LOSING SKIPPERS BLAME THE BOAT. And the crew and the race committee and the wind. That's the impression Newt Gingrich's Real Change left me. As Book Review N^o. 12, it's the other side of the reactionary progressivism of The Big Con, reviewed late last week. Again, the subtitle, if a bit shorter than Mr Chait's, summarizes the plot: From the World That Fails to the World That Works. The "world that fails" is that of government, particularly when it's in the hands of the self-styled progressives who have governed New Orleans and Detroit ... well, you get the picture. Oh, and it's a Regnery book, so the preach-to-the-converted tone typical of that publisher's offerings is there, should you already be converted and want a bit of shoring up. Well, maybe not. Mr Gingrich relies on some polling data, without discussion in text or footnotes of sample sizes, margins of error, questions posed, or anything else that might help the reader decide whether the figures he reports even qualify as ad popularum claims, to suggest that what he characterizes as "the Left" is out of touch with The People. ("The Left", of course, is quite willing to use the same tactic in popular discourse. We can do better, people.) The balance of the book is a collage of business-guru speak, a favorable retrospective on that Republican Congress better known for mistimed government shutdowns and sex scandals than for any privatization of Social Security or development of energy supplies or tort reform or any of the other "real change" Citizen Gingrich is now advocating. The book illustrates one problem he, or any other leader of the turn-of-the-century Republican coalition faces: finding common ground between the business types (for whom a strict libertarian position means no room for influence peddling and pork procurement) and the religious types (for whom a strict libertarian position means freedom to sin.) He's never able to accomplish the proper synthesis.