From April 2010
An Interview with Former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich
Conducted by Nick Rugoff and Jaclyn Delligatti
Newt Gingrich was the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999. First elected to Congress in 1978, Gingrich represented the 6th District of Georgia for twenty years. He has published nineteen books and was named Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1995. He is Chairman of the Gingrich Group, General Chairman of American Solutions for Winning the Future, a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and a news and political analyst for the Fox News Channel. He received a B.A. from Emory University and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Modern European History from Tulane University.
NR: There has been a lot of talk about bipartisanship over the past few years, yet the current political environment seems hyper-partisan to many Americans, with a recent poll showing that around 80% of Americans consider Washington “broken.” Given your experience working with a Democratic president while you were Speaker of the House, is bipartisanship an achievable goal?
Well, we are beginning to ironically get bipartisanship between Democrats and Republicans in opposition to Obama. For example, with the recent health care bill, some 38 Democrats split from their party to side with Republicans, so in a way, there is beginning to be an anti-Obama bipartisan group. If you look at Gallup data and other data, and talk with Arthur Brooks – who is the leader of the American Enterprise Institute, has a new book coming out in June called The Battle, and is probably the best student of Gallup data in the country – there is a tremendous split between the world view of left-wing Americans, who are about 20-25% of the country, and the world view of independents and Republicans, who tend to come together on a whole range of issues. Independents became unhappy with the Republican Party in 2006 and 2008, and they temporarily accepted the idea that Obama was a moderate and gave him a substantial vote. Since then, they have come back to the conclusion that he is too left-wing and too expensive, and that his ideas are too radical. We are now seeing a tremendous shift of independents back to the Republican Party. In the last Gallup data that I saw, about 25% of white Democrats were opposed to the “Obama-care plan,” while only about 1% of African-American Democrats opposed it. This shows that there is an emerging split even inside the Democratic Party on some of these issues.
NR: What have been President Obama’s best and worst decisions in office?
His best decision was to bring in Jim Jones as National Security Advisor and develop a sophisticated, serious strategy for Pakistan and Afghanistan. His worst decision was actually to ram through, with no one having read it, a $787 billion stimulus package written by Speaker Pelosi and the hard left, because it shaped the rest of his administration. It showed that he was not going to be a centrist, he was not going to be transparent, he was not going to reach out, and that he was going to be a hard left Democratic-machine politician. He did this with no accountability, transparency, or bipartisanship. I think that this permanently damaged his administration and that the health bill is actually simply the second stage of a secular, socialist machine ramming through what it wants, without regard to the country.
JD: You have made it a priority to emphasize the need for new jobs in this economy. In what ways do you propose the government should go about creating new jobs, without overstepping its bounds? What do you believe the role of the federal government should be in such tough economic times?
First of all, I was just in St. Petersburg last night and Florida has 14.5% unemployment, so it’s not a very bold thing to say that we need to focus on jobs. The St. Petersburg Times Sunday Business Section recently said that if we created 225,000 new jobs per month, it will still take until 2015 to get back to 5% unemployment. Now last month we actually lost 37,000 jobs, so we were over 250,000 jobs short of that goal. So jobs had better be the number one goal of government policy because if Americans are not working, then America is not working, and we cannot sustain this country without some kind of growth and economic opportunity. My 527 group American Solutions has a very clear three-part strategy here. The first part is to control spending and move back towards a balanced budget. The second is to have an energy strategy now, and not four years from now or just “someday,” so that we can produce energy in the U.S. and create jobs in the U.S., instead of sending the money to Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, or Iran. The third stage is to have five major tax cuts, which would enable us to dramatically restart the American economy. By about 59 to 21, the country believes that business tax cuts are more effective than government spending to create incentives and new jobs. We would start with a 50% reduction in the Social Security and Medicare taxes for both the employee and for the business, which means that every small business would have a substantial improvement in cash flow. Second, we would eliminate the capital gains tax, as China has done. We would have zero capital gains taxes, which would keep us directly competitive with China. Third, we would permanently eliminate the death tax, so that if you own a small business, work your whole life, save, and are frugal, the government won’t step in and take half of it away from you when you die. Fourth, to compete in international markets, we would match the Irish corporate income tax rate of 12.5%. Today, between state and federal income taxes, American corporations pay the highest corporate tax rate in the world. Finally, we would allow 100% write-offs in one year for all new productive equipment so that American workers would have the best technology and the greatest productivity of anyone in the world. We think that package would enable us to have a very dramatic increase in economic activity almost overnight, and we think that it would bring us out of the recession very rapidly. The best way to get to a balanced budget is to have full employment with people paying taxes rather than drawing on unemployment, and people paying for their own health insurance rather than going on Medicaid.
