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« Back to Newt: What’s Next? main page    Transcript for: Newt: What’s Next?ANNOUNCER: Funding for Think Tank is provided by the T. Rowe Price Associates, an investment management firm providing mutual funds, brokerage services, and retirement plan services. T. Rowe Price, invest with confidence, T. Rowe Price Investment Services Incorporated.We’re Pfizer, we’re looking for the cures of the future, spending about $4-1/2 billion a year in search of new medicines for the 21st Century. Pfizer, life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, John M. Olin Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, and the Dodge Jones Foundation. (Musical break.) MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Not long ago Newt Gingrich, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives stood at the center of the Washington political universe. Now, as a private citizen he spends much of his time traveling outside the beltway to talk to doctors, scientists, and entrepreneurs about the technologies of the future. But, Newt’s mind is never too far from the Capitol. Today, Think Tank sits down with Newt Gingrich to get his thoughts on the politics of the past few years, and the years ahead. The topic before the house, Newt, what’s next, this week on Think Tank. (Musical break.) MR. WATTENBERG: When the political history of the last decade is written, Newt Gingrich will hold a prominent place. For 40 consecutive years up to 1994, Democrats held a majority of the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. (Film clip.) MR. WATTENBERG: Then, under the guidance of Gingrich, the Republicans took control. Gingrich’s 1994 campaign document, the Contract With America became both famous and infamous. The spectacular 1994 elections turned out to be not only a GOP victory, but a trend. Republicans kept control in 1996, 1998, and 2000, albeit with very narrow margins. Now, President George W. Bush, himself coming off something less than a landslide, is promoting a policy agenda, many parts of which could have come straight from the play book of the Contract With America. But, this time the tone is very different. Mr. Speaker, colleague, thank you so much for joining us. Let’s go back and start with that magical year of 1994. Did you expect to win the House? MR. GINGRICH: Yes, in September we did. MR. WATTENBERG: Because? MR. GINGRICH: We knew enough races around the country, we knew we could win. We had been involved in a process that was 16 years long, of recruiting, training candidates, gathering resources, trying to figure out how do you match the labor unions, how do you match the scale of the left, the big city machines, a Democratic party which had historically, from 1930 on, been much bigger than the Republican party. And by 1994 we had enough potential resources to win. We also knew that Clinton had given us the issues to make people mad at the Democrats, and our job was to actually be positive. We thought it was very important to have a Contract With America, because we thought that the key swing voters -- remember, this is the largest one- party increase in off year voting in American history, 9 million more people vote Republican. And to get those people to turn out we felt they had to have a positive agenda, balancing the budget, reforming welfare, cutting taxes, strengthening defense. MR. WATTENBERG: But, my understanding was that these were not very radical programs in the sense that they all had 70 percent approval ratings in advance -- MR. GINGRICH: but, there’s a huge difference here. The biggest change in the last eight years may be that Washington has begun to catch up with the rest of the country. I mean, welfare reform was a 92 percent support by 1996 in the New York Times poll. Now, it was in Washington that the idea of ending the 61- year federal entitlement was seen as radical. In the country it was seen as common sense. So the idea in retrospect that there’s this natural harmony is simply not historically accurate. MR. WATTENBERG: Now, you then get elected in 1994, in this incredible sweep. And you start giving talks that, I don’t know if you used the word, but I think you did, revolution, revolutionary, Republican revolution, Gingrich revolution. Does a successful country need a revolution, or does it need an evolution? MR. GINGRICH: Well, Jefferson said it needed one every generation. So I’ll let you and Jefferson debate that. I was making the point that I think was absolutely valid at the time. If we were not militant, if we were not prepared to fight, you wouldn’t have a balanced budget today, you wouldn’t have a surplus today, you wouldn’t have cut taxes in ‘97, you wouldn’t have strengthened defense, you wouldn’t have reformed welfare, because on every one of those issues, despite the election of ‘94, the left was opposed and the president was opposed. MR. WATTENBERG: But, according to the common wisdom you became seen as a, to use your word, a militant bomb thrower, and that the country wanted more moderate, evolutionary, not revolutionary change. You took the hit on that, and you became the poison dart figure that the Democrats kept zinging. Is that -- MR. GINGRICH: That is just historically false. MR. WATTENBERG: That is false? MR. GINGRICH: It is the common belief of this city, to go back to what I started