Newt Gingrich's defiance of the elements to win control of the House of Representatives in November coincided with the theatrical release of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. And, fittingly, there are parallels between the two tales. Gingrich, a brash iconoclast, can be cast as the scientist-creator. The role of his monster -- the pathetic beast who does not know his own strength, can kill anything in its grasp, and ultimately turns on its maker -- is reserved for the press.

Capitol Hill was once a remarkably courtly news beat. The climate was civil even during the great struggles over minority rights and Vietnam and after relations between press corps and White House had grown bitter. Congressional scandal stories (Wayne Hayes, Wilbur Mills) were the exception, not the rule.

Enter Newt Gingrich, the man who, as Suzanne Garment put it in her book Scandal, "brought scandal politics unmistakenly home to the Congress." Even as a junior House member in the early '80s, he saw visions of the Speakership and had a strategy for getting there. Among other things, it required infusing those staid congressional reporters with a blood lust. The frontal lobe of a pit bull had to be sutured, figuratively speaking, onto the brain of a gentleman, and this new creature aimed at the Dems. How was this accomplished? With the idea of "corruption." Contrary to stereotype, the typical reporter is surprisingly passive. But, given a whiff of impropriety, a jolt of accusation, his eyes twitch, his limbs quiver ("It's alive, Igor! IT'S ALIVE!"), and he lurches from the slab.

In his book The Ambition and the Power, John M. Barry describes how Gingrich performed his surgical feat. His aim was to create "resonance" -- a pervasive perception among press and public that Democrats, particularly House Speaker Jim Wright, were crooked. Gingrich was short on evidence but long on persistence and rhetorical pyrotechnics. There was a circularity to his onslaught. Barry describes Gingrich walking into The Miami Herald in 1987 and persuading reporter Tom Fiedler to join the fray: "Fiedler's story quoted Gingrich's now-routine comment that Wright was the most corrupt Speaker in the twentieth century, and some variations: 'Wright is so consumed by his own power that he is like Mussolini .... We have overwhelming evidence that he is a genuinely bad man ....' The article added, 'Gingrich said his charges are based on numerous news accounts.' Many of those news accounts Gingrich had generated."

Wright resigned when an ethics panel disclosed evidence of possible violations on a book deal and other matters. But Barry concluded that Wright, operating just within the margins of propriety, was felled as much by the embarrassing din of publicity as anything else.

Encouraged by the Gingrich machine, reporters took up not only the House post office scandal (a serious matter) but also the House bank overdraft affair. This was minor, involving no tax money, but they played it like another Teapot Dome. Unpaid House restaurant lunch bills of certain members became another Abscam. And so it went until the country, pining for change, dumped the Dems and put Gingrich in as Speaker.

But the monster did not return to its lair. Instead it went after its creator. CBS's Eric Engberg called Gingrich "bombastic and ruthless" and said his record is "filled with contradictions: the family values candidate who divorced his ailing first wife, the avowed enemy of dirty politics who bounced twenty-two checks at the House bank." NBC's Tom Brokaw reported that Gingrich had complained "stridently about the Washington elite but flew thousands of miles on jets provided by corporate friends." The Boston Globe called him "Newtron bomb."

CNN's Bob Franken called him "militant and outrageous" and countless publications weighed in with the label "bomb-thrower." NPR reporter Sunni Khalid said on C-SPAN that Gingrich was seeking "a more scientific, a more civil way of lynching people." ABC's Jim Wooten described Gingrich as "the national poster boy for the politics of resentment and rage."

Responding to the onslaught, Gingrich froze out The Atlanta Journal/Constitution and ABC News over coverage he particularly disliked and complained of a "constant, unending barrage of distortion," an obsessive media quest for "conservative populist hypocrisy."

He attributed his treatment to liberal bias. But that can only explain so much. My theory is that journalists castigated Gingrich because they saw something of themselves in him. They regarded the kind of attacks that propelled him to prominence as reckless (e.g., his assertion that up to one fourth of the White House staff used drugs) but they couldn't resist trumpeting those charges themselves. Then, after helping throw bombs, they assuaged their guilt by lambasting him as a bomber. (This pattern again evokes Frankenstein. In the book, scientist and monster grow to despise each other, which can be interpreted as a kind of self-hatred. As critic Harold Bloom put it, "the monster and his creator are the antithetical halves of a single being.")

What now? There usually is a honeymoon. But given Gingrich's sharp tongue and volatility, and the questions involving his tax-exempt foundation, I would not be surprised to see Return of Frankenstein before long. Perhaps even Son of Frankenstein. Bride of Frankenstein. Life Partner of Frankenstein. Anyone for popcorn?

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