Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment (Chapter 11)

Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment.

Chapter 11: Republican Revolution

Late in 1994, Newt Gingrich quickens the political pulse through a ten-pledge “Contract with America.” He speaks of transforming welfare and says, “I don’t know the details of the replacement, but I know if you’re thinking about repairing it, reforming it, propping it up, paying for it, you don’t get it yet. We have to replace it.”

If Republicans follow through on that task and nine others, Gingrich says, “You’ll see an explosion of hope. The people will become hopeful again. They’ll think, ‘Wow, what if America can work? What if we have a good future? What if we could be physically safe? What if our schools actually taught people? . . . What if my life could have purpose and I could pursue happiness?’”

Sure. What if we could live on the big rock-candy mountain? My expectations are low, my skepticism high, but I still cheer for the right versus the left and am delighted on November 8, 1994, as Republicans pick up fifty-four seats in the House of Representatives. They have a majority for the first time in forty years. Gingrich will be Speaker of the House. Major networks televise his inaugural address on January 4, 1995.For background noise in our Austin living room while writing syllabi for spring term University of Texas courses, I turn on the television.

Suddenly Gingrich says, “I commend to all of you Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion. Olasky goes back for three hundred years and looks at what has worked in America: how we have helped people rise beyond poverty, how we have reached out to save people.” A Gingrich staffer was supposed to give me a heads-up about the new Speaker’s forthcoming praise but forgot.

Gingrich is often rude to his political opponents—mildly so by 2024 standards—but generous to those with whom he agrees. I’m pleased that he loves The Tragedy of American Compassion, talks about it more in his inaugural address, and keeps talking. Later he explains, “Bill Bennett told me it was the most powerful book he had read in a decade, and I finally picked it up over Christmas, and I called him and I said, ‘I am just overwhelmed by how powerful it is.’”

In speech after speech, interview after interview, week after week throughout 1995, Gingrich says things like “If you haven’t read Marvin Olasky’s book, The Tragedy of American Compassion, get it by next week, read it.” My phone rings with requests for interviews and speeches. An NBC Nightly News
segment, introduced by Tom Brokaw, begins, “Who is this mystery man?” A Philadelphia Inquirer article begins, “Marvin Olasky, a born-again professor from Texas and self-described mumbler, has become the Thomas Paine of House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Republican ‘revolution.’”

Early in 1995 Atlanta Journal and Constitution columnist Colin Campbell captures the speed of my move from obscurity to momentary notoriety. Campbell imagines a man repeatedly hearing Gingrich saying, “I commend to all of you Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion.” The car radio is tinny, and the driver wonders whether he’s got the name right: “Is it Olasky or Mellaski or Alaska or Molasses?”

I run like molasses and have heard other versions of that word, but Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol says my central message “hit the conservative movement like a thunderbolt.” Basically, I’m saying the right has lost out to the left on poverty issues because conservatives keep saying that welfare is too expensive. It’s not, for a society as rich as ours. It’s stingy in offering personal help that recognizes how all of us are made in God’s image and should be challenged rather than treated as household pets (put some food in their bowls and don’t expect much from them except entertainment).

The small publisher rushes out a new printing, and the big publisher requests a sequel. I pivot from academic to political life. The Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), Gingrich’s favorite, suggests that I move to Washington. Our children, though, are at the age where changing schools would be disruptive, so I plan to commute to Washington, with PFF paying my salary from January 1995 through August 1996. I’ll have the opportunity to bring to bear my historical research on the modern policy debate. UT officials, glad to have a connection with a rising political power, quickly say yes.

When I arrive at PFF’s new offices on Eye Street in Washington’s influence-peddler district, young staffers are opening box after box of freshly donated desktop computers. They tell me the Republican revolution is underway and everything will change. I smile and quote William Wordsworth, who was nineteen years old when the French Revolution began: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!”

Republicans pledge to reform welfare. Bill Clinton says he wants to “end welfare as we have come to know it.” My more modest goal is to see whether Republicans will move beyond merely cutting welfare and Democrats beyond expanding it. I also want to learn about local groups that truly help the poor, talk with journalists about alternatives to our failed war on poverty, and point them to groups achieving street-level success.

My calendar from early 1995 reflects that desire. For example, the January 19 schedule has a 9 a.m. meeting with Rep. Chris Shays (R, Conn.) at his office. He is a Christian Scientist who eventually gets labeled a RINO (Republican in Name Only) and loses his seat. Then comes a 10:30 meeting at the
Gospel Mission near Capitol Hill, where muffins are available on paper towels, and a noon luncheon on fine china hosted by wealthy Arianna Huffington. She introduces my speech by saying she’s having “an intellectual love affair” with me.

