From the Radio Free Michigan archives ftp://141.209.3.26/pub/patriot If you have any other files you'd like to contribute, e-mail them to bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu. ------------------------------------------------ NEWT GINGRICH Speaker-Elect of the U.S. House of Representatives 11/11/94 Speech to Washington Research Group Let me say first of all that, in a way that is peculiarly fitting, 76 years ago today, the armistice was declared at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in what was then called the Great War. In an indirect way that had an enormous impact on my life because it was while my dad was stationed with the army in Europe and I was a fourteen year old freshman in high school that we went to the battlefield at Verdun, which was the largest battlefield on the western front of that war, and spent a weekend with a friend of his who had been on a death march in the Philippines and served three years in a Japanese prison camp. The Great War was both an example of what happens when leadership fails and societies collide and it was an example, in its aftermath, of what happens when people lie to themselves about the objective realities of the human condition, because instead of leading to world peace, as Woodrow Wilson had so devoutly hoped, it in fact ultimately led to the Second World War. And instead of leading to greater freedom for all human beings, as Woodrow Wilson in his fourteen points had hoped, it led to Nazism and the Soviet Empire, the Gulag and Aushwitz. And so, it is both good for us today to remember the cost paid by those who believed enough in freedom to have died for it, and useful to remind ourselves that that price has to be paid every year and every week, and that it is better by far to pay that price in peace time, by being vigilant and by trying to do that which is right, than it is to allow your society to decay or to have inadequate leadership and drift into a cataclysm comparable to the First and Second World Wars. And that is not just a foreign policy or national defense battle cry. I think it is important to recognize that what is ultimately at stake in our current environment is literally the future of American civilization as it has existed for the last several hundred years. I am a history teacher by background, and I would assert and defend on any campus in this country that it is impossible to maintain civilization with twelve-year-olds having babies, with fifteen-year-olds killing each other, with seventeen-year-olds dying of AIDS, and with eighteen-year-olds ending up with diplomas they can't even read. And that what is at issue is literally not Republican or Democrat or Liberal or Conservative, but the question of whether or not our civilization will survive. Now, I've been sort of intrigued by the press coverage since the election on a couple of levels. First of all, I think the article which has most accurately captured the essence of what just happened is Charles Krauthammer's column this morning in the Washington Post, which makes the correct point that you have the most explicitly ideologically committed House Republican party in modern history, that we held an event on the Capitol steps that 330 members or candidates signed up for, that we told the country in a full-page ad in TV Guide where we were going and the direction we would take, that the President and Tony Coelho took up the challenge, that the Democratic National Committee ran two million dollars of ads attacking the Contract, that the President personally attacked the Contract virtually everywhere he went, and that, in the end, there was the most shatteringly one-sided Republican victory since 1946. Now, there has been an enormous effort in the Washington elite to avoid the reality that this election was actually about some fairly big ideas: which direction do you want to go in? And that those who argued for counter-culture values, bigger government, redistributionist economics, and bureaucracies deciding how you should spend your money, were on the losing end in virtually every part of the country. When in Georgia we elect five statewide elected officials, we have a majority of seven to four in the House delegation, there may be something that's a message. You're going to say well, but that's those southern Christian religious groups. Fine. In Washington state we went from seven-to-one Democrat to six-to-two Republican. You can hardly argue that it's that southern fundamentalism that swept Washington state (laughter). And yet I have seen talk shows where learned experts who were totally wrong a week ago are equally wrong now. I was reminded of Meg Greenfield's wonderful essay about a year ago, that it is amazing how often we can watch experts who had no idea what was about to happen explain to us afterward what it meant. And part of the problem is stereotype. Let me discuss ... several things that break out of the stereotype. And let me suggest to all of you that part of the problem is the level at which we think (and those of you who were here when I last spoke here will recognize part of this.) I use a planning model and a leadership model that is very explicit. The planning model is derived from how George Marshall and Dwight Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt managed World War Two, which was the most complex large human activity ever undertaken. And essentially they had a four-layer model. And it's a hierarchy: the top