DuPont: And Newt Gingrich was right. George Bush paid with his presidency for a very bad decision that Newt was right about. The apple cart needed to be upset. I would have thought that Newt couldn't have done this--but he would have done better to just walk out of there with his House delegation and have nothing to do with the agreement. He did shoot it down once and it came back again and he couldn't stop it the second time. If we're going to be a party of populists who believe in individuals having power, we've got to turn that power over to them. We can't raise taxes and we can't regulate more and we can't create new departments. We've got to begin closing down the collective side of the government and opening up the individual opportunity side.

Q: Who were the people who financed GOPAC?

DuPont: The GOPAC organization and the new Newt Gingrich conservative party is a party of small business: of the hardware store owner who has four employees. Of the fellow who's running his own service station, or dry cleaning company. We really don't represent the General Motors type anymore as much as we do the small businessman on main street America.

Q: It seems, also, a lot of very successful, some very wealthy people donate to GOPAC, but they seem to be self-made or newly made.

DuPont: They're the entrepreneurs of America, the people who have come forward with a better idea, they have built it into a business and suddenly say, 'If we can do this, everybody can do this given the opportunity.'

Q: Isn't this a little ironic for you since you come from one of the older and more prosperous American families?

DuPont: Well, it is, I suppose, ironic. I do come from a family that has been here for almost two hundred years. But, after all, my ancestors started a very dangerous gun powder business in 1802 and my great grandfather and his father were both killed in gun powder explosions. So, there were some entrepreneurial DuPonts that are a little different from the heads of the corporations today.

Q: Newt's staff tends to say, 'We have a hundred ideas a day,' and they put them in the 'Newt bad ideas/Newt good ideas'--and then he changes them a lot. Is that your experience?

DuPont: Newt is one of those people who has more ideas in the morning than I have in a month. Some of his ideas are not quite the ones you want to pursue in the interim. But that's the way it is with entrepreneurial people. You try one thing, it doesn't work, you try another. Didn't Thomas Edison once say that he knew eleven thousand ways not to do something and now he was going to get it right?

Well, Newt's a little bit the same way. He offers an idea, he tests it in the public opinion. It gets a bad reaction, it's over with. It gets a good reaction, he develops it further. So, he's the kind of creative thinker that the party needs in order to stay in the majority.

Q: A man who ran Newt Gingrich's first successful campaign was telling us that what Newt had to do, and GOPAC was a central part of this, was to create whole new structures to transform the Republican Party. Do you think that's accurate?

DuPont: It is because if you're going to try to win an election at either the local or the national level, you can't be 80%. You can't say I'm for what my Democratic opponent is for but not quite so much of it. People say, particularly if it's Democrat incumbents, 'Why shouldn't I vote for the real thing? Why should I vote for who's the pale copy?' So Newt had to get into the minds of Republican candidates that we didn't disagree with a little of the Democrats liberal program, we disagreed with all of it. We didn't think taxes ought to go up. They ought to go down. We didn't think the census ought to be weakened. We thought it ought to be strengthened. We didn't think it ought to be done in Washington. -- we ought to pass the responsibility back to do it at home.

So, that required an entire reeducating of the moderate Republican mindset. I think that is the primary thing that Newt accomplished for the Republican party. He changed the frame of reference of all of our candidates. That's why we won so big in 1994.

Q: That was a phenomenal event. How do you think Newt has handled the transition from being the person who was the outsider, from being the rebel to now, himself, being the establishment. He's Speaker of the House.

DuPont: Newt has got two transitions behind him. And he's got one to go. First he had to capture control of the House. Nobody said he could do that. Well, he did. Then he had to deliver. He had to get the Republican budget through. He had to get the Contract With America through. He has done that.

Now he's got to stop being the Thomas Paine of the revolution and he's got to become the George Washington of the revolution, the leader who's a little less bombastic and a little bit more of a leader of all the troops.

He's made the first two transitions. He'll make the next one as well.