Then come interviews with journalists: 2 p.m. with National Public Radio’s Lynn Neary, 3:15 with the Washington Post’s David Broder, 5 p.m. with Reader’s Digest, 6 p.m. with Ron Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times, 7 p.m. on Capital Watch. It’s an ego-gratifying experience, but many interviewers wonder if I’m realistic, given the faltering of many community groups in recent years.

Compared to my easy teaching schedule in Austin, broken up by kids’ sporting events and walk-and-talks with Susan, I’m moving at hyper speed and spending half my time on the road during the first quarter of 1995. Plus, I write—often on airplanes—a weekly column in World and a syndicated column.

Also on the schedule are DC dinners, part of a world I previously did not know. The strangest is a $50,000-per-plate event with Gingrich to benefit National Empowerment Network, which will fail when Fox News launches the next year and gains dominance. It’s at the Hay-Adams Hotel two blocks north of the White House. I’m a nonpaying invitee “to help guide the dinner table conversation.”

The appetizer for that dinner is an appearance before TV cameras outside the Hay-Adams, with protesters chanting, “Two, four, six, eight—$50,000 a plate!” To my right is Arianna Huffington, now referring to me as her “compassion guru.” To her right is Michael Huffington, her soon-to-be-former husband, who has just spent nearly $30 million in a failed attempt to unseat California Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Washington Post gossip columnist Lloyd Grove asks Arianna about her outfit, which he identifies as a beige brocade Valentino pantsuit from Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. She replies, “I love those clothes, but I wait until they’re fifty percent off.” Arianna murmurs to me, “Well, guru, you say compassion is a word owned by the Democrats. Tonight we take it back.”

The main dish at the sixteen-person dinner in a private room is salmon and rack of lamb. I think it’s excellent, but Michael Huffington tells reporters, “It was no better and no worse than any other dinner.” Dessert, as described by Newsweek’s Jon Meacham, is “a hockey-puck-size cappuccino torte in Grand Marnier sauce.” The real treat for those paying is a face-to-face relationship with Gingrich. I feel like Alice in Wonderland.

As Gingrich continues to promote my book, it’s easy to get face time with congressional Republicans. One typical morning, March 8, moves from a meeting with Rep. Sam Brownback to my speechifying at a congressional GOP breakfast. Sometimes I’m a salesman, trying to convince budget hawks that the goal of welfare reform shouldn’t be primarily about saving money. Repeatedly I stress that it should be about saving the lives of people trapped in a system that’s stingy with what’s most important: challenging, personal, and spiritual help.

It’s a heady experience to meet with Missouri’s John Ashcroft in the Senate dining room, where uniformed servers glide between the white cloth–covered tables. Light pours through arched windows, illuminating a stained-glass image of George Washington on horseback. But I want to find answers to the interviewers’ questions about realism. Given the way we’ve become reliant on government, can sympathetic senators and
representatives craft bills that will open up opportunities for nonprofits and volunteers?

I’m happy when Ashcroft introduces a bill we discuss: a person who volunteers at least fifty hours a year to an institution directly serving the needy could receive a five hundred dollar tax credit (not just a deduction) for a contribution to that institution. No law will fix the basic problem—we don’t love our neighbors as ourselves—but with all the current tendencies in the United States to maximize self and abandon others, maybe a positive incentive will help.

Some legislators get it. They know charitable giving has declined as a percentage of income since the 1930s, and more Americans have let their generosity atrophy. If we’re ever going to shrink the welfare state or privatize parts of it, we have to encourage giving of time and money. Meetings with Dan Coats from the Senate and J. C. Watts and Jim Talent from the House are also productive. Although their draft bills differ, they all focus on tax credits for charitable donations to street-level poverty-fighting organizations.

This new access to the influential shows what I missed by rushing through Yale in minimal time with minimal cash. During an April trip to Manhattan, I spend one afternoon lunching at the Harvard Club, traveling by limo to meet Roger Ailes at Fox News, then schmoozing at a Yale Club reception,
followed by another meeting at the Waldorf Astoria. It’s not a lifestyle I yearn for permanently, but I’m grateful for the experience, once.

I’m also grateful for God’s providential timing, which is always much better than mine. Say the New York publisher followed through on its initial plans and The Tragedy of American Compassion made an initial splash at the end of 1991. Great—but it would have been old news three years later. As it turns out, the way of reforming poverty-fighting that I propose is a new idea (actually, an old but abandoned one) just when cameras are focused on Gingrich and he’s focused on proposing alternatives.

In spring 1995, Democrats also express interest in my literal definition of the word compassion—suffering with those in need, not just throwing a few coins. Polling shows welfare reform to be popular. Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle invites me to meet with him and four of his colleagues. They complain that Republicans want to “slash” spending.

How about a grand compromise? The GOP in Congress could maintain welfare spending at current levels, and Democrats would relinquish some power by allowing community organizations to decide how part of that welfare money is spent. But as Washington begins to polarize, that middle-of-the-road sowing is like a seed falling not on hard ground but onto a concrete divider.