of it was vision, and after you understood your vision of what you are doing you design strategies, and once you had your vision and strategies square, you designed projects which were the building blocks of your strategies, and inside the context of those projects, you delegated dramatically, an entrepreneurial model in which a project was a definable, delegatable achievement. Eisenhowers job was: invade the continent of Europe, defeat the German army, and occupy the German heartland. The actual order from the combined chiefs is two paragraphs, all the rest was detail. That's delegation on a fairly grand scale. At the bottom of the model is tactics, what do you do every day. This is a city so consumed in its own tactical self- amusement that it's very hard for the city to have any sense of projects, and the concepts of vision and strategy is almost beyond its comprehension. I want to bring you back to that model in just a moment. The second model I follow fairly rigorously is a leadership model, that's four words that are a process, that is there's not a hierarchy, there's a sequence that matters. It's a very direct sequence: listen, learn, help, and lead. You listen to the American people, you learn from the American people, you help the American people, and in a rational society, if people know you have listened to them, learned from them and helped them, they want you to lead them. So the job of a leader is first of all to think about things, develop a vision and strategies and projects and tactics, and then go back out and listen to the people and find out whether or not in fact they are on the same wavelength. And if not, to assume that there is at least a better than even chance that it is the people and not the elites who are right. It is a very specific model, you may disagree with it or not like it, but it is a very specific model and if you want to understand what the next Speaker of the House is going to function like, it is a model that will in fact be fairly predictive. Now ... a couple of examples. I want to cite three of them. First of all, it's very hard for the Washington elite to come to grips with the reality that there is now a national Republican party and that's the biggest single message of this election. That for the first time in history the Civil War in effect is over, and Republicans were able to run everywhere simultaneously, and, standing on Ronald Reagan's shoulders, the Republican party now has enough recruits, and enough resources and enough leaders to actually be capable of running everywhere. And it was literally the first election in history where there were fewer Democrats without opposition than Republicans. We had more Republicans running unopposed for the House this year than there were Democrats. That had never, ever, in the history of the two parties, for a 140 years, been true. And we won, which will make it even more historic. So the first point I would argue, this was clearly a historic election which clearly had a mandate. And that's outside the Washington elite's view, they don't want to believe that because it is not the mandate that they wanted. Second, I want to draw a distinction between two words, because we are going to get into a lot of confusion, at the vision level, about those two words. I am very prepared to cooperate with the Clinton administration. I am not prepared to compromise. The two words are very different. On everything on which we can find agreement, I will cooperate. On those things that are at the core of our Contract, on those things which are at the core of our philosophy, and on those things where we believe that we represent the vast majority of Americans, there will be no compromise. So let me draw that distinction: cooperation, yes - compromise, no. Third ... this happened by pure happenstance two days ago... that I will share with you. People have been trying to figure out how to put me in a box, and it is very hard because I don't fit boxes very well. Probably...and therefore I must be a hypocrite...you know if you watch the Washington press coverage, some of it verges on the bizarre. The best description of me is that I am a conservative futurist. Mariann and I have for a long time been friend with Alvin and Heidi Toffler, authors of "Future Shock" and "The Third Wave." We really believe it's useful to think about the 21st century. On the other hand I believe the most powerful single doctrine for the leadership of human beings and for their opportunity to pursue happiness is the Federalist Papers, the Toqueville Travels and Democracy in America, the Declaration of Independence, and the American Constitution. So on the one hand I recommend to all Congressional staffs Druckers "Effective Executive," Demmings "Concepts of Quality," look at the new Progress and Freedom Foundation's report on Alvin Toffler's works, and that will help you in one direction. In the other direction I suggest to them, immerse yourself in the Founding Fathers. These people thought a long time about the nature of being human, about the problems of power, about how to organize a free society so it could sustain freedom. And if you can combine the two, you can begin to create an opportunity for every American to participate in ways that will prove to be quite remarkable. Now, that obviously doesn't fit anybody's current word processor. There is no "Newt Gingrich, conservative futurist," - it doesn't exist yet. Therefore it has to be something