WINNING THE FUTURE

This is the transcribed text of a speech Newt gave to a private meeting of conservative leaders I attended in Washington last week. –JW

Thank you very much. This is a very important group which is a big part of how we ended up beginning to be – I emphasize beginning to be – the natural governing majority of the country and so it’s a thrill for me to be here.

I want to give you a very brief outline and then I’m going to take questions for most of my time because just looking around the room I know how many interesting personalities are sitting out here. It’ll be more fun to interact with all of you.

Here’s my outline. I have a book that’ll be coming out next month called Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America

It makes the following core argument: that we are entering the fourth cycle of a growing conservative movement. The first cycle was Reagan defining the majority. The second cycle was the Contract With America creating the majority. The third cycle was President George W. Bush deepening and reaffirming the majority. The challenge now is to have this fourth phase growing the majority out so it becomes a more natural governing majority.

Let me make two points about that. There’s a paper that I posted back in July on one of my websites, www.newt.org. If you go to there, you’ll see a paper called “What’s at Stake.” We listed thirty-four issues and on thirty of these issues the Kerry campaign was on the wrong side of a 77 to 17 split (in public opinion polls). The only area where we were on the wrong side, frankly, is the environment and energy where we just have to do a much better job of developing a creative, entrepreneurial approach to the environment and energy so that people understand that we can in fact solve it.

But literally on every other issue, on thirty issues, the average was 77 to 17. One of the papers I’m working on right now basically argues that we have to talk about what is the center of American politics.

Let me give you an example. This country is 91% in favor of saying “one nation under God” as part of the pledge, and 8% opposed. Now in the New York Times model, that means that the center in the country is between 91 and 8 or 41%, whereas the actual center far above that.

But wait a second. If the country is 77% conservative to 17% liberal on most issues, how come we’re at 51% of the vote? A large part of that reason is because we do not have the kind of program of inclusion which would lead African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Native-Americans and Asian-Americans to follow their values with partisanship.

So I think there are three challenges for us. One, because people do now think we’re the natural governing majority, we better govern. Governing means piling up solutions that work and fit our values… in that order. This’ll shock some of you. If they don’t work, I don’t care how much you love your principles, a governing majority can’t say, “You know, it failed totally but it was the right thing.”

Because people want life to work. You go out to the suburbs and the exurbs, people want to get to their kid’s soccer game. They don’t want left wing soccer; they don’t want right wing soccer. They want a road that works, a neighborhood that’s safe and the soccer field not to be underwater.

You say now well we have this terrific theory of what we’re going to do and we’re sorry that the road didn’t work, the neighborhood wasn’t safe and the soccer field’s flooded. They’re going to say, “Okay, I think I need a new county commissioner.” So it’s very pragmatic but it has to fit our values because why would we earn power in order to have governing solutions that fit the left and cause a civil war within our own coalition?

And let me say – and I say this with all due respect because it obviously wasn’t the President’s decision. The recent agreement by the Defense Department to send out a warning that the military cannot sponsor the Boy Scouts is exactly the wrong thing to occur the week after we beat John Kerry and should be reversed.

We should take the ACLU head-on on this assertion that you cannot believe in God and be in a public space because after all, does that mean we now take out the chapel at WestPoint?

I predict to all of you that no issue will be more central to the next ten years than whether or not we re-center this society around the concept of a Creator because the difference between the U.S. and Europe is that we are a covenant society and our rights come from God and Europe are contract societies.

While we are producing our solutions that fit our values, we then have to become inclusive, and I want to draw a distinction between outreach and inclusion. We had twenty years/thirty years of Republicans talking about outreach. Outreach means five white guys met in a room, made a decision, then placed a phone call.

Inclusion means let’s all get in the same room. I’ll tell you, when you say to African-American parents, “Let’s sit down and talk about your child living in a violence-free, drug-free neighborhood with a school that works,” they’re going to come to the meeting.

When you say to Native-Americans, “Let’s talk about a future where you don’t die of alcoholism or commit suicide at totally inappropriate rates,” they’re going to come to the meeting. And then you’re going to have a rich tension – it’ll be a tense meeting, it’ll be a difficult meeting, because that’s what majorities are like.

