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No Newt without the Contract.

Jimmie | February 19, 2006 | Comments (0)

There’s an interesting op-ed in Sunday’s Washington Post asking where the Democrat Newt Gingrich is?

The column misses something I think was vitally important to Gingrich’s “revolution” of the 1990s that led to the Republican’s first majority in the House in a very long time – the Contract with America.

The authors make a great effort to note how Gingrich and his fellow revolutionaries used a couple timely scandals to put the Democrats back on their heels and note that the Abramoff scandal provides the same opportunity. In that, they are absolutely correct. The House banking and post office scandals put the need for reform right in front of the American voters. But it’s wasn’t the attacking that earned the GOP the majority they’ve held ever since.

It was the Contract and it didn’t just happen overnight.

John Pitney, a former House aide notes in this article that it took Gingrich 14 years to develop the Contract. Gingrich was looking toward reform long before the opportunity to reform ever arose. Right now, that’s the fundamental difference between the minority GOP then and the minority Democrats now.

The Gingrich the Dems need is one who has been thinking deeply about reform for more than just the past couple of months who is willing find just a few like-minded compatriots and who is wlling to go against the entrenched leadership of his party hammer and tong. That person has to have the long view of politics, not tomorrow’s poll results. Right now the party definitely has the relentless attacking part of the game down-pat. What they don’t have is a plan of action to put into place after the attacks have created the political opening. What they don’t have is someone who will drive forward with that plan even if it cheeses off the party leadership.

That person doesn’t seem to exist. Worse, Dems don’t even seem to realizethat they actually need a plan of action. Right now, they’re employing the legendary Underpants Gnomes strategy:

1) Attack Republicans
2) ???
3) Electoral Victory!

Unfortunately, until Dems realize that they actually need something akin to the Contract, they’re going to keep repeating Step One over and over again, and they’ll lose more and more relevance.