Long before there was a mighty Republican machine running Georgia, there was a handful of brash conservatives plotting to lift their tiny, financially struggling party so they could end more than a century of Democratic dominance.
Among the chief architects was Newt Gingrich, a West Georgia College assistant professor who ran for Congress three times in a blue-collar district — twice against an entrenched Talmadge Democratic incumbent — before finally winning.
Gingrich, now a presidential hopeful, traveled West and North Georgia during the 1970s and ’80s, preaching the Republican gospel and arguing that the GOP had to choose between remaining a silent, permanent minority or aggressively taking the fight to Democrats.
He chose confrontation and played the role of provocateur, unwilling to accept second place.
While Gingrich soared and crashed in Washington — helping produce a Republican Revolution in 1994 before resigning four years later under pressure from colleagues — his legacy remains in Georgia.
The careers of many of those now in charge — such as Gov. Nathan Deal — or who led the state House and Senate takeovers in the 2000s — were aided and inspired by Gingrich.
“There is no question that he played a huge role in the Republican Party that exists today,” said Rusty Paul, a lobbyist who served as chairman of the state GOP from 1995 to 1999.
The “us-against-them” tactics and language Gingrich used in Congress and trained candidates on became standard in the Statehouse, helping the GOP build distinctions with the Democratic majority that helped build a base for their takeover.
And he helped raise money for a party and candidates often short of cash. For much of the past decade, the state GOP has maintained a huge fund-raising advantage over the Democrats, and Paul remembers Gingrich helping to bring headliners such as Ronald Reagan and conservative hero Jack Kemp in to build party coffers from the late 1970s through the 1990s.
U.S. Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Savannah, calls Gingrich an “indispensable early trailblazer” for Georgia Republicans. Kingston remembers his college days, when Gingrich came to the University of Georgia to recruit students to get involved in GOP politics.
“I think he inspired bravery and activism in a lot of us who would have kind of come up and been happy perpetually in the minority,” Kingston said.
But others argue that Georgians paid a price for the tactics Gingrich and his followers used.
“In the long run, I am not sure it’s best for the state or the nation to have confrontational politics,” said George Hooks, dean of the Georgia Senate and an Americus Democrat. “Now, I agree with him [Gingrich] on many issues. But he would find a way to attack on every single front. It was not the style of the Republicans in this state until his appearance on the scene.”
Speak like Newt
Still others say credit belongs to others besides Gingrich for the Republicans’ Georgia dominance.
Though many Gingrich tactics were used by the state GOP in the early 1990s to confront Democrats in Atlanta, there were other Republican leaders who were not trained by Gingrich who helped lead the party.
“I don’t know that he had any major role in the [current] state House and Senate majority,” said Rep. Earl Ehrhart, R-Powder Springs, one of the leaders of the takeover.
When Gingrich began his rise in politics in the early 1970s, Georgia was the bluest of blue states. Jimmy Carter was governor, former segregationist governor Herman Talmadge was in his second decade in the U.S. Senate and barely 10 percent of the General Assembly was Republican.
Gingrich was controversial from the start, running for Congress only a few years out of graduate school and almost immediately accusing his opponent, 12-term congressman, Jack Flynt, of corruption and ineptitude.
“Congressman are not bribed anymore,” Gingrich said. “They simply have a lot of friends who are willing to help them out whenever they find it necessary.”
He narrowly lost twice to Flynt, but when the Democrat retired, Gingrich finally won election in 1978, branding his opponent a friend of “welfare cheats.”
Gingrich spent the next decade in Congress characterizing Democrats as champions of the “corrupt liberal welfare state” and building the hard-ball language and tactics for which he would become famous.
He went after Georgia Democrats, too. At the 1989 state GOP convention in Cobb County, he described House Speaker Tom Murphy and state leaders this way: “They are not good old boys. They are pleasant people who behind the scenes are thugs.”
Along the way, he recruited and inspired young conservatives, many of whom wound up running for office in Georgia.
He developed and, through GOPAC, taught candidates how to “speak like Newt” by using words like “liberal” and “corrupt” to describe Democrats and their policies. Tape-recordings of GOPAC’s strategy were made available to candidates throughout the country. Paul remembers listening to them during drives to and from work.
Confronting Democrats
Gingrich also recruited Democrats to switch parties. Among them was Deal, a conservative Democrat from Gainesville.
Deal had been a mild-mannered state Senate leader in Atlanta.
He was elected to Congress in 1992, and after the 1994 elections, with Republicans suddenly in the majority, he switched parties.
Two years later, Deal was at the Republican National Convention in San Diego, lambasting the president who once led his party, Bill Clinton, for his “liberal” policies.
Deal, who was elected governor in 2010, thinks Gingrich deserves a lot of credit for the party’s Georgia dominance.
“When I changed, I was the first Republican member from the 9th [congressional] district of Georgia at least since Reconstruction,” he said. “... By the time I left [Congress], we did not have a single Democrat in the House or Senate that represented any portion of the 9th Congressional District.”
Gingrich rankled some feathers in the GOP by pushing his candidates to run the party and injecting himself into local politics.
Ironically, while he was busy traveling the country helping Republicans win seats, he almost lost re-election in 1990 in part because he spent little time tending to his own district.
By the 1990s, the young Republican minority in Atlanta was turning up the heat on Democrats led by Murphy.
The most common confrontational tactic involved putting amendments on bills to stake out Republican positions. The point wasn’t necessarily to change or pass legislation: It was to show the differences between the two parties in the most stark way and get Democrats on the record on issues that would later be used against them in the next election.
For instance, for years Democrats had written the state budget and easily passed their spending plans at the end of each session. But Republicans tried to put amendments onto the budget to cut out some of the programs Democrats favored.
Ehrhart was famous for trying to pass amendments ending affirmative action, and other amendments that staked out positions calling for tax cuts or pushing social issues. When Democrats voted against the amendments, their positions were recorded and they wound up on scorecards being portrayed as a tax-and-spend, welfare-loving, social liberals.
While Republicans didn’t take over the state in the 1990s — they took a severe beating in 1998 — they gained legislative seats and began winning some statewide races.
In 2002, Sonny Perdue, a party-switcher who became the first Republican governor since Reconstruction, and Gingrich trainee Eric Johnson helped lead a GOP takeover of the state Senate. Two years later, the state House was won by Republicans and today they hold all statewide elected offices.
Johnson was among those trained in the tactics of Gingrich and others who blazed the trail for the Republican takeover.
“It was all about defining the differences between us and them and aggressively targeting seats,” he said. “...We had been shown the hill and how to take it.”
While Ehrhart discounts Gingrich’s influence on Georgia Republican politics, he is among the best-known users of the Gingrich method of confrontational politics.
“You don’t get anything by holding hands and dancing around the Maypole,” he said. “Sometimes when you want to move a mule, you have to hit him in the head with a 2-by-4 right between the eyes.”
While he also disagrees that Gingrich fathered the current Georgia GOP dominance in Atlanta, Steve Anthony, Murphy’s former aide and a Georgia State University politics lecturer, calls him the most influential politician of the past quarter century.
“He took the Southern Strategy of Nixon and perfected it and he took the art of campaign and campaign rhetoric to a new level that is the standard for today,” Anthony said. “He emboldened a whole group of people to approach campaign and governing in a whole different way.”
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