Thank you all for that remarkable welcome. I’m deeply, deeply grateful, and Callista and I are delighted to be back here once again at the most important single meeting of the conservative movement in a historic time.
Many of you know that my background includes being a teacher, and I am going to try in the next few minutes to offer a little bit of a lesson. My Dad was a career soldier, served 27 years in the infantry, and when I was very young, he convinced me that leadership and courage and a willingness to think deeply are vital to the survival of a free country.
Between my freshman and sophomore years in high school, when we were stationed first in Orleans, France, and then in Stuttgart, Germany, I concluded that what we are doing here today is really, really important. It’s part of the dialogue by which a free people govern themselves. My dad was reassigned to Fort Benning, Georgia, and in 1960, I was a volunteer as a high school student in the Nixon-Lodge campaign. So I want to talk to you this afternoon from having spent what will be this August, fifty years studying and thinking about what it takes for America to survive. In many ways, they’ve been remarkable years. The Georgia I arrived at in 1960, was legally segregated and a one-party Democratic state. Today it is legally integrated and a two-party state with a Republican governor, two Republican senators, and a Republican legislature.
When I decided at the beginning of my sophomore year in high school that I would study national security and I would try to understand how we acquire the power legitimately from the people in order to implement the policies we need, the Soviet Empire was a real and a direct threat to the survival of freedom on this planet. Because of the courage persistence, clarity, and vision of one person, the Soviet Union does not exist today, and that person was Ronald Wilson Reagan.
Those two speeches could have been given by no other leader in the last fifty years. He had the courage, he had the conviction, and from 1947 on, he had been systematically thinking about and studying communism and trying to find out how to defeat it. Now, he made the first CPAC conference really important, because he came here at a time when we were in despair, when the Republican Party was crumbling under the weight of Watergate, when the Left was on offense, when the counterculture was in full steam, and he said in [March of 1975] that we must have a flag of bold colors, no pale pastels. [“Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?”—Ronald Reagan]
I tried in thinking through what I could say to you this afternoon to literally ask what would Ronald Reagan have said in this setting at this time, not to repeat what he said in other times, but to think about the clarity and the historic context. I went back and looked at what Barry Goldwater said in 1960 when there was a conservative eruption because Nixon was going too far to the left, and Goldwater’s name was put a nomination for vice-president, and he withdrew it and said he would support the ticket. Compared to the other party, there was no choice. I looked at what Ronald Reagan said in 1976, when having risen in rebellion against an incumbent Republican President and come within 70 votes of the nomination, he said that given a choice between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, there was no choice, because Jimmy Carter would be about as bad as he turned out to be.
So I want to say several things that are fairly complicated and I hope you will bare with me, because I think we are at a moment of historic choice for the conservative movement’s future. I want to give you four sets of numbers, those of you who are truly interested in this may want to write them down, we gave you a copy of the Platform of the American People which I’ll talk about in a minute, but feel free to write on the back of it. I think you’ll find this interesting as a lesson in history and as a thought process about where we are now. The first is the number 9 million. The second is two numbers: 1928 and 68. The third is 0 to 6, and the fourth is 14.6 to 8.3. I believe in these four sets of numbers, lies a diagnosis of where we are and where we must go.
The first number, 9 million, is the number of additional votes who came out to vote in 1994, the largest one-party increase in an off-year election in the history of the United States, brought out by a proud, positive, clear, and very, very bold Contract with America.
The second set of numbers, 1928 and 68. In 1928 was the last time a Republican Congress was reelected. We had held the House from 1946 for two years, we held the House in 1952 for two years, and when I became Speaker I felt the greatest challenge I had was to ensure that we would in fact keep a majority in 1996 for the first time in 68 years. Now, it was a doubly difficult problem because I had every expectation that President Clinton, as one of the smartest, most agile, and least inhibited by principle politicians in America, would flow magically to whatever he had to in order to get reelected. So my assumption all along was that come the presidential campaign, we would have an uphill fight. No Republican House had been reelected with a Democratic President winning. And I want to share three keys with you that people don’t understand to this day in this city:
The first key is, we kept our word on the Contract, and we voted on every single item in the first 93 days, and people began to believe we were serious.
