MR. GINGRICH GOES TO HOLLYWOOD

Newt Gingrich came to Hollywood last week and gave the same speech he'd
just given to the Cobb County Chamber of Commerce in Marietta, Ga. Which
might have been OK if it were a good speech. But it wasn't. Not in Cobb
County. Not in Olympia, Wash. And not in Los Angeles.

It's not that he said anything offensive. In fact, so cautious was the
speech that there wasn't even a passing reference to any of the cultural
controversies along the contentious Hollywood/Washington axis. Indeed, the
most offensive thing about the speech was its sheer banality.

For those of us who arrived at 7:30 in the morning expecting a major
address billed as his first in Hollywood since he became speaker, the
conclusion was that there was less fiber in the speech than in the eggs
served at the Beverly Hills Hotel. We came for a blockbuster and instead
got a shopworn public service announcement.

The speaker began by inviting us to have "an adult conversation" -- by
which he did not mean a raunchy NC-17 conversation but a "serious" one. And
here was the extremely grown-up point he made: "We should decide," he said,
"to become a drug-free country." I had instant visions of practicing
positive thinking in front of my mirror: "I am deciding to live in a
drug-free country, I am deciding to live in a drug-free country. . . . "

But the speaker apparently wasn't so naive as to think that this alone
would do it. He had a plan -- the same recycled "just say no" plan thanks
to which, he asserted, "drug use declined by two-thirds between 1984 and
1992." His next assertion was that suddenly the decline stopped and it all
"turned around in six weeks." But neither the speaker's office, nor the
Partnership for a Drug-Free America, nor PRIDE (the National Parents'
Resource Institute for Drug Education) could provide any corroborating
evidence for these statements.

The shallowness of his analysis of the drug problem was matched by the
shallowness of the rest of the speech -- a combination of crowd-pleasing
cheerleading ("This is a great country!") and microscopic proposals in
response to major problems. "Every child in the country," he said, "should
spend one day a year studying the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution."

And Gingrich -- you know, the guy who wants to get government off our backs
- -- actually wants state legislatures to introduce such a bill. Maybe while
we're at it, we can pass a law that says kids can't have their dessert
until they finish their vegetables. And why stop at state legislatures? Why
not an amendment to the Constitution?

Now, I'm all in favor of reading these great documents, but isn't it a
higher priority to get kids reading in the first place?

The Declaration of Independence proposal was at least a window into
Gingrich's caveman logic. When, last month, he returned from having a good
time in London, courtesy of Arco -- he gushed that "every American should
make this trip" -- in the same way, presumably, that everyone should read
the Declaration of Independence or own a laptop computer.

In fact, no one would disagree that Claridge's, Gingrich's London hotel, is
much nicer than our urban ghettos. So why don't all the people in our
forgotten inner cities just "decide" to go to London? In fact, I'm going to
propose right now that we, as a country, all "decide" to take an enriching
trip across the Atlantic.

When Gingrich moved from this "adult conversation" to policy prescriptions,
things got even murkier. The speaker launched into a tirade against the
earned income tax credit, which he told us is costing the economy $5
billion in waste and fraud. Last July, however, the speaker welcomed as
"very useful" the Senate compromise that failed to rein in what he
described in his speech as a highly wasteful government program.

What's the point of fighting tooth and nail to remain speaker of the House
if there is no connection between your grandiose rhetoric and your
legislative practice?

The speaker waxed lyrical about tax reform while celebrating a balanced
budget that added 900 pages to the Internal Revenue Code. He talked about
the need to take "action this day" -- a Churchillian phrase -- to fix our
schools while failing to put on the legislative front burner even as modest
a bill as the one proposed by Reps. Jim Talent and J.C. Watts to provide
alternatives to children trapped in dysfunctional schools and to their
troubled communities.

And this rhetorical rice pudding was served up with a concluding reference
to the 1983 report on a nation at risk. "The nation is more at risk now
then it was then," the speaker opined ominously. Last week, Ralph Reed
called Gingrich a "towering intellect." Perhaps he meant it in the
Whitmanesque sense of containing many contradictions: bemoaning a nation at
risk while celebrating prosperity and doing nothing -- in fact saying
nothing -- to reconcile the two.

Oh well. Be sure to read the Declaration of Independence -- it's the law.