that maimed him and nearly killed him, as well as a meditation on the condition of American society and culture from someone who refuses to go along with that culture in identifying him now and forever as, first and foremost, a victim.

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A phenomenon whose time has finally come. 

The American Spectator

Just when you think you’ve got the rules of politics figured out—that liberal Democrats won’t give up the theory, rhetoric, and practice of class warfare, for example, until you pry their cold, dead fingers from the wallets of the rich—along comes a one-two-three punch to send you reeling.

First was a long Wall Street Journal op-ed in April by investment banker Felix Rohatyn. The Lazard Freres & Co. managing partner (and Democratic Party maximum guru) renounced his redistributionist past and called for tax cuts to stimulate economic growth. Then came legislation introduced by the supremely liberal House delegate from the District of Columbia, Eleanor Holmes Norton. She proposed exempting D.C. residents from the (progressive) federal income tax , subjecting them instead to, in effect, a flat tax with a top rate of 15 percent. And soon after came a Washington Post editorial proclaiming the liberal newspaper’s support for Norton’s plan. The Post even suggested it might be a fine model for revitalizing other depressed urban centers.

This is emphatically not Dick Gephardt’s America.

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The American Spectator

In the torn-up note found in his briefcase after he turned up dead, an apparent suicide, Vince Foster offered this parting reflection on life in official Washington: “Here, ruining people is considered sport.” We do not know if Foster considered himself already ruined, or was worried about someone ruining him. We do know, though, that the ranks of the ruined in Washington are legion. And every day, there are some–in Congress, in the press, in advocacy groups, in public-policy non-profits–who dream about the next ruination.

Most of these dreams today center around Newt Gingrich. Ethics complaints about the Speaker are seemingly endless, and there is a delicious irony in the fact that it was Gingrich who launched the unrelenting, incendiary ethics attacks on Jim Wright, one of his predecessors. Wright’s ignominious resignation of the speakership in 1989 marked the start, in a way, of Gingrich’s meteoric rise–so it would be good sport if the same kinds of charges brought Gingrich down as well. That $4 million book deal, for example–how could that fail to remind us of Jim Wright’s own book deal, one of the central points in the ethics charges that brought him down?

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The American Spectator

Capitol Games: Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and the Story of a Supreme Court Nomination; by Timothy M. Phelps and Helen Winternitz; Hyperion /458 pages/$24.95

The problems with Timothy Phelps and Helen Winternitz’s Capitol Games: Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and the Story of a Supreme Court Nomination begin with its title and end with its last sentence. The title is noncommittal, nonjudgmental. It seems to promise a disinterested insiders’ account of events from June 27, 1991, when Thurgood Marshall announced he was retiring from the high court, to October 26, when the Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas for the seat — journalism in its “objective” or “fair” or “balanced” sense.

As for the last sentence, we may take it as an oblique summa of the authors’ position on the truth or falsity of Prof. Hill’s charge that Thomas sexually harassed her: “The Republicans had no appetite,” the authors archly aver, “for investigating the alleged conspiracy that they say had been concocted to sabotage their nominee to the Supreme Court.” It is a detail, the final detail, that the authors seem to regard as “telling.” What does it tell? That even the Republicans, who are earlier described as willing to “stop at nothing” to see their man confirmed, may themselves not have believed Thomas.

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