Off on the Right Foot

WASHINGTON —  Do yourself a favor: Put aside your politics, please, long enough to take a nonpartisan stroll with Newt Gingrich. No need to tax yourselves, regardless of whether you’re on the right or left. I did enough sweating for all of us. For one thing, I kept veering to my right (don’t read anything into that), thereby bumping into the House speaker while we were walking and talking. Plus, I was already drenched halfway through our interview. At 8 a.m. Capitol Hill was already an unpleasant 78 degrees of heat gummed up with 79% of humidity. That’s swampy. The 55-year-old Republican from Georgia, you should know, did not perspire.

One item before we got going: What kind of shoes is he wearing?

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Question: Let’s check ‘em out, Mr. Gingrich.

The speaker lifted the cuff of his pant leg.

Answer: Call me Newt. Tennis. I have three pairs, and I don’t have a clue what they are. They were all three bought . . . on sale.

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Q: What would you normally be doing right about now?

A: If I wasn’t walking with you, I’d normally go to the House gym and put in probably 2 1/2 miles. Oops. I almost lost you.

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Q: Sorry, I keep bumping into you. Anything else besides the treadmill at the House gym?

A: It depends on what cycle I’m in. If I’m in a cycle where we’re going to be in town a lot and I can get to the gym regularly, I’ll use free weights and a variety of exercise machines for muscles. But I don’t do as much of that as I should, partly because it’s episodic and I can’t quite get into the rhythm of it.

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Q: What about when you’re home, in Marietta?

A: One of the things that has helped me is that for my birthday two years ago, Marianne [his wife] bought me a treadmill so when I’m home, I can get up in the morning and put in about an hour or an hour and a half on the treadmill. We like to go out along the Chattahoochee River in Atlanta or we go up to the mountains. All my life I’ve liked to walk. Besides, it’s a great way to sort things out.

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Q: Do you find that exercising gives you more energy or relieves stress?

A: I’m so excited most days by what I’m doing that the natural excitement gives me an awful lot of energy. When people say--”Oh, gee, you can’t imagine how much energy you have when you work out”--I don’t find that to be particularly true because of the adrenaline flow I’ve had all my life. I mean, I’m fascinated by life. I get up in the morning, I’m amazed. My wife says I’m basically a 4-year-old who knows that the cookies were baked during the night.

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Q: What’s one of the things about life that amazes you?

A: I like collecting dinosaurs.

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Q: You collect dinosaurs?

A: Well, I go out with people who collect ‘em. We have a dinosaur skull in the office. It’s on loan to us. This is funny. I also go to zoos, and one of the things my staff has learned to do--you think of fitness as mental and physical--is I don’t play golf, but I love to learn. So, they’ve built in learning experiences about every second or third day of my trips. So part of what I try to do is probably 80% psychological and 20% physical. I try to keep a balance in my head.

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Q: Do you do anything else for relaxation?

A: Oh, sure. I relax by reading. I relax by going to movies. I like to go out with friends at a bar and sit and talk--shoot the breeze.

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Q: Do you have wine or anything hard to drink on those occasions?

A: Yes, wine and anything hard to drink.

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Q: All the above, huh?

A: Yeah. Probably my two biggest weaknesses food-wise are that I really do like ice cream and then the other is, I really like beer much more than wine. That to me is just a psychic satisfaction that is incompatible with being as thin as I’d like to be.

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Q: On the other hand, hangin’ out with the guys, that’s all part of the ritual to relax.

A: Yeah, but I think if you’re going to do that, you’ve got to get up the next morning and go walk extra long or exercise. I weigh myself every week and try to keep the pressure on myself psychologically. And then I say, “OK. This means I better do an hour and a half, not 45 minutes.”

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Q: How much do you weigh right now?

A: 230. But I should weigh 205. That’s my goal.

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Q: How tall are you?

A: About 5-11. I’ve lost about 20 pounds. Well, I’ve lost 30, but I, frankly, have drifted up over the course of a year. So I’m now back to trying to get back down. I’ll tell you another thing I learned that’s sort of sobering as a college teacher is that looks really matter.

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Q: It’s a nuisance too.

A: I know. And it’s a discouraging fact, you know. I’d rather have people say, “Oh, gee, I saw you on TV last night. What a really intellectually stimulating speech.”

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Q: So how are you watching your weight?

A: Well, let me start and say normally what we try to do is stay on a high-protein, low-sodium, low-fat diet. So, there are variations within that. My ideal breakfast is a pancake or French toast with a low-sodium, artificial sweetener syrup. My wife bought a bread maker and developed a low-sodium recipe.

