It’s best to read Major Garrett’s engaging and meticulously researched “The Enduring Revolution” (Crown Forum, 325 pages, $25.95), a retrospective on the Republican Party’s huge midterm victories of 1994, with at least some skepticism. Mr. Garrett, currently a Fox News reporter, covered that year’s elections and the GOP’s seminal “Contract With America” for the Washington Times, and as a result, like any reporter who lives and breathes an ongoing story, has invested himself in its significance.

I don’t say this to discount the seismic shift in American politics as a result of that election, personified by Newt Gingrich and the “Contract,” which ended the Democratic Party’s 40-year stranglehold on the House of Representatives and returned the U.S. Senate to GOP control, but Mr. Garrett at times is downright hyperbolic about its historical impact.

At the outset of “The Enduring Revolution,” Mr. Garrett makes the dubious claim that Senator Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign was, in essence, a replica of the Republican domestic platform 10 years earlier. As if to add validity to this assertion, the author quotes Mr. Kerry’s hagiographer, Douglas Brinkley, as saying, “We live in a Contract With America world.”

That’s news to this reader. While the Republican congressional majorities endure, it’s hard to square Mr. Garrett’s view that President Bush “has taken his cues on domestic policy” from the Contract, when you consider that Mr. Bush spearheaded – to name just one initiative – the budget-busting Medicare boondoggle of 2003. Similarly, term limits, a central tenet to the “Contract,” are mostly forgotten, as the 1994 Republican winners have inevitably come to enjoy their positions of power in Washington.

Nevertheless, Mr. Garrett’s exhaustive account of what led up to the 1994 election – the internecine battles in the GOP, the persistence of Mr. Gingrich and like-minded reformers – is a valuable document of that heady period. It would be even more fascinating if “The Enduring Revolution” was published with a companion book – written by a left-leaning reporter – that told the Democratic side of the story.

Mr. Garrett hasn’t shut out Democrats from his book. He includes trenchant observations from former Congressional leaders Dick Gephardt and Tom Foley, as well as Bill Clinton’s onetime strategist Paul Begala (who’ll talk to anyone, it seems) and Howard Dean. But he concentrates on the Republicans who played central roles .

The anecdotes, many of which haven’t been published before, are numerous and often instructive. Jack Howard, one of Mr. Gingrich’s aides, recalls the battle to keep the Contract’s platform focused on policy rather than potentially divisive social issues. Mr. Howard says of activist Paul Weyrich, “I remember having to go over to one of their crazy lunches and they just tore me limb from limb over the school prayer constitutional amendment that wasn’t in the contract.”

Mississippi governor Haley Barbour, RNC chairman in 1994, also explains the strict formation of the “Contract”: “If Republicans let abortion be the threshold of Republicanism, they need to have their head examined. There are millions of pro-choice Republicans who are just as good Republicans as I am.” That’s why the new congressional majority concentrated on the banning of partial-birth abortion rather than attempting to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Mr. Garrett strives to convince readers that the government shutdowns in the fall of 1995 wasn’t the Democratic victory it is now commonly perceived. “It was a spectacle the likes of which Washington had never seen before,” he writes, trying to explain that that episode was merely the loss of a battle, not the political war. “It was a circus, an opera, WWF Smack Down, the Super Bowl. It was America’s first reality series, played out on the nightly news.”

No doubt Mr. Gingrich’s capitulation captivated, for a brief period, the Beltway establishment, but as far as Washington “spectacles” go, I’d say the Watergate hearings and Cuban Missile Crisis easily trump the budget “train wreck” as an ongoing “reality series.”

Mr. Garrett is certainly correct in writing that the 1994 GOP takeover significantly changed Mr. Clinton’s philosophy of governing. (The former president never really had a principled platform except for his own political fate.) Had the Democrats kept control of Congress after 1994, it’s almost certain Mr. Clinton never would have signed a welfare reform bill or dedicated himself to deficit reduction.

Yet in his zeal to show how the “Republican Revolution” completely altered American politics, Mr. Garrett leaves some questions unanswered. Why didn’t this brash and energetic new leadership inject itself in the GOP primaries of 1996, recruiting a presidential candidate who’d stand a better chance against Mr. Clinton than Bob Dole? Republican strategist Don Fierce tells Mr. Garrett that, as early as March of that year, “We knew Dole was dead, but we had to wait for a critical moment to pull the plug on him. Welfare reform was it.”

Additionally, while Mr. Garrett is convincing in his view that Mr. Gingrich “was neither the general nor the beguiling mystical leader of the Republican Revolution,” he doesn’t emphasize clearly enough that the Georgia firebrand was the public face of the “revolution,” and his string of intemperate remarks certainly hurt his cause. Even before the 1994 elections, Mr. Gingrich commented on that fall’s murder case in South Carolina, where a young woman drowned her own children, saying, “The only way you get change is to vote Republican.” Injecting politics into an isolated crime was repulsive, and a foretaste of future gaffes from the two-term speaker.

Mr. Garrett’s conclusion provides more evidence that he inflates the ongoing importance of the 1994 “revolution.” He writes: “Can any other period in American political history ascribe to itself such an epochal intellectual and cultural heritage?” How about the Civil War, FDR’s New Deal, the violent political tumult of the 1960s, Watergate, and President Bush’s reaction to the September 11 atrocities, to give just a few obvious examples?

Mr. Garrett’s thorough reporting for “The Enduring Revolution” has not been in vain – it’s probably the best book on the 1994 election and its aftermath to date – but would be more convincing had he maintained a sense of proportion.

Mr. Smith last wrote in these pages on the 2004 presidential election.