else, and so they keep trying to say, well, are you going back to the eighties, or are you doing this - no, we're in fact trying to get to the 21st century, and we want to do so in a way that's very effective. There are five large changes we have to go through. I will be teaching a course, called "Renewing American civilization," at Reinhard College in January, which is designed to outline these changes in some detail. It takes about twenty hours, so I am obviously not going to give them to you today. But I want to just describe the five changes very briefly to give you a taste of what they are because I think they are central to everything that will be organizing our activities over the next two years. First, we have to accelerate the transition from a Second Wave mechanical bureaucratic society to a Third Wave information society, to use Alvin Toffler's model. Two simple examples: one, imagine the speed and ease with which you use a bank teller card anywhere on the planet and electronically verify your account and get money, and then call the federal government about a case (laughter). There is no objective reason that institutions of government have to be two or three generations behind the curve in information systems and management, but they are. And that means, for example, if we're really serious about distance medicine, and about distance learning and about distance work, we could revolutionize the quality of life in rural America, and create the greatest explosion of new opportunity for rural America ever in history. And yet, we currently are moving in the opposite direction. So at a time when the IRS should be making it easier to have a home office, they make it harder. Now that's foolish. It is exactly the wrong direction. Second. The second example I am going to give you is: we will change the rules of the House to require that all documents and all conference reports and all committee reports be filed electronically as well as in writing, and that they cannot be filed until they are available to any citizen who wants to pull them up simultaneously, so that information is available to every citizen in the country at the same moment that it's available to the highest paid Washington lobbyist. That will change, over time, the entire flow of information, and the entire quality of knowledge in the country, and it will change the way people try to play games with the legislative process. The second big change is to recognize the objective reality of the world market, to realize that we create American jobs through world sales, and to make a conscious national decision that we want to have the highest value-added jobs on the planet with the greatest productivity, so you can have the highest take-home pay and range of choices in lifestyles. In order to do that we have to literally rethink the assumptions that grew up in a self-indulgent national economy, and we have to recognize that litigation, taxation, regulation, welfare, education, the very structure of government, the structure of health, all those things, have to be reexamined from the standpoint of what will make us the most competitive society on the planet, the most desirable place to invest to create jobs, and the place with best trained and most entrepreneurial work force, most committed to Demming's concepts of quality. Now that's a big challenge. One step frankly has to be that every child in America should be required to do at least two hours of homework at night, or they are being cheated, for the rest of their lives, in their ability to compete with the Germans, the Japanese, and the Chinese. Now, one of the differences that I would suggest between where we are going, and where our friends on the left would go is I do not derive from that a belief that we need a federal Department of Homework Checkers (laughter). I believe that we should say to every parent in the country your child ought to be doing two hours of homework, and if they're not, go see the teacher, if you can't convince the teacher, get a better teacher, and in the interim assign it yourself. I was taught to read by my grandmother, general George Marshall was taught to read by his Aunt, I mean the objective fact is that historically this is the country that got the job done, not the country that found scapegoats for the failures. And so, we simply have got to reassert, a topic I will come back to, a level of civic responsibility that we are not used to. Third, we have to replace the welfare state with an opportunity society. Let me be very explicit. It is impossible to take the Great Society structure of bureaucracy, the redistributionist model of how wealth is acquired, and the counter-culture value system that now permeates the way we deal with the poor, and have any hope of fixing it. They are a disaster. They ruin the poor, they create a culture of poverty and a culture of violence, which is destructive in this civilization. And they have to be replaced thoroughly, from the ground up. Now that should be done in cooperation with the poor. The people who have the most to gain from eliminating the culture of poverty and replacing it with a culture of productivity are the people currently trapped in a nightmare. Living in public housing projects with no one going to work. Living in neighborhoods with no physical safety. Their children forced to walk into buildings where there will be no learning. And living in a community where taxes and red tape and regulation