From Newt Gingrich, Lessons Learned the Hard Way (HarperCollins, 1998), pp. 10, 41:
We had not only failed to take into account the ability of the Senate to delay us and obstruct us, but we had much too cavalierly underrated the power of the President, even a President who had lost his legislative majority and was in a certain amount of trouble for other reasons. I am speaking of the power of the veto. Even if you pass something through both the House and the Senate, there is that presidential pen. How could we have forgotten that?
...
The idea of a grand showdown on spending had long been a staple of conservative analysis. Even before Reagan's inaugural, he had been approached by one prominent conservative who urged him to force a showdown over the debt ceiling and simply refuse to sign on to one until the Democratic Congress reined in its spending plans. Reagan rejected this idea with a comment I wish I had understood better at the time. The conservative activist who told me that story was convinced that Reagan would have won such a showdown. For fifteen years I agreed with him, but I was to learn something about the American people that too many conservatives don't appreciate. They want their leaders to have principled disagreements but they want these disagreements to be settled in constructive ways. That is not, of course, what our own activists were telling us. They were all gung ho for a brutal fight over spending and taxes. We mistook their enthusiasm for the views of the American public."
From Newt Gingrich,
Real Change (Regnery, 2009), p. 24:
What was most misunderstood about our victory by the media and even many in the Republican Party was that even though voters were angry about their government in 1994, they were not anti-government. The Republican Party cannot win over time as the permanently angry, anti-government party because neither appeals to most voters. It can win as the pro-good government and pro-limited government party.