You get enough people in the same party – and I’ve said this for twenty-five years – we are a center right majority and when you build a center right majority and you get 150 or 180 million Americans to show up, it’s a very weird family reunion. And the only way you avoid that kind of tension is to become a minority. You kick out everybody that makes you uncomfortable. Zell Miller is living proof that one of the parties is practicing that model. It ain’t us.

So I’m happy to stand next to Arnold Schwarzenegger because broadly, in many ways, he’s doing more to change California to the right than anybody we’ve seen since Ronald Reagan. It’s remarkable. I’m going to argue with him about a few things, but I want to argue with him in the same room. And that’s really important as we grow up to become a real governing majority.

Thirdly, we have to learn from our mistakes faster. I’ll just give you just a couple of quick examples. We did the right thing in Afghanistan because as fast as we won, we turned the country back over to the Afghans. In June of last year we did the wrong thing because in Iraq we didn’t turn the country back over to the Iraqis. We should have learned from that mistake a lot faster than we’ve learned.

The world’s hard. It’s complicated. We’re going to find ourselves sometimes making mistakes. You cannot govern in a world this complex and not occasionally make a mistake. Learning from those mistakes quickly is really important. If we’re going to govern for what I hope will be a generation or more, my hope is we get to a point where the only way the left gets to run is by being us.

I’ll close my opening pitch with saying to all of you if you have not read it, you should get a copy of Mickelthwait and Wooldridge. I love these names; they came out of Dickens.

Mickelthwait and Wooldridge are two Englishmen who write for The Economist magazine. They have written a book called The Right Nation, trying to explain America to the Europeans. It covers my lifetime because I’ve been active since 1958 in trying to create a center right majority and defeat the Soviet empire and replace the welfare state, and some of those things we actually finished getting done and now we’re wrapping up in the next phase.

If you read the book you’ll find it very helpful. I’ll just give you one particular vignette. They take Denny Hastert’s district in Illinois and Nancy Pelosi’s district in San Francisco and they compare them. Here’s the one piece of data I found the most compelling. Pelosi’s district is 35% home-owning. I want you to think about that.

Home ownership. Only 35% of the people of Pelosi’s district own their home. The national average is almost 70% now. So when Pelosi goes home and while we’re talking about an ownership society, she’s going to say things that are really whacked out. Stuff like “How can there be an ownership society? Nobody’s that rich.” The left is badly out of sync. It’s a very interesting study and gives you a lot of insight into the left and what their challenges will be.

For the rest of the time if it’s alright, I’m going to throw it wide open and take questions.

QUESTION: Thank you Mr. Speaker. What are your thoughts on reshaping the American judiciary? Perhaps you could lay out a roadmap for us of the things you think we should do.

MR. GINGRICH: Yes. In 1800, Thomas Jefferson defeated the Federalists and back then you didn’t actually get sworn in until March. So the Federalists created and doubled the number of circuit judges and they appointed all of them and got them confirmed before Jefferson took over. This was called “the midnight judges”.

The Jeffersonians abolished all eighteen of the new judges. There were thirty-five total. They literally wiped out over half the federal judges in the United States. Several of them filed suit claiming you couldn’t wipe them out and the other judges who understood what would happen if they made the wrong decision all decided they wouldn’t hear the suit.

So I start with a premise. The legislative and executive branch have the power to decisively reshape the judiciary. One principle I would adopt for the future – I wouldn’t do it retroactively – would be any judge too dumb to understand you’re allowed to say “one nation under God” misunderstands America so decisively, you don’t have to impeach him; just abolish the office. They don’t hold court, they don’t have a clerk.

Now the Supreme Court may rule it’s a lifetime appointment. Fine, pay their salary; they get to go fish. They’re doing much less damage that way.

You know, I have been very strongly in favor of exclusion. I do not believe you have to allow the Supreme Court to ever rule on issues like one nation under God. If – if the President – if two of the three branches reach a conclusion, they have the ability to overawe the third branch. And there are several good books on this that I recommend to you and we have a long chapter in the book. This will be seen as fairly bold, but I think it’s absolutely, constitutionally correct.

QUESTION: Newt, we’ve worked with you on a lot of coalitions and just appreciate everything you’ve done. But what in the world are we going to do about overspending? We’ve got to have budget reform and what can we do?