destroy their hope of creating new entrepreneurial businesses, and doing what every other generation of poor Americans have done, which is to leave poverty behind by acquiring productivity. Now we simply need to reach out and erase the slate and start over. And we need to start with the premise that every American is endowed by their creator with certain, unalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And that extends to the poorest child in Washington D.C., and the poorest child in West Virginia, and the poorest child in American Indian reservations, and we have been failing all of them because we have lacked the courage to be mentally tough enough to get the job done. And I think it can be done, but I think it is very deep and very bold change. Fourth, we have to recognize that American exceptionalism ... is real, that this has been the most successful civilization in the history of the human race of liberating people to pursue happiness. I think that's an objective fact. There is no other society in history where as many people from as many cultures speaking as many languages could come together and become a nation. And where they could then be liberated to go off and be whatever they wanted to be. This is the country where Colin Powell and John Shalikashvily can both be chairman of joint chiefs, and nobody even thinks about the remarkable difference in ethnicity because they're Americans. And that is the way it should be. And that is why we have to say to the counter-culture: nice try, you failed, you're wrong, and we have to simply, calmly, and methodically reassert American civilization, and reestablish the condition which I believe starts with the work ethic. You cannot study 300 years of American civilization without coming to the conclusion that working, and being expected to work, and being involved in work, maybe for money, or maybe at home, it may be a hobby that you pursue, but the sense of energy, the pursuit or happiness, which is an active verb, not happiness stamps, not a Department of Happiness, not therapy for happiness (laughter), pursuit. This is also a muscular society, and we've been kidding ourselves about that. The New Hampshire slogan says "Live Free or Die,", it is not "Live Free or Whine." (Laughter). And so we have to think through what are the deeper, underlying cultural meanings of being American, and how do we reassert them. Lastly, and this is one were I frankly became more radical ... I realized that as I talked to audiences, I was in 127 districts in the last two years, ... that there was an enormous danger that they were going to say: terrific speech, let's elect Gingrich speaker, let's elect our local candidate to the House, they'll do the job. And let me tell all of you flatly. The long experiment in professional politicians and professional government is over, and it failed. You cannot hire a teacher to teach your child and walk off, and then blame the teacher. You cannot hire a policeman to protect your neighborhood and then walk off and blame the police. You cannot hire a public health service to protect your health and then walk off and blame the public health service. We have to reestablish, and I particularly want to thank Gordon Wood who will probably get in a lot of trouble at Brown University for my using his name, it is Gordon Wood's understanding of the origin of the American revolution and his understanding of the core intent of Jeffersonian politics, was for me a liberating moment. Because it's his argument, that what Jefferson understood was that you had to have limited but effective government precisely in order to liberate people to engage in civic responsibility. And that the larger government grew, the more you would crowd out civic responsibility and that in the end, you could never replace civic responsibility with government. Now this means that my challenge to the American people is real simple: do you really want the dramatically reduced power in Washington? You have to be willing to take more responsibility back home. You really want to reduce the bureaucracy of the welfare state? You have to accept greater responsibility back home. We are going to have to be partners. This is going to be a team in which we work together to renew American civilization. This is frankly why I teach the course that I do on video tape, why we have it available across the country. In fact, I will shamelessly tell you we use an 800 number I hope all of you will call (laughter). And I am very serious about it. If you are not going to take the time to learn about ideas.... If things that are wrong in America are not wrong because of money or lack of money, they are wrong because we've had a bad set of ideas that haven't worked, and we need to replace them with a good set of ideas. And you can actually call 1-800-to-renew, if you want to get a copy.... The Capitol steps were designed as a subset of those five principles. The Capitol steps basically said, look we are a team, we are going to go in dramatically different direction. We are going to give you eight reforms on the opening day, starting with the Shays act, which will apply to the Congress every law which applies to the rest of the country. So Congressmen will learn all the problems they have imposed on everybody else. We are going to cut the number of congressional committee staffs by a third, an we sent a letter to that effect to Speaker Foley on Wednesday, frankly in order to allow