WASHINGTON -- In addition to the 10-point agenda the House Republicans have pledged to carry out in their "Contract with America," they need to do one other thing if they are to be seen as responsible leaders: put a muzzle on Newt Gingrich when he recklessly gets off that subject.
Once again, the next House speaker has demonstrated his talent for creating division by irresponsibly demonizing opposition Democrats and treating them not simply as adversaries but as despised enemies.
He may be succeeding Bob Michel as the ranking House Republican, but he will never replace the always decent Michel as long as the loose Gingrich tongue continues to wag as it did Sunday on "Meet the Press."
Gingrich's statement in the NBC News interview that "up to a quarter of the [Clinton] White House staff, when they first came in, had used drugs in the last four or five years" was "substantiated" by his statement that "a senior law enforcement official" had told him that it was so "in his judgment."
Gingrich did not identify the official and insisted that he was "not making any allegations of any individual persons." But, he observed, the White House "had huge problems getting people through security clearance, because they kept bringing people in who had a lot of things that weren't very easy to clear." Again, he offered no specifics or proof to back up his comments.
The observations came in the context of questions about his earlier characterization of Bill and Hillary Clinton as "counterculture McGoverniks" and Gingrich's allegation that the first couple had brought others of that ilk, such as Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, into the administration. In this instance, he insisted, he was not talking about behavior 20 or 25 years ago, but now.
The remarks were chillingly reminiscent, to those of us old enough to remember, of Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin waving pieces of paper in the 1950s and proclaiming that "I have in my hand" the names of Communists working in the State Department, none of whom he ever revealed.
McCarthy, like Gingrich today, had new-found power and publicity bestowed upon him when his Republican Party took control of the Senate in 1953. McCarthy, as a committee chairman, used both with reckless abandon, poisoning the public discourse throughout that era.
Gingrich, so far at least, is no Joe McCarthy. In his one-hour "Meet the Press" appearance, he articulated with clarity his positions and his aspirations for the House Republicans he will lead in the next Congress. You do not have to accept the world according to Newt Gingrich to recognize that he is a forceful and effective advocate of the political revolution he hopes to achieve as speaker.
But as speaker he ill serves his party and his cause by continuing to be the loose cannon that he has been as an ordinary congressman and a minority leader.
If he is going to accuse the White House of harboring what he calls "counterculture people," he should name them, say specifically how he knows who they are and spell out what their crime is. He should, in other words, put up or shut up.
The danger in raising questions about the White House staff is that it could divert attention from the House Republican commitment to bring the 10 specific actions listed in the "Contract with America" to the House floor in the first 100 days of the new session.
The last thing the country needs is another McCarthy-era witch hunt. Gingrich is smart enough to know that, so it's likely that, having planted his little accusation, he will simply let it lie there.
But the mere planting of it suggests a lot about how he perceives the people in the opposition party with whom he will be doing business over the next two years.
Gingrich earlier served notice on the White House that his idea of cooperation is Democratic capitulation, saying he would "cooperate" but not "compromise."
It's not hard to see why he takes this attitude, if he sees the Clinton White House as a nest of "counterculture" vipers who don't share the values he believes are at the core of acceptable behavior and thought for, as he put it earlier, "normal Americans."