MR. GINGRICH: Well, I outline in the book a number of steps. I’ll give you one minor first step. Require the budget resolution to include an average of the previous three years of Supplementals. That is, put them inside the budget so we quit this phony business of here’s the budget, this is the most we can spend. Oh, sorry, we forgot, here’s another hundred billion dollars in spending. That’s number one.

Number two: you have to transform health if you’re going to balance federal and state budgets. That’s why we founded the Center for Health Transformation and wrote a book called Saving Lives, Saving Money. We’re working all – with the federal government, etcetera. We can do this.

Health savings accounts – we just published a paper on them – the first thirty-one businesses we found that have taken a health savings account on average have lowered their premiums 44%. Which means they can take the money they were paying last year in premiums, give it to their employees as a tax-free savings account and now have the employees begin to have a market oriented personal interest in their own health. I mean there are big changes coming. We can do it but it does take being as firm as we were in the mid ‘90s.

QUESTION: Newt, could you walk through Social Security reform and how that plays out?

MR. GINGRICH: Yes. I feel very strongly about this so I’ll try to speak with more temperance than I sometimes do. This is an example of long-term how you balance the budget and how you reduce the size of government. It is desperately important that we move to large, personal Social Security savings accounts as rapidly as possible. (Applause)

Now I want you to listen to how I said it. Large. Not small. Personal. Social Security accounts. So we’re not privatizing Social Security; we are transforming it into a personal account which earns interest.

Now what happens if you do that? Well, as all of you know, you move from a minus one percent per year return, which is what the children of the baby-boomers are going to get, to somewhere between three-and-a-half or the seven percent return that’s a blending between stocks and bonds over a hundred year period. The difference in compound interest does that.

Now why does that matter? First, you do not need to mess around with benefits because if you have a large enough savings account, you take the burden off the taxpayer. So I could in effect guarantee you the current Social Security retirement and if the model all of us believe in is right, you’ll never need a penny of taxpayer’s money because you’ll be way above it by the time you retire.

So understand, you can literally eliminate the taxpayer burden over about a generation. The people say, “Well, that’s too long.” Well they should talk to folks who go to college and pay off a student loan. Why do they do it? Because they think over their lifetime it’ll pay off. Talk to people who borrow money to buy a house. Why do they do it? Because they figure over thirty years they’ll pay it off. I mean, this is not a radical idea to say what if we actually had politicians wising up to think about a generation.

Okay. So – so when people say “It’s got to be faster than that,” well, if I can get rid of five or six percent of GDP being in government in a single generation, that is an enormous transition and it creates a huge pool of capital. It accelerates economic growth; it means every single American is now included in the ownership society because every person who goes to work suddenly is saving and investing.

But here’s the hitch. And I need your help as a conservative group to get this across to our friends. You cannot do this if you touch benefits. There’s a very clever idea in town: Move off of wage indexing of benefits to price indexing (based on the CPI – Consumer Price Index of inflation). It’ll save a lot of money. Sure it will, and you’ll never pass it. What you’ll do by bringing it up is you will kill personal accounts because you will give the left the only weapon they need.

Because what do you do when you do that? You save money. What’s saving money called in politics? A cut – which here the left will parade as a cut in benefits. So I’m now handing the left a tool to go beat my brains out with in a second term off-year election when I don’t need it. Because if I get you to go ahead and adopt the large personal account, you’re not going to need government money because your own money’s going to put you above the number we’re currently guaranteeing.

So I think it’s very important, no pain, all opportunity, big upside. And by the way, the side effect is we just took all future Americans off the taxpayer and put them on their own savings account where they have the money.

QUESTION: You’ve suggested our number one point should be national security to focus on. We’re currently fighting what is described as a “war on terror” and the media talk about us fighting “insurgents.” Former CIA Director Jim Woolsey said earlier today that what we’re really fighting against is a fascist combination of Baathists and Islamist totalitarians. So could you talk a little bit about the language and how we describe this war in which we’re engaged?

