“Are we smoking something or is that Marion Barry with Newt Gingrich?” was the headline of a syndicated column at the time by Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune.
At the town hall meeting at Eastern High School in 1995, a C-SPAN recording of the event shows, Barry told the crowd that he and Gingrich “found a common bond” and that “I’m convinced that our speaker cares about our children.” Norton told the audience that she had “cordial relations” with Gingrich, though she added that she opposed his “national agenda” and joked, “He knows that as a Democrat I seek his early retirement as speaker.”
However, Norton also added, “I am willing to put the District above partisanship.”
When it was his turn, Gingrich was deferential to the mayor and the congresswoman, saying that in their work together Norton is the “senior partner and I am the junior partner.”
“Our goal, our vision should be to have the best capital city in the world and to make that real,” he said.
Bernard Demczuk, who served as Barry’s liaison to Congress at the time, said Barry and Gingrich spoke regularly, both in person at the speaker’s U.S. Capitol office and on the phone. Demczuk said Gingrich and Barry, who was born in Mississippi and had deep roots in the civil rights movement, had a shared interest in Southern history.
“I remember being in Marion’s office and him saying, ‘I gotta speak to Newt’ and then pressing a button on his phone that went straight to the speaker’s office,” Demczuk said. “That’s how good the dialogue was. There was a warm, Southern, cultural relationship.”
Gingrich, in an interview, said Barry and other Democrats were willing to work with him because there was a “general consensus that the city needed to be fixed.”
“We took the position that we had a real obligation to do everything we could to make the city work because it’s the American capital,” Gingrich said. Of course, his interest in helping the city had its limits. Gingrich opposed granting the District full voting rights in Congress. “Why would you give them two senators who would be dedicated to raising taxes and hiring more bureaucrats?” he asked.
Thomas M. Davis III, a former Republican congressman from Virginia who served on the Oversight Committee in the mid-1990s and later chaired it, said there was a sense at the time that “we are in this together.”
“Eleanor went out of her way not to bash me when we disagreed — we didn’t see it as advantageous to attack each other,” he said, referring to Norton. “There were no surprises. We worked with the mayor in those days. We communicated.”
These days, Davis said, that kind of cooperation is difficult because “there’s a huge cultural divide between Republicans from rural areas and urban Democrats. It’s a microcosm of what has gone on in the country.”
“If you don’t talk, the lines always harden,” Davis said.