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Newt Gingrich was crucial to the transformation of the Republican Conference in the House of Representatives. When he entered the chamber in 1978, Republicans mostly cooperated with Democrats in passing legislation that they, in part, helped write. Gingrich, through both converting existing member and recruiting new members, convinced his party that the only way they were going to be a majority party was through tearing down the Democratic-led House of Representatives and rebuilding it in their own image. They succeeded in 1994 when they became a majority for the first time in 50 years. The Gingrich Senators took these lessons with them when they went to the Senate.

This chapter continues the discussion on the open competition race, the most common type of leadership race in the House of Representatives, focusing on the GOP. It begins with a detailed discussion of perhaps the most consequential GOP leadership election in the past three decades: the 1989 race for whip, in which Newt Gingrich (R-GA) narrowly bested Ed Madigan (R-IL) and positioned himself to become the first Republican Speaker of the House in forty years. It then considers three additional cases of open competition for GOP posts: the minority leader and whip races in 1980 and the majority whip contest in 1994. As in the previous chapter, the findings are consistent with the mixed-motive model of vote choice.

Personal characteristics cannot explain the distinctiveness of the Gingrich Senators. Neither can their distinctiveness be explained by close proximity to Gingrich when they served in the House. Rather, the key factor in understanding their Senate behaviour is knowing that their politics were forged in a highly combative House.

Chapter 4 shows how American sex scandals have a specifically national element inspired by evangelical thinking. How a politician is accountable for illicit sex depends on whether he typifies white masculine norms, and whether he symbolizes a protector who will keep white Americans safe from their enemies, both foreign (e.g., Muslim terrorists) and domestic (e.g., poor blacks). Politicians thus function like national fathers whose indecencies Americans tolerate so long as they can assure the white public of the nation’s strength. To chart this idea, the author explores the proliferation of family rhetoric in political speech across the 1970s and1980s (including that of Ronald Reagan), discusses the racialized gender norms that politicians follow to increase their public appeal, and shows how Americans see themselves as childlike citizens who need a father’s protection. These ideals are borne out in a comparison of the sex scandals of Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and John Edwards.

This chapter details the fate of the Republicans at the end of the Reagan era. Topics discussed include the presidency of George H. W. Bush; the emergence of Arkansas governor William Jefferson Clinton as a Democratic front runner in 1992; Bush's defeat in the 1992 presidential elections; Newt Gingrich's success in bringing the Republicans back into control of the House of Representatives in 1994; and the campaigns of Vice President Gore and George W. Bush.

We examine party asymmetry in government, finding that Democratic officials treat the policymaking process as an attempt to address a catalog of social problems requiring government action, whereas Republicans view policy disputes as manifestations of a broader fight over the scope of government power. Because new policy alternatives are more likely to expand than contract government, Republicans focus on position-taking and retrenchment, whereas Democrats prioritize substantive policy changes. We review the history of the parties in government, including Democratic amendments to congressional rules in the 1970s, the decline in liberal policymaking, and the remaking of the Republican Party in the image of movement activists in the 1980s. Democrats have responded to conservative ideological critiques by advancing policies that incorporate markets, build incrementally on existing institutions, minimize bureaucracies, and decentralize responsibility. Republicans have thus succeeded in limiting visible expansions of central government but not in reducing the breadth of national policy.

Smarting from Michael Dukakis’ defeat, centrist Democrats finally counterattacked. Working through the Democratic Leadership Council, Dave McCurdy, and his centrist liberal acolytes, battled Jesse Jackson and his New Politics allies. With Will Marshall and the Progressive Policy Institute serving as a policy arm, McCurdy pushed “national service” legislation as avenue to reorient liberal policy back into the political mainstream. Alarmed by Newt Gingrich's campaign to paint Southern and Midwestern Democrats as somehow beyond the mainstream, McCurdy pushed his legislation to save his party in Oklahoma and like regions. An implicit rejection of an Entitlement liberal ethos, McCurdy's legislation offered young people federally funded college tuition in exchange for two years of national service. One of Bill Clinton's signature issues in the 1992 campaign, McCurdy's policy eventually was enacted into law and became a symbol of the New Democrat's governing philosophy.

Chapter 2 examines how the Republican Party’s crackup evolved over the course of Barack Obama’s two terms as president. As divided as the GOP may have been after the 2008 presidential election, its major donors were linked in their opposition to Obama. For the first time since McCain-Feingold, the full force of conservative wealth in America was united against healthcare reform and any spending to revive the perilous economy, rescue the auto industry, or provide relief for mortgage holders. The election of the first African American president made it easy for conservative commentators on talk radio and Fox News to call Obama’s healthcare plan “reparations.” This stoked racial resentment and boosted the plans of wealthy industrialists Charles and David Koch to move Republicans further to the right. Their main organization, Americans for Prosperity, raised hundreds of millions of dollars yearly and quietly provided training, infrastructure, and funding for many of the “spontaneous” Tea Party groups that helped restore Republican control of Congress. Donors may not have been willing to give millions of dollars for compromise, but the slash-and-burn tactics of the Tea Party became a catastrophic example of overreach. The 2012 presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, got caught up in a party tilting ever more to the right; he was only given financial support for his campaign against Obama when he renounced his Massachusetts healthcare program—the model for Obamacare—and put Ryan on his ticket.

Unlike the Sagebrush Rebellion, which remained largely regional, the War for the West enjoyed national support through a conservative infrastructure of media, think tanks, public interest law firms, foundations, advocacy organizations, and militias. Frustrations over federal land management were knit into a broader, civil religious story of the American paradise lost, in which the federal government was portrayed as a tyrant bent on trampling the US Constitution, particularly Bill of Rights. The War for the West was led by the mainstream Wise Use Movement, which linked property rights to gun rights and religious freedom, and by the more extreme militia movement, driven by dark conspiracy theories and a profound antagonism toward the federal government. In the Republican Revolution, led by Newt Gingrich, the Republican Party struggled to hold together these mainstream and extreme factions to gain and retain power. This further integrated conservative, Western anger with federal land management into national politics.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 eliminated the Cold War imperatives that had maintained America’s fragile class compromise and narrowed the ideological space for political dissent. The triumph of the neoliberal order was secured not by the Republican Party that had nurtured its ascent but by the acquiescence of Democratic president Bill Clinton to the policy regime they had established. Clinton became the Democrats’ Eisenhower under the influence of political strategist Dick Morris and senior cabinet members who favored supply-side economics, deregulation of telecoms and financial industries, and a balanced budget. By the end of the 1990s, neoliberals within the Treasury, including Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, had decisively outmaneuvered more progressive reformers such as Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Clinton and his fellow New Democrats produced a new ideological fusion that combined a dynamic high-tech economy, free market ideology, and multiculturalism.

Chapter 2 examines which members of Congress are likely to succeed in getting news coverage, the issues they focus on, and how strategies and approaches have changed over time. In general, party leaders and minority party members seem to have become more successful in going public, subject to the political context, particularly whether there is unified or divided government. The issues members are able to communicate through the national media have remained remarkably consistent during the past forty years. Budgets and taxes, foreign affairs, defense, government affairs, and political appointments are the most common topics for members of Congress trying to go public.