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Q: A bread maker. For the aroma alone.

A: I know. I think it’s the largest, single, quality-of-life improvement we’ve had in the last three or four years. And then she’ll use an egg substitute and make French toast, which, with the right kind of syrup on my diet, breakfast never looks like a diet breakfast.

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Q: What are the rest of your meals like?

A: Actually, this is normally a four-meal diet. It’s designed to keep your blood sugar up so you never get too hungry. So lunch, snack and dinner are actually interchangeable. My favorite is probably [lean] steak with vegetables, and you get a carbohydrate at lunch, which is usually a baked potato. It can be pasta with a low-sodium sauce. Then you could also have fish or a chicken breast without skin. And then Marianne’s found a low-fat, no-sugar yogurt which I’ll eat occasionally as my carb.

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Q: Do you eat salads?

A: I eat salads . . . but to be honest, I get tired of it after a while. There are times when in the absence of Roquefort or bleu cheese [dressing], it’s not worth having salads. The other thing is, occasionally I’ll break down and have a Caesar salad, although that is a very high-sodium salad.

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Q: Do you ever drift off the diet?

A: I break down occasionally. Like the other night we were out, I ordered a half chicken with the skin. Life can’t be perfect. One of my weaknesses is occasionally I’ll eat steak which has fat on it. I have several weaknesses. One of them is I like dairy products. I like cheese. I love ice cream.

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Q: How do you handle sticking to a diet with all the dining out you have to do?

A: I have one huge advantage over most people. I have a staff, and my staff says, “Oh, good. Newt’s gonna be here. Put his normal diet breakfast here.” So I would say 80% to 90% of the time I will get precisely what I’m supposed to have. My staff really thinks about it because they recognize that, frankly, in my business one of the characteristics is how do you look. So, they’re more concerned than I am because they have to look at me. I don’t have to.

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Q: What do you normally drink throughout the day?

A: I drink coffee, Diet Coke and water in very large quantities.

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Q: Do you do any politicking in the House gym?

A: Of course. Well, you talk about your business. Although there’s a pretty good rule that you can’t be too serious in the gym. The gym is a little more relaxed than that. But I find the gym’s a great place to learn things.

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Q: How so?

A: You find out--how are things back home? What are you up to? You also watch different peoples’ style and some people are very disciplined--show up every day, do the same thing.

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Q: Right before I flew out here, a couple of phone calls wound up being impromptu town hall meetings. So starting with my parents--Mom said to tell you hello and Dad wants you to stop taxing his Social Security.

A: You tell your mom and dad we’re going to introduce a bill that eliminates the taxation of Social Security. We’re also going to cut capital gains and eliminate the death tax so that they no longer have to worry about the idea of visiting the IRS and the undertaker the same week. . . . The budget surplus for the next decade is a trillion dollars more than they predicted in January. So our goal is to get it out of here before we spend it, to get it back home to your mom and dad in the form of tax cuts.

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Q: The next person at the mike is Debbie from Brooklyn, an old friend of mine. She’s known me since I was a twit in New York City a long time ago.

A: All right. I was a complete twit in a lot of places, including Washington. Yes, she’ll get a Social Security savings account that will be personal, that’ll be her share of the budget surplus, which will have a tax-free buildup of interest, and she’ll be in a position both to have the regular Social Security and have this as a supplement.

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Q: Labor Day 1999--that’s when you’ll let us know if you’re going to run for president?

A: Yes. Labor Day 1999.

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Q: So, you’re not making the decision now?

A: I’ll give you a very practical reason why. I have to make decisions every day. If all I worry about is being a good speaker of the House and making the right decision, I make better decisions faster than if I start going--”Oh, gee, how will this affect my presidential campaign?” So I consciously don’t want to think about anything beyond doing my job because my job is exhausting and very, very important in terms of the quality that we’re doing for the country.

(Before taking off for an appointment with Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, the speaker reminded me to go take a look at that T-rex skull in his office.)

I’ll tell you the other thing you should do--go out on the porch and look down in the Mall. Now, first of all, I find if I go out and sit on the porch, that reduces my tension just by the act of being out there. It’s a great view, and it’s expansive. Second, at some level you have to say to yourself, “You know, if you’re an Army brat with no money and an unusual name and the people of the United States have loaned you this porch, how bad can the current problem be?”

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Guest Workout runs Mondays in Health.