In 1994, Newt Gingrich became that rarest of creatures: a successful revolutionary. That’s when his decades-long emasculation of the Democratic majority finally broke them -- as he always knew it would – and the Republicans, with Gingrich at their helm, retook the House for the first time in 40 years. Then, in 1998, he entered the next, and usually final, stage in the revolutionary’s lifecycle: the humiliating fall from grace. His brand of unalloyed conservatism and partisan overreaching repulsed the country, and voters responded with the worst electoral drubbing any opposition party had received since Johnson walloped Goldwater in 1964....