the Democratic staff to know that a substantial number of them ought to be looking for jobs. We thought that was the most decent and most correct way to deal with it. We are going to cut the number of Congressional committees. We are going to eliminate the Current Services Budget and replace it with a straight line budget where if you have a one dollar increase it counts as a one dollar increase. This is the only place in the world where you can increase spending massively and it counts as a cut. And it's been a major source of the problem of dealing with the deficit because you create a linguistic barrier to honesty. So we are simply going to eliminate it. You are not going to get a Current Services Budget in this Congress. Not on the House side. Now, at the end of the opening day we will introduce the ten bills we described in the Contract. It was printed in TV Guide. We will read the Contract as the opening item of business every day for the first hundred days, and at the end of the first hundred days the American people, at Easter, will be able to say they saw a group of people who actually said what they were going to do and then kept their word. Now we don't guarantee we'll pass all ten. This is very clear in the Contract. Some of these are very controversial: litigation reform including malpractice, product liability and strike law reforms is one item. A balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. A vote on term limits. An effective enforceable death penalty with a one-time unified appeal. Beginning to phase out the marriage penalty in the tax code. Allowing senior citizens to earn up to $39,000 a year without penalty from Social Security. A capital gains cut and indexing. These are not small things. But they are the right direction. Welfare reform emphasizing work and family. A line item veto, including, frankly, a line item veto for this President. So that we as Republican conservatives are prepared to give to President Clinton a line item veto. We think it's right for America. Now, these are real changes. It is going to be real hard to do, and it's going to take a lot of people helping. Let me say one last thing. If this just degenerates, after a historic election, back into the usual baloney of politics in Washington and pettiness in Washington, then the American people, I believe, will move towards a third party in a massive way. I think they are fed up with this city, they are fed up with it's games, they are fed up with petty partisanship. I don't think they mind grand partisanship. There is a big difference. To have a profound disagreement over the direction of your country or over the principles by which your economy works or over the manner in which your government should structure its resources, that is legitimate, and the American people believe in that level of debate and relish it. And the question will be over the next six months, can we reach out to the American people. Can we recruit enough of them. Notice, I didn't say Republican. The American people. Can we reach out to enough Democrats, and I just talked to Jack Kemp a little while ago, we had a very encouraging talk with a leading member of the Black Caucus about working together and developing a program that is very bold and very dramatic in terms of helping the poor create jobs and helping those who want to rise have a real opportunity to acquire wealth and to create a better future for themselves. Now if we can reach out and truly try to do this. And remember who I quoted on the Capitol steps, which was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, on March 4, 1933, standing in his braces in a time when it was inconceivable that somebody who had had polio could be elected to major office. And standing there, and saying on a wintry overcast day in the middle of the Great Depression that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. When you hear gunshots in your nation's Capitol at night. And you know that young Americans have died needlessly, then I would suggest to you that we have every reason to have the moral courage to confront every weakness of the current structure, and to replace it. And if the first wave of experiments fail, to have the courage to say, well that one didn't work, and have a second one, and a third one, and a fourth one. And the Monday morning we wake up and we can look on the morning news and no young American was killed anywhere in America. And we can know that every one of them is going to a school where they are actually learning how to read. And we know that they live under a tax code where if they want to it's easy to create jobs and to have your own business, and it's easy to start accumulating a little money to create a better future. That morning I think we can say, okay, this journey has been worth it. But until that day, it just stays politics. And so we have an enormous amount of work to do. All I can promise you on the side of the House Republicans is that we are going to be open to working with everyone. That we will cooperate with anyone. And we will compromise with no one. And that's the base of where we're going. And that's what we believe this election is all about. ------------------------------------------------ (This file was found elsewhere on the Internet and uploaded to the Radio Free Michigan archives by the archive maintainer. All files are ZIP archives for fast download. E-mail bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu)