Gregorsky: Yeah, or macaroni and cheese. There was only money for one poll in '78 and it was taken in the second week of September '78 and it revealed that our opponent, Mrs. Shapard, had a strong lead among middle-class white women. The shopping cart, as I recall it --Weed would know better-- but as I recall it, the shopping cart was an attempt to say if we're going to swing this election --because we were 14 points behind in the middle of September, it was 50 to 36 with 14 percent undecided, Mrs. Shapard was almost at the critical 50 percent acceptance rate.

To swing the election --the themes and the symbol and the shopping cart was a direct attribute of that-- had to be: Newt's a working- class guy, not a working-class necessarily, but a middle-class guy. He was a professor, he was a Ph.D, you can't stretch this, he's not exactly a mill hand. But the point was, she's well-off, she's rich and she may be a woman and Democrat and a middle of the roader, but there are other things to look at if you're a Georgia voter and you're not either a strong liberal or a strong conservative.

We were going for that economically middle vote with the emphasis on the female. I don't know what the final polls showed, but we won by 8 points and that was always the target the swing voters would find in the last 6-8 weeks of the election.

Everything Newt has done strikes me as audacious until he sticks with it enough to cause it to have a result. And in 1987 he and a small group of members put forth a resolution to have an outside blue ribbon committee investigate the House. This was before the charges against Wright and it got like 79 votes.

A reporter called me up and said, 'Isn't this a real defeat for Newt and his band of Young Turks? I mean they were humiliated, they didn't even get half the Republicans to vote for it.' And I said, 'I guess it is, but I have the sense they'll come back and do something either against Wright or against somebody else, and the ethics issue will rise again.' It was just an experiment. Newt conducts lots of experiments. At a superficial level they fail or they waste money or they make people angry, but he cheerfully says, 'Well, y'know, we jiggled the beast. We learned how it responds.'

That was an analogy he gave about the Pentagon in '83. He supported an amendment that cuts some military project and he voted with the liberals and the Democrats on that, and I said, 'What are you doing this for?' and he said, 'I want to jiggle the beast to see if it moves, to see what kind of response we get.' Cap Weinberger was Secretary of Defense at the time, and Newt was fooling around with Ron Dellums and the moderate Republicans trying to cut the defense budget. This was '81.

Q: So, on the one hand this was a guy who liked to experiment and on the other hand, this was also a guy who doesn't accept defeat. He'll go out, get smashed and he's back with a slightly new tactic to do the same thing the next week.

Gregorsky: Yeah. Whole campaigns in a sense become further experiments. The '74 campaign where he got 49 percent two months after his party leader, Gerald Ford, pardoned Nixon. Newt had the audacity to run as the ethics candidate. Even though he was a Republican and Nixon had just dragged the country through Watergate. I mean, it's vintage Newt. He said that he never expected to win, that he was startled that they came as close as they did and to his credit, years later he said, 'You know, if I had won in '74 at age 31, running that kind of off-the-wall, swashbuckling campaign it would have been a disaster. I would have learned all the wrong lessons.' Doesn't mean he was glad he lost, but we all rationalized our early defeats.

Q: Let's talk about the 1980 campaign. You were involved in that, the 1980 close call.

Gregorsky: It didn't end up being a close call. It ended up being an 18 point victory but that still startles me to this day. There was lots of gloom and doom. Bob Weed ran a good campaign. His management style hacked off a lot of people. He would fly in from Baltimore and be there uttering these strategic dictates, which were right, but it was a different--I mean it was the anti-epitome of the good 'ole boy. Newt turned to Weed and said, 'Look, I'm going through a personal crisis, I'm separated, I may lose, maybe I deserve to lose. You go down there and run the campaign. I trust you more than anybody --your strategic world view and competence in regards to running that campaign.' Somehow, he won with 18 points. A bigger margin than in 1978. By the way, this was the year that Jimmy Carter was at the top of the ticket and Georgia was the only state in the nation in 1980 that Carter got an absolute majority of the vote, 55 percent, so with that at the top of the ticket, Newt still won.