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Weber: It was one of our great days.

Q: Tell me about that.

Weber: It was always our objective to engage the Democrats on the floor. If we ever could get them to engage us in this debate in front of the country, we thought that we'd won. We could illustrate the differences more clearly to the American people. We never really thought we would get the speaker himself to directly engage three very junior members of the minority party. He may have gotten laughs on the Democrat side of the aisle but suddenly the three of us were sort of folk heroes of the grass roots level in the Republican Party around the country.

We got all sorts of invitations to go and speak at Republican events, all three of us together. We did a number of those around the country together. He really popularized us to an extent.

The fourth member of our group at that time, by the way, was Connie [Mack], at the time a freshman Congressman from Florida and now a Senator from Florida. He has a picture of his grandfather, Connie [Mack] of the old Philadelphia baseball team, pitching to the three stooges back in the 20s or 30s. I think it's still on the wall of the Senate office, Connie [Mack] and the three stooges, which he showed us and we autographed it for him.

Q: You draw Tip O'Neill into a fight. Flash forward about a decade. Isn't that what happened in the '94 election? The Republican Party with a Contract really drew President Clinton into a fight. He nationalized the election.

Weber: That's exactly right. Nationalizing the election was always part of the strategy, taking the issues directly to the country, getting outside of the committee rooms and getting outside of the Congress was always part of the strategy. And we succeeded only little bits at a time.

It could have happened, probably, earlier if you'd had the very aggressive support of a Republican President. But, in fact, we just couldn't move either President Reagan or President Bush along. It was too big a risk to take. They were better than President Nixon had been in the early 70s. Students of political history always talk about the 1972 campaign when President Nixon won reelection in 49 states --it is sort of a model of how to get reelected without doing anything for your party in the Congress.

That was really the model for Republicans for a long time. We were the minority party. Back to the minority party mind set, we thought we could win the Presidency but probably never the Congress. So Presidents and their advisors always believed that you really can't attach yourself to the Republican and the Congress too much because they're not going to win the majority. So, they were never very helpful.

Reagan and Bush were more helpful than Nixon had been a decade or so earlier. Still, there was target set here: you can't really get involved in a strategy. The Republicans holding on to the White House, in many ways, was an impediment to our doing exactly what we wanted. Because as much as we could try to engage Tip O'Neill or communicate through C Span or do a number of other things, in the end, it was Ronald Reagan and then George Bush that were communicating for the Republican Party to the grass roots electorate. And if their message was not our message, we were drowned out by the sheer volume of the Presidential soapbox. Actually seeing the White House go over to the Democrats was almost indispensable to the ultimate victory of new House Republicans. Suddenly House Republicans and congressional Republicans carried their own message. There was nobody out shouting at them, if you will. There was nobody they had to compete with. In fact, they were able to play off of President Clinton very successfully and use him to help amplify the message of congressional Republicans and turn that into a genuinely national election.

Q: In the middle of all of this politics, you're getting to know Newt Gingrich pretty well.What kind of a guy was he?

Weber: I like him. I liked him then; I like him now. I think he's a guy with a good sense of humor who likes to have a good time. We'd go to movies and restaurants together and we enjoyed each other's company, I'd say. He is however, a workaholic. I guess that probably has some technical meaning and psychological jargon and I'm not trying to engage in any armchair analysis. I just mean when people ask me about his success, I say there's a lot that's unique there. Some of it's not very hard to explain. Number one, he is very smart. I'm not saying he's smarter than anybody in the Congress, but he's a very smart guy. [He has] a high IQ, Ph.D in history, all that stuff. Second of all, he really probably works harder than anyone in the Congress. If you're smarter than most people and work harder than just about everybody else, it's hard for you to fail. A lot of that explains Newt Gingrich.

When everybody else is done working at the end of the day and would like some leisure time, time with their family, Newt Gingrich is ready for another round of meetings to clarify the issue that didn't get clarified at the three o'clock meeting. If you get done at ten o'clock and still haven't driven it home finally, he'll say, 'I'm going to go for a walk tomorrow morning at six-thirty. Why don't you join me and we'll talk about this some more?' And he means it and he'll be there.

We're friends and we socialize together. But it's hard to form a close personal attachment to somebody who is really consumed by his work. I'm sure that his wife Marianne, who's also a very good friend of mine, finds that frustrating too because nothing really comes before his work.