NR: There has been talk amongst Senate Democrats of reforming filibusters. What are your thoughts on the filibuster? Has it been abused? Does it need reform?
Majorities always want to reform the filibuster and minorities always want to keep it. When the Democrats were the minority, they loved the filibuster, and when Republicans were the majority, they hated the filibuster, so we are back to business as usual. John Adams said that the Senate was supposed to be the cooling saucer to the hot cup of coffee from the house. The Senate was designed to slow legislation down, make it hard to get things done, and preserve freedom. The Founding Fathers designed the Constitution as a machine so inefficient that no Hugo Chavez demagogue could force it to work. I think that has preserved our freedom for 220 years, and I prefer freedom to speed, and frustration to dictatorship.
JD: You have described the health care bill as incredibly divisive, not just with respect to Republicans versus Democrats, but within the Democratic Party as well. How do you think the bill will affect midterm elections? What will be the bill’s long-term effects?
Firstly, I think there is a two part process of repeal and replace. All of the repeal requires a Republican president, so that probably cannot happen until February 2013. The new Congress, if it is Republican, could refuse to finance the bill’s implementation by just refusing to pass appropriations. I think that the first real argument will be over adding 16,000 I.R.S. agents. I do not think people want a federal health police. I think that if Republicans campaign this fall on the promise that they will not fund the 16,000 I.R.S. police, and if Democrats campaign on the promise that they will have 16,000 I.R.S. police sniffing into your life, that this issue will become a decisive election choice. If Republicans win on that, it makes it perfectly authentic for them to refuse to fund it, which is the first step to repealing and replacing Obama-care.
NR: What are three pieces of legislation you would like to see put in place over the next three years?
I would like to see a program for every child from kindergarten through twelfth grade where their parents could choose where to send them to school, without any restrictions from bureaucrats and unions. I would like to see an energy plan implemented using American energy now, so that we could dramatically increase jobs in the U.S., as well as our national security by cutting off our dependence on Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Iran. I would like to see the tax policies I outlined for you earlier, combined with a balanced budget, which is something that I helped lead for four years. That was only time in the last seventy years where we had four consecutive balanced budgets and paid off $405 billion of debt. I think we can do it again, but it will require an economy that is growing, Americans who are working and paying taxes because they are employed, and a willingness to reform and control government.
NR: What compelled you to start your 527 group American Solutions for Winning the Future? What are the group’s ultimate goals?
I became convinced that it was impossible for my grandchildren Maggie and Robert, who are now 8 and 10, to successfully compete with China and India, without fundamental reform of litigation, regulation, taxation, education, health, energy, and infrastructure. I concluded that you could not just get that from the presidency. There are 513,000 American elected officials, and you need a wave of change from school board to city council to county commission to state legislature and governor, and all the way up to Washington. I concluded that to do this, we would need an Internet-based system that reached out on a tri-partisan basis, and found issues like energy independence, which 79% of the country supports. A majority of Democrats, independents, and Republicans all support energy independence, so it is an issue that ought to bring us together rather than divide us.
JD: Many people are talking of how the midterm elections will be a time for Republicans to take back seats in the House and Senate, taking advantage of increased levels of dissatisfaction with government. What do Republicans have to do to win back the hearts and minds of the American people?
They need to be very clear that they represent a better future and a better alternative, and that the secular, socialist machine now dominating Washington, Sacramento, and Albany is very dangerous to the country. They need to campaign in every neighborhood of the country and reach out to every community, and have the courage, as Margaret Thatcher put it, to win the argument before you win the vote. If they do that, I think that they could have one of the most historic elections of all time this fall.
NR: Which candidates are you most excited about?
People like John Kasich and Rob Portman, who are respectively running for Governor and Senator of Ohio. Scott Walker, who is running for Governor of Wisconsin. I think he will be very important. Mark Kirk, in Illinois, who I think will actually win Obama’s former senate seat, which will be fun. Mike Castle in Delaware, who I think will win Biden’s former seat, giving both the President and Vice President’s past seats to Republicans. I think Pat Toomey will beat Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania. I’m very optimistic and think that we could have a remarkable year. I also think that Meg Whitman is going to be California’s next governor. That will be an enormous shift in the right direction and her ability to take on Sacramento will be very exciting. I am pretty optimistic about the emergence of the new generation. Among current elected officials, what Paul Ryan is doing in the House on entitlement reform is brilliant. Kevin McCarthy is doing a very important job developing the core campaign themes of the fall. Eric Cantor is going to emerge as a real leader in the future. We just have a lot of talent emerging in a way that is very encouraging.
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THE POLITIC — April 2010
