Weber: I don't think that's surprising at all. I think Newt's always been supremely pragmatic. I just think that the definition of pragmatism in the Congress, at least for the Republican Party for a long time, simply meant keeping your mouth shut and going along. If pragmatic is defined more literally as doing what it takes to succeed, Newt's always been pragmatic. He's always been quite ready to work with senior Republicans. He's always been able to work with Democrats that would help him. He has also always understood that the price of passivity can often be defeat, particularly when you're in the minority. Nothing that he's done in the last year surprises me in the slightest.

He's a pragmatic guy and he's not, in the traditional sense, nearly as ideological as a lot of the Conservatives. A lot of the newly-elected conservatives and many of the other leaders in the House today are far more conservative ideologically than Newt Gingrich. Dick [Armey's] a genuine conservative ideologue. So is Tom [Delay], the House Republican [Whip]. They're tremendous guys and good friends of mine. They are far more ideological than Newt Gingrich.

Q: In Gingrich's book he praises Franklin Roosevelt as one of his heroes. Dick Armey, more traditionally as a conservative, says Franklin Roosevelt was the man who turned everything wrong. It's a great statement.

Weber: I think that there's a sense of responding to history which separates Newt from people like Dick Armey, who have a well-developed economic philosophy. In Armey's mind, if I can sort of interpret what he says, he understands what he believes economically. I believe it too. And Roosevelt was [antithetic] to all that. Hence, what Roosevelt did was wrong.

He's not going to just get out of touch with the rank and file numbers. I'm not concerned about that. I do think that it's one of the great challenges to the Republicans today to take this new group of members in the Congress, the real revolutionaries in the Congress, and convince them that the real challenge now is not simply dismantling the old order but figuring out what takes its place.

There's an awful lot of populous anger at government and Congress today. And to an extent, that reflects to popular will and helps the Republican Party --it's appropriate for the country to be angry. They've been angry in the past about various things. But that's not a long term governing principle. There are mixed messages coming out of the Congress right now about whether or not they view restraining government as being the first step or the ultimate goal. If it's the ultimate goal, I don't think that bodes very well for the Republican Party. I know that Newt Gingrich doesn't think it's the ultimate goal.

Q: Newt Gingrich thinks there's a role for government.

Weber: Absolutely....

Q: He's conservative, but he's flexible, he's pragmatic, he's got some very maverick ideas--some would say kooky ideas. Describe him politically.

Weber: He's a twenty-first century, information society, traditional values, free enterprise, pragmatic conservative. That's for starters. It's seriously a very difficult question to answer. He has a very strong sense of threats to society and a very deep sense of a historic mission to assure that America's as great in the next century as it has been in the twentieth century. Those ideas are not theological in their intensity or rigidity. He understood, very clearly, during the time I was in Congress with him in the 80s, the threats from communism in the Soviet Union.

Beyond that he was quite willing to look at different strategies for resisting. He wasn't married to any one particular strategy. He now sees a great threat from the welfare state in terms of what it's doing to the values of the country and particularly how it's affecting poor people.

Q: In replacing the welfare state, and there's been a lot of stories recently about the odd couple --Marion Barry and Newt Gingrich-- you have some sense that he's a guy who's always tried to get more black voters into the Republican Party. I get some of the sense that he's making this up as he goes along.

Weber: Well, I think Republicans are generally making it up as they go along. Just as the New Dealers made it up as they went along for Franklin Roosevelt. If you look back at the history of the first years of the New Deal, they came to office with a lot of principles that they believed in, centralization and redistribution of income and Keynesian economics and what have you. But they didn't have a plan. They basically put it together as they went along based on those principles.

Well, the Republicans now have come to office with a bunch of principles and you can hear the words 'individual empowerment' and 'devolution' and 'supply side economics' and 'free enterprise' and 'incentives.' But in terms of having a clear program to replace the welfare state we're sort of making it up as we go along. Maybe that's just the way things work in a democracy, I don't know. But the danger in terms of dealing with the problems of the inner city and the poor and particularly the problems of the African Americans, is that because we haven't thoroughly invented a replacement, there's a tendency, if you really care about those issues and you want to succeed in doing something for those communities, to buy into too much of the old order. That is what some people criticize Jack Kemp for in his four years as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. He clearly had a greater commitment to doing something for the inner cities than any Republican in federal office probably ever. Yet we didn't have all the solutions. If you want to be helpful rather than simply destructive, you might end up buying into more of the other side's agenda than necessary. And that's a danger, a pitfall that Newt needs to avoid.