The second, is something that the news media and the elites and the Republican consultants got exactly backwards. We got into a struggle over balancing the budget with Bill Clinton and the federal government was closed. Everyone says, “What a huge mistake,” and I keep trying to say to them, “We were the first reelected majority in 68 years and you think it was a mistake?” If we had broken our word with fiscal conservatives, if we had rolled over and caved, if we had failed to fight, we would not have held the Congress in 1996. In fact, it was precisely because people suddenly looked up and said, “Wait a second. These guys actually believe it enough to lay their careers on the line and stand for something even when they’re being yelled at,” that led people to decide that we were real.
And third, we voluntarily committed that we would balance the federal budget. We weren’t required to by the Contract. The Contract said we’d vote on a balanced budget amendment. But we said when the amendment passed the House and failed by one vote in the Senate, we would go ahead and behave as though it had passed. And we said by definition if we were going to pass the amendment we thought we could balance the budget in seven years because that’s what to amendment said. And so we held a meeting and I’ll never forget it. Dick Armey, Bob Walker, Bob Livingston, Bill Archer, John Kasich, Tom Delay. We all sat down and we looked at each other. And I said, “We have a chance to decisively make history if we have the courage to make history.” Now in order to do that, we had to reform Medicare in the middle of an election year with a liberal Democrat in the White House. And we had to do so, so carefully, and with such training that all of our members could go home and explain what we were doing. And we had to do so with such care that AARP would not attack us, because we couldn’t have withstood it if they had decided to tell every senior citizen that we were against them. When we finished keeping our word on the Contract, standing firm even if it had involved a real fight, and moving towards a balanced budget with an effective reform of Medicare that people agreed was needed and correct, we kept the U.S. House for the first time in 68 years. And there’s a big lesson there.
Now the third number, which I think should have led to a vastly bigger discussion in the Republican Party, is 0 to 6. That’s the track record of incumbent U.S. Senators in a close election in 2006. Now if your party loses every single close incumbent election despite having raised an immense amount of money, maybe there’s something wrong. I don’t want to be too bold,
Now, because we were sleepwalking through 2007, we get to the last set of numbers which should sober every person in this country who does not want to have a left wing president. On Super Tuesday, there were 14.6 million Democratic votes, and 8.3 million Republican votes. Now, I want to repeat this because I want it to sink it in here. There were 14.6 million Democrats who thought the presidential nomination was worth voting for, and there were 8.3 million Republicans on Super Tuesday. That is a warning of a catastrophic election. I was in Idaho this last week, and Barack Obama on last Saturday had 16,000 people in Boise. The idea that the most liberal Democratic Senator getting 16,000 people in Boise was inconceivable. And every person who cares about the conservative movement and every person who cares about the Republican Party had better stop and say to themselves, “There is something big happening in this country. We don’t understand it. We’re not responding to it. And we’re currently not competitive. And if we want to get to be competitive, we had better change and we had better change now.”
Let me tell you flatly. I said the week before Super Tuesday, actually a week before the Super Bowl, reporters asked me, I think it was on Hannity and Colmes, and they said, “What are the Republican chances this fall?” And I said, “Well, I think they’re about as good as the New York Giants beating the Patriots.”
Now, and this next comment comes with a little pain because I’m a Green Bay fan, and I learned a lot about the Giants when they played in Green Bay recently, but here’s the point I was making. People thought I was saying we didn’t have a chance to win. I was saying, the game hasn’t started, and if we field the right team with the right issues in the right way, we have fully was much chance to win as the Giants did, but I’ll tell you, we are currently no where near being ready to do this. This is not a comment–I want to make this clear for the news media–this is not a comment about any of the current candidates for president.
This is a comment about the conservative movement, and it's a comment about the Republican Party, and all the candidates currently running fit within those two phrases. But it is about all of us. It is about our Congressman, our Senator, our governors, our county commissioners, our school board members.
And let me make this very clear, I believe we have to change or expect defeat.
And I believe that this is a time for the conservative movement, to issue a declaration of independence. And let me explain what I mean by issuing a declaration of independence.
First of all, I think we need to get independent from a Washington fixation.
Second, I think we need to get independent from this leader fascination with the presidency. Remember Ronald Reagan rose in rebellion because Gerald Ford was negotiating the Panama Canal Treaty. I voted against two Reagan tax increases. I voted against George H. W. Bush’s 1990 tax increase. It is a totally honorable and legitimate thing to say I am going to support the candidate and oppose the policy. This idea [is] that I think we [did] President George W. Bush a grave disservice by not being dramatically more aggressive in criticizing when they were wrong, and being more open when they were making mistakes.
And I don’t think it helped them or the country.
I also think that we need to declare our independence from trying to protect and defend failed bureaucracies that magically become our’s as soon as we are in charge of them. We appoint solid conservatives to a department and within three weeks they are defending and protecting the very department that they would have been attacking before they got appointed. And this is a fundamental problem and I think it comes from some very great challenges. And I want to suggest to you, and I spent a lot of time since 1999 thinking about this. That’s the part of why I wrote the book Real Change, and why I have tried to lay out at American Solutions a fundamentally different approach to how we think about solving our problems.
I think that there are two grave lessons for the conservative movement since 1980. The first, which we still haven’t come to grips with, is that governing is much harder than campaigning. Our consultants may be terrific at winning one election, they don’t know anything about governing. And unfortunately most of our candidates listen to our consultants. And so you end up with people who don’t understand briefing people who don’t know, and together they have no clue.
We win the election and then we lose the government. And this happens at every level. It happens in Sacramento, it happens in Tallahassee, it happens in Albany, it happens Trenton, and it happens in Washington D.C.
So the first lesson is that we are going to have to learn as a movement how to actually create conservative government, not just conservative politics. And that is a fundamentally harder thing.
The second thing that I think has been a very sobering surprise to me, and it really started when we won in 1994, and I thought that the Democrats would stop and say “Wow we just lost power that we had for forty years, I guess maybe we did something wrong.”
They didn’t say that at all. They said, “Gingrich must have cheated.” And their most partisan members just hated me. They filed 83 ethic charges and they did all sorts of things because they just couldn’t stand it. They knew they were supposed to be chairman. In fact, the first couple of weeks, people would come in and sit in the chairman’s seat and we would have to say to them, you know, you’re the ranking member now, and they were just beside themselves because they can’t have been wrong.
But it is a deeper problem. I had no real understanding of how decisively and deeply entrenched our opponents are from every level. From the Marxist tenure faculty member running for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota, achieving the impossible, the only man in America who could be to the left of Al Franken, and a vivid reminder of how much our University campuses are filled with people who hate the very country that provides them their salary, that provides them their tenure, and provides them their freedom.
To a Detroit school bureaucracy which is crippling the children of Detroit, which graduates only 25% of its entering freshman on time, which is one of the highest paid and most expensive programs in the country, and which, when a successful millionaire offered to give $200 million dollars, to help create charter schools to save the children of Detroit, promptly attacked him as a racist because no white man had the right to step in and save black children, and in fact drove him out of Detroit, because he was such a threat, by insisting that teachers actually be competent, and that the purpose of schools was actually to teach.
But we have seen the same thing right here. Any of youo who have listened to Ambassador John Bolton knows that we have a vast portion of the State Department deeply committed to defeating the policies of President Bush. We have a large proportion of the Intelligence community deeply committed to defeating the policies of President Bush. The fact that he is the elected Commander in Chief of the American people, the fact that the laws have been passed by the elected legislators of the American people, seems to be no matter to this bureaucratic elite, which arrogates to itself the right to do things that are stunningly destructive.
The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran can only be understood as a bureaucratic coup d’état, deliberately designed to undermine the policies of the United States, on behalf of some weird goal.
There is one other declaration of independence we need and this will startle some of you. And remember I say this from a background of having been active in the Georgia Republican Party since 1960. In a fundamental way, the conservative movement has to declare itself independent from the Republican Party.
Let me make very clear what I'm saying here. I am not saying there should be a third party – I think a third party is a dumb idea, will not get anywhere, and in the end will achieve nothing.
I actually believe that any reasonable conservative will, in the end, find that they have an absolute requirement to support the Republican nominee for president this fall.
And let me remind you, I say that in the context of personally believing that the McCain-Feingold Act is unconstitutional and a threat to our civil liberties.
And I say that in the context of believing that the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill was a disaster and was correctly stopped by the American people.
But I would rather, as a citizen, and I say this with Callista and I have two wonderful grandchildren. Maggie who is 8 and Robert who is 6. We think about their future. As a citizen, I would rather have a President McCain that we fight with 20% of the time, than a President Clinton or a President Obama that we fight with 90% of the time.
Let me, if I might, carry this a step further so that you understand where I am coming from. I believe the conservative movement has to think about reaching out to every American of every background. I think we have to decide that in 2010, we are going to recruit and support conservative candidates in Democratic districts, because the right answer to gerrymandering is to beat them in the primary.
Now all of you have a copy, I hope you got a copy, but if you didn't, you can get it later on outside of the Platform of the American People from American Solutions. And it’s also at the back of my new book Real Change. And you can also get it at AmericanSolutions.com. And you can download it for free.
Let me tell you how we developed this. This is a work in progress and this is phase 1. We had a Solutions Day workshop last September with over 100,000 people participating across the country on the internet, in person, and on television. We had over 25,000 people in telephone and townhall meetings where we asked them to be involved and we listened to their questions and worked with them. We took six national surveys. And what we were looking for, and what’s in this Platform of the American People is issues which are tripartisan. They get a majority of Democrats, a majority of Republicans, and a majority of independents.
Now it turns out when you develop a tripartisan platform, it's a center-right platform because this is a center-right country. The fascinating thing will be watching Senator Obama who is for “Real Change” and has “change” on all his slogans, and I am for it. We wrote the book Real Change last summer and I want to thank the people at Regnery for going along with the title, it turns out this February that it was really a good title.
But it was also an obvious title. But here’s the question: Are you for the right change or the wrong change?
Let me give you a couple of examples from here. And this isn’t the Gingrich Platform, this is the Platform of the American People. And by the way, we’re going to want your help when you go back home reaching out to Democrats and Republicans, to get them at your county, at your district, at your state, in both parties to adopt this platform. Everything in here has a majority Democrat support. It doesn’t have a majority elite support, but I’m hoping you’ll go back home and I do want to introduce for one second Princella Smith who’s here somewhere. Princella is the chief advocate of the Platform of the American People and she’d love to talk to you later on and be available to explain it and work on it.
And here’s my point. Let’s talk about the right change versus the wrong change. 85% of the American people believe we have an absolute obligation to defend America and her allies.
So if we need to strengthen our intelligence capabilities, and strengthen our interdiction and surveillance capabilities, and strengthen our ability to win wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere that would be the right change. But if we want to have weakness, under funding, and crippling of our departments of security that would be the wrong change.
Now let me give you a second example. 75% of the American people believe we have an obligation to defeat our enemies. Pretty strong language. Actually a higher number than I thought we’d get. 75% to 16%. So if we knew how to be clear and articulate and explain it, if we knew how to communicate to every American what the Director of National Intelligence said last week about the depth and intensity of al-Qaeda and this was on public record it just wasn’t, people didn’t pay attention to it, the news media didn’t want to cover it. The Director of National Intelligence said, let me tell you, al-Qaeda is working all day every day to find a way how to kill Americans. And they’re recruiting Westerners to have more sophisticated people to come and kill Americans. Now you would think if that was on then someone might say to Senator Obama and Senator Clinton, okay if al-Qaeda wants to come here, would you like to stop them over there? And if you want to stop them over there, how can you run back home to here if we’re trying to stop them over there?
Just three more examples to show you the difference between right change and wrong change. 92% of the American people believe that for us to compete with China and India in an age of science and technology we have to dramatically improve math and science education. Now, I am prepared to change every bureaucracy in America that is failing our children until we get them to actually succeed, and I think the change should start today, because we shouldn’t lose a single child to prison who ought to be in college if only they had a decent school to go to.
And the question for Senator Obama and Senator Clinton is simple. Are you prepared to put the children ahead of your union allies, and actually measure achievement rather than union dues as a primary success?
Two last examples. 87% of the American people believe English should be the official language of government.
Now, 87% means an absolute majority of Democrats favor English as the official language of government. An absolute majority of Republicans favor English as the official language of government. An absolute majority of independents favor English as the official language of government. An absolute majority of Hispanics favor English as the official language of government.
Both Senator Obama and Senator Clinton voted against 87% percent of the American people, but nobody knows it.
Well, it’s not their fault that nobody knows it, it’s our fault. So I would think if you want an example of real change, I think the Senate Republicans should say you know we like this idea of working together, we like this idea of getting real change, we’re prepared to work with Senator Obama next week, and Senator Clinton next week, and then once a week I would give them a chance to vote up or down on making English the official language of government. And let it just keep drawing it out.
Because there’s a profound principle here. If something is both historically right, and has 87% of the American people in favor of it, then leadership which is prepared to stand firm will in the end be successful in getting the right change, not the wrong change, for America’s future.
Lastly, 84% of the American people would like to have a one page tax form with an optional flat tax.
I know a number of you favor the Fair Tax, I’m just pointing out as an interim transition step, a one page flat tax wouldn’t be a bad interim step. And here’s my point about real change. If every Republican in the House and Senate were to send out a mailer to all of their constituents in March with literally the one page tax form, and an explanation on the back, and a little questionnaire that said, “Hi. Would you like to just change the whole tax code and have the option, now you can keep the current code if you want. If you like record keeping and you think you need your deductions, and you want to pay your CPA and your tax accountant or attorney, that’s fine. But if you’d like simplicity, clarity, and certainty, you could have this.” You would suddenly change the entire tax debate from finding a way to get more money for Washington, to finding a way to save an immense amount of time and clarity, and all of a sudden the Democrats would have to answer the question: Would they like to have real change now, and would they like to have the right change now?
Those of you who have cell phones with you I’m going to give you a chance to do a text message if you want to know more about what we’re doing. At American Solutions, we are dedicated to reaching out to everybody in the country. And so if you’d like to text Newt, see they made as easy for you as they could, we’d love to find out how to stay in touch with you.
I believe the following. And I say this having lived through the narrow defeat of 1960, the great convention victory of Goldwater followed by a disastrous defeat in ’64, the recovery in the ’66 off-year election, the very narrow election of Nixon in ’68, the stunning landslide over McGovern in ’72, the collapse of the Nixon administration, and the rise of Reagan, the loss to Jimmy Carter, the extraordinary victory of 1980.
I believe we have two futures this year.
I believe we can be for real change now. We can put the Democrats on record every day from here on out. We could use the House and Senate as opportunities to have the country focused on what’s the right change and what’s the wrong change. We can take on the bureaucracies and decide that we don’t care who the nominal head is. The permanent bureaucracy is permanently liberal, permanently obsolete, permanently incapable of doing its job, and we need fundamental deep change from school board to city council to county commission to the sheriff’s office to the state legislature to the governor to Washington, D.C., and we are the movement of real change by this summer I suspect we will win one of the most cataclysmic elections in American history. Because the sad reality is that our friends on the Left are trapped by their allies, they’re trapped by the trial lawyers, they’re trapped by the unions, they’re trapped by the big city bureaucracies, they are trapped by their allies in tenured faculty, they are trapped by the Hollywood Left.
And if there is a clear choice of which change, we will win. But if we run a traditional consultant-dominated tactical Republican campaign, like we’ve seen in the last eight years, we will be defeated this fall, and we will be having a CPAC meeting next year talking about how we rebuild for the future with either President Obama or President Clinton in charge.
I’m here as somebody who has spent his entire life practically, since I was fifteen years old, trying to find a way for us. And we’ve had great successes. We cut taxes dramatically, we re-launched the American economy in the 1980s, we eliminated the Soviet Union. The fact is we won the Cold War. People are freer.
So we have had great successes. But we can’t rest on them. And so we need to go out dedicated to insist on real change now, on the right change now, and about making sure that every American, of every background, in every neighborhood, understands that their future, their children’s future, and their country’s future, rest on creating the kind of opportunities that we are building, and that that requires real change in the obsolete, expensive, and destructive bureaucracies we’ve inherited in the past.
With your help, at every level, starting with adopting the Platform of the American People, and moving on to encouraging every elected official you know to be active in the reform movement, we have a chance I think to set the stage for a dramatically better American future. Thank you, good luck, and God bless you.