MR. GINGRICH: Yes. I think the most dangerous immediate enemies are what I would call the irreconcilable wing of Islam. These are largely Wahhabi, but not totally. They are people who, for example, would not allow any woman in this meeting. They’re people who believe in a world that is not compatible with the modern world and by the way, for all of you who are religious, they believe in it for the deepest and most powerful religious reasons. The Baathists are mostly secular. The irreconcilables are not. They’re deeply, deeply religious.

Now what does that mean? It means their word is martyr. Our word is suicide. It means our reporters don’t get it because when you take a rational, secular, left wing reporter, they’re going to say, “boy, these people are crazy.” Why are they crazy? Well, they’re willing to die.

Well, anybody who understands martyrdom in the Christian tradition understands. Anybody who understands the Maccabean tradition and the Jewish tradition, or understands Massada . People who really believe are tough because they live out their real beliefs.

My view of this is very straightforward. This is win or die. Because we live in an age of weapons of mass destruction and weapons of mass murder. I helped create the Hart-Rudman Commission with President Clinton. Then when I stepped down as Speaker they asked me to serve on it. We warned in March of 2001 that the greatest threat to the United States was a weapon of mass destruction going off in an American city, probably by a terrorist.

September 11th was not that attack. Add two zeroes. Not 3,100 — but 310,000 instead. And you start to imagine. Get an engineered biological and add a couple more zeroes and you’re in the six, eight, ten, twenty million range. If you’re not frightened you don’t understand how real this is. We need to go after these people; we need to go after them worldwide; we need to be ruthless about it and we need to understand that only one of the two teams is going to win. And I pick us.

QUESTION: Mr. Speaker, you had mentioned the comment about Europe and they don’t get it concerning America because we are a covenant-based people believing in God. Can you make any suggestions on how we can build bridges to these countries? I traveled in Europe many years and I agree with you. They do not believe that public – that the role of religion has any place in public policy.

MR. GINGRICH: Well they come out of a very, very different tradition than we do. Europe is in some ways towards conservatism where America was about 1955 or ’58 when people like Bill Buckley were founding National Review and things were just getting started and Barry Goldwater was out as a freshman member making his first speeches.

But I believe that the Europeans are going to face a genuine crisis of identity in the next twenty-five years and that they’re going to have to come to grips with the fact that true rights and true opportunities are to be found much more in a society like America than in the current European model.

I think it is important for us not to be embarrassed to stand up for what we believe in. I recently met with a group of Chamber of Commerce folks from Brussels, and they were startled when I said, “Look, we’re two different civilizations. It’s okay that we have tension. We’re allies, we’re friends, we’re not enemies, but we’re not the same people. We’re not the same, you know. We’re the ones who left.”

I explained that since we come from all over the world, our natural interest is worldwide. And that’s alright. I mean, it doesn’t mean we’re better than you; we’re different. I mean we really do believe in a set of values that are much different from European values and I think the first stage is just to relax about it.

I think over a generation they’ll decide our values actually work better. But I think they – you’ve got to let them be – you’ve got to first have the courage to say, “Hey, these are two different models. And it’s alright.” You know. Elegant decay is not a bad strategy.

QUESTION: Mr. Speaker. You were talking about the African-American vote. Just like every election, polls show the African-American is very pro-life, very pro-marriage and yet the same results: we got 4% again of the Black vote; 4% every year. What do you think that needs to be done that hasn’t yet been tried to win this group that votes 25 to 1 against us every single election?

MR. GINGRICH: Well, I think you ought to ask Karl Rove that when he speaks to you later tonight, because I think Karl will tell you they doubled their share of the African-American vote from 2000.

Ask Carl, because they believe it helped them in Ohio for example. Yet this is a very good question to close on, as it sort tells you how far we’ve come and what the potential is. I don’t want to reach out to the African-American vote. Frankly, in the first place I don’t even want to think about the African-American vote. I want to say as a governing majority, we have an obligation to have representatives of all of America in the room when we’re solving problems.

This is my simple test for all of you – if we truly believe all of us are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights among which are life, living and the pursuit of happiness, then doesn’t “all of us” include all of us? And then don’t we have a patriotic stewardship obligation to have everybody in the room solving these kinds of problems? If we do that, the votes will take care of themselves because they’ll be based on sincerity and actions that won’t be based on consultants and polls.

Thank you, good luck, God bless you, and God bless America.