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Mahe: Well, bear in mind this tape program was a companion to some aggressive training programs that GOPAC also had under way. Not all candidates who got the tapes got the training but there was a lot of overlap. But it seemed to me that what they did, perhaps, is they gave conservatives a language of consensus to be able to articulate conservative ideas. Cause still in the 80s it was very difficult to talk conservative language without getting massacred fairly badly by either the media or your opposition and he helped conservatives understand ways to frame their arguments so that they were not immediately attackable. He taught them how they could defend their arguments or counter-attack when they were attacked.

And a lot of what Newt did during those days and with those tapes is he framed some fairly strong counterattacks and he would oftentimes go way out front with them, far beyond what a candidate running for the state senate in Mississippi might be able to do. But if that candidate saw it happening and saw Newt doing it, he obviously was against less of a competition so, even though he could only go this way, rather than this far, it was far enough to get him confidence to keep going in Mississippi.

Q: You are one of the people who was a consultant paid by GOPAC. So that meant you really did what? GOPAC pays you and you go and do what?

Mahe: Sit in meetings. I mean, the planning sessions and the strategy sessions. And I think that's correct. We never, ever had an operational role within GOPAC. We weren't paid that much money. But basically there were meetings. There were just lots of meetings because when you're working your way through the challenges that we were confronting, of trying to take control of Congress and trying to take on the monolithic Democrat Party and its resources. When you are trying to take on our supposed allies, the business community, who were supporting the Democrats, in addition to taking on the press, who was substantially, universally hostile to our thinking in those days, you just don't kind of willy nilly, just kind of stand up and say, 'Oh, I think I'll do this and I'll do that.'

And a lot of ideas, like that satellite conference we did, didn't work out very well. It wasn't what? 600,000. After the fact everybody said, 'Geez, that wasn't a very good idea.' But at the beginning, it seemed like another vehicle that might work. Paul Weyrich is now making it work for Century with his NET Network. But it never worked at the time we tried. But it's just a lot of meetings.

Q: And part of what you all were doing was literally the meat and potatoes, the stuff and substance of figuring out, what is the conservative philosophy? How do we articulate it, what are some of the things we can say back?

Mahe: And, trying to figure out --we know that about 65% of the American people have genuinely been in accord with us for the last two decades or more. Probably nearly three. The American people figured out a long time ago that the liberal welfare state was not working. It's now becoming manifest and you see it much more dramatically. But people are not dumb. They saw what was happening in the inner cities. They saw the educational system collapsing. But figuring out how to position against that, how to try to define the alternative. How to take on this very, deeply embedded institutional fabric that had permeated all levels of government. By the time you get into the 80s, government, state legislatures, mayors, city councilors, Congress. It's everywhere.

There's one man, Ronald Reagan, out there that's kind of standing apart and everything is fairly well dominated. And that's what we were talking about and with absolute conviction. That was what the Contract was about, if the American people were on our side, if they could ever understand the choice. The fact that they did not was not the American people's fault. It was our fault because we had not yet figured out how to define it or how to give it to them.

Q: What made Newt the vehicle for this transformation?

Mahe: He had, and has, the mind and the energy to do it. But, as I assume you have come to know with your intense investigation in his life, he is an expert on military strategy. Military strategy being the only 'quasi-scientific' area that is remotely translatable to politics.

He's a historian and he knows about any battle or related military history. He understands that. His area of expertise, I assume, is domestic history, U.S. history because he seems to know about every election and why, and what happened there. And you bring those two bodies of knowledge together, and he has an instinct for strategy on top of that and you get a perspective. You get a perspective that you don't get from anybody else that I'm aware of right now. The reason I want him to stay where he is because I think the Presidency is irrelevant for Newt Gingrich. You only lead out of the House. Up until the 1930's, the most powerful office in this country was the Speaker of the House. I think it is again, and that's the way it should stay.

Q: It doesn't necessarily hurt Newt or the cause if Bill Clinton's reelected, does it?

Mahe: No, I don't think it does. I think the President, the only problem with the President is he appoints judges. If it wasn't for that, who cares?

Q: Newt --he is something of a general if you will, marshalling them, and the way he thinks strategically and practically, just sort of a bloodless war --that is one way of looking at it, isn't it?

Mahe: Yes. Very much so. That's what it is. That's what we have been in for a long time. And marshalling the army, determining your strategy --a lot of the [soldiers] that we depend on don't even realize they have a link to us.

This is one of the significant differences between the Republican and the Democratic Party. Our 50 Republicans are totally independent. There is no chain of command downstream from the Republican National Committee. The National Committee cannot do anything at the state level except in some instances, it cannot recognize the delegates. Equally true, except in Oregon and a couple of other states, the states have no control over the county parties, so you got in, setting aside Oregon and a couple of others, 7,300 independent organizations on any given day that can do what the boss wants or, not do what the boss wants, depending on their whim. Well, now think about trying to organize this and make something happen through this kind of structure. It's really difficult.

I mean the fact is that when you're playing in this kind of game you gotta play hardball. This is not tag football. And the Democrats are a lot tougher on any given day than we ever have been and that's been part of the problem. And their allies make our allies look like bush league. So we've been in a tough game. That language is critical. I mean we define who we are and what we're about by words. And the choice of words are critical. Newt understands words. And when we had questions about words, we would focus group words to try to make sure that the language we were using, i.e., the words, was communicating to people out across the country the same thing we were saying here.

We also find, what you know in your business, a dramatic regional difference in words, so if you find a word that in New England tends to mean left and in California tends to mean right, you better take it out of your vocabulary and use a different word, because you can't use words that have mixed meanings nationally. So the use of language, and Newt, he is a master with words. He very rarely uses a word, or uses a word that's less powerful than the one that could have been used. I mean he is an absolute master.