Gregorsky: From the deposition that was filed by Mrs. Gingrich, at the time, Jackie, it was a real story. I mean it was all the charges. It was money. It was debt. I think it was run in the Carroll County Georgian, on the 22nd or 23rd of October, two weeks before the election. I thought it was over. I mean, I thought that was it. But Newt still carried Carroll county, which was one of the bigger counties in the western part of the district at that time. Margin went way down. I mean, he carried it 2 to 1 in '78, only got 53 percent in '80, but he still carried it.

Q: Why do you think?

Gregorsky: That's a good question. The only theory I have is that the theme this is a bad guy and he has wronged his wife and he deserves to be chastised --that might have worked in the '50s but I don't think even in the '70s that was working in this electorate anymore. I think enough guys, men, had been through divorces, had lost everything, whether they deserved to or not, but there was maybe a secret or subterranean angry white male vote or angry male vote that could look at Newt and say, 'Well, the guy can't be this bad. I mean, we've all had problems with our wives and our girlfriends or what have you.'

Q: You actually worked for two years with Newt Gingrich, now Speaker of the House. What was it like to be on his staff?

Gregorsky: Mercury going around the sun. Yes, well, there are some people who have lasted longer. What I learned --a lot of people learned-- from my tenure as Chief of Staff is that if you're going to be a close associate manager, an administrator, a lieutenant so to speak, at the operational level of this man, Gingrich, you really can't have your own agenda. You can't want to argue with him about what is the meaning of conservativism, and what is the philosophically right thing to do, which I wasted a lot of time doing back then.

The issue is how many projects can we start? How many experiments can we run and learn from? How can we minimize the damage so that is doesn't kill us but otherwise let's just laugh off these failures? A lot of people had problems with that. I mean, we either were control freaks or perfectionists or people that liked to run a little bit of a tighter ship. People like that have always been driven crazy by Newt Gingrich and in my opinion, if he becomes President, half the administration will be driven crazy by that. So I was driven crazy by that, that's the punch line. And I wanted to go off and be a writer and work at home.

Q: You've written recently about how Newt's politics, his vision, is misunderstood by some conservatives and by liberals. What do you mean by that?

Gregorsky: Newt, in my opinion, doesn't have any fundamental philosophical interest in abolishing government for the sake of abolishing government. He's interested in a lean, mean, effective sort of corporate transformed government based on Demming and Drucker and a lot of his other heroes. But my prediction is that the conservatives in two, three, or four years from now are going to be shocked and deservedly so, given the way they think, by the fact that Newt Gingrich is a Teddy Roosevelt-style Republican. He is an activist, he is a reformer, he is a leader.

He is not going to be somebody who wants to, as Dick Armey and Phil Gramm do, run entirely on shrinking the government and cutting spending. So you know their interests are in tandem now. But once enough reform has happened, and once the budget is closer to balance and once we've eliminated a few cabinet departments, then I expect Newt will still be speaker or maybe even President.

At that point, you're going to see a Lincoln/Roosevelt-style Republican leadership. Not a Hoover or even a Reagan-style government bashing Republicanism. Anyway, so that's what the conservatives don't get yet. And some of them do and they don't want to get it, but that's the reality in my opinion.

Liberals have a completely different problem. They really would like to stigmatize Newt in the same way that the conservatives want to idealize Newt. I mean, the conservatives want to idealize Newt as somebody who is really going to deliver all of our fantasies of fifty years --of wiping out the New Deal and the Great Society. Nothing like that is going to happen. Maybe half the Great Society will go, but most of the New Deal will stay. And we'll get some other things.

So, if liberals portray Newt as uncaring, anti-humanitarian, a troglodyte, antediluvian, all this sort of stuff, they don't get the fact that this guy is probably the most intellectual activist and, in some ways, a bleeding heart conservative a la Jack Kemp. But he's tougher than Kemp.

He shares a lot of Kemp's desires to empower the poor, to bring the blacks into the Republican party, to do all these things that are really kind of idealistic. And so, we need to see more of that side of Newt and I think we will once we get through this budget cutting, Medicare reform sort of pain and sacrifice stuff, which is necessary. The bond market likes it, I mean, and Clinton's going to sign most of it. But I'm not sure that's the core Newt. And I think the liberals will be less disappointed in the long run than they are now. And I think that the conservatives will be shocked two or three years at the level of pre-government or pre-governance in this guy 'Jingoish.'