to say. But, let me tell you why it’s false. The weekend before we win the election the cover of time magazine talks about angry white males, it doesn’t talk about ideas, it doesn’t talk about the contract. Three weeks before Christmas Time Magazine has me on the cover as Scrooge, holding Tiny Tim’s broken crutch, not just crutch, broken crutch. MR. WATTENBERG: Shame on you. MR. GINGRICH: The title of the cover is, How Mean Will Gingrich’s America Be to the Poor? The following week Newsweek has me as a Seuss figure, entitled The Grinch that Stole Christmas. By September of ‘95 the unions, the Chinese communists, the Indonesians and the Democrats start running what end up being 125,000 commercials, all of them -- that I’m in personally, that doesn’t count other commercials, over the course of 14 months. MR. WATTENBERG: Give me the list of the sponsors again? MR. GINGRICH: Well, there’s fund raising by the Democrats, the labor unions. The Democrats raise money from the Indonesians, the Chinese communists, Thai billionaires. I mean, go back and look at the list, the laundry list. So was I too tough, maybe. On the other hand, nobody had elected a Republican Congress in 40 years. Nobody reelected a Republican Congress since 1928. Denny Hastert is not leading the fourth Republican House in a row, the first since 1922. Nobody had consecutively balanced the budget over four years since the 1920s, nobody had cut taxes in 17 years, nobody had reformed welfare in 61 years. So when you come back and you say, well, what would have happened if we had come in and said, let’s be moderate. I mean, George W. Bush is a moderate in style and very conservative in philosophy. If Bush had been president, I would have been a pussycat, I would have ben easy. You don’t have to fight with somebody who is honest, and you can deal with. But, go back and read Dick Morris’ book about what the summer of 1995 was like. The White House was in a raging civil war inside itself, between those who wanted to fight us every morning, and Clinton who thought he had to sell out to survive. MR. WATTENBERG: I wrote a book about that also, it’s exactly right. This values issue is tearing him apart. MR. GINGRICH: So remember what the summer of ‘95 was like. My argument is simple, if we had arrived and we had said, let’s meet in the middle, you wouldn’t have gotten to a balanced budget, because the changes were too big. You certainly would not have ended the 61-year federal entitlement to welfare because the change was too big. You would not have gotten a major tax cut, because it was anathema to the left. MR. WATTENBERG: How did it feel just personally -- I mean, you had been an important person in this town. But, all of a sudden you were not only on the cover of news magazines and on television, wall to wall, nonstop, but you were one of the half a dozen Americans who are known by their first name. I guess it helps in your case to have a somewhat unfamiliar first name, it’s not Joe. But, still, there are not a whole lot of people saying, Newt says. How did that feel? MR. GINGRICH: It felt overwhelming. MR. WATTENBERG: Did you like it? MR. GINGRICH: I liked it in a general sense. It wasn’t central to my personality or my happiness, but obviously is you work that hard you want to win, you want to succeed. But, I really felt an overwhelming responsibility that we had created a large collective -- you know, running for the president is essentially about a singular person. Running to control the House is about hundreds of candidates. You represent a collective team. Those hundreds of candidates have thousands of volunteers. So when you win you really are representing this huge extended family that you have a responsibility to. And I felt that it was a historic moment, that if we could take that momentum and keep driving the system, that we could in fact move Washington a fair distance. I also thought at some point that Clinton would probably co-opt us. You can go back and read various documents that were published by the Ethics Committee, that were my planning documents where I said very openly in ‘93, if we pull this off a sitting president has the ability to co-opt you. And there’s nothing you can do about it. MR. WATTENBERG: And co-opt means you win 50, 60, 70 percent of what you had gone after. MR. GINGRICH: Right. And I used to be willing to be co-opted every third day if Clinton would sign the bills we passed. Take 70 percent and come back for more. It’s a lesson I learned from Reagan. MR. WATTENBERG: Did you think that you were going to keep control of the House in 1996? MR. GINGRICH: Yes. I thought that was the price -- I didn’t think ‘94 was the hard thing, I thought ‘96 was, because remember, we’d won twice, in ‘46 and in ‘52, and then lost two years later. We had not won consecutively since the 1920s. And I really thought reelection would be harder than election, particularly because we did not have a candidate likely to beat Clinton. And we were in a situation where no Republican House had ever survived a Democratic presidential victory, ever. So you’d have to have said mathematically going into ‘96 that Clinton would win, and he would carry the Democrats back in. MR. WATTENBERG: Did you think you were going to win in ‘98? MR. GINGRICH: Yes, in fact, we were just wrong. We thought we’d gain seats. Part of why I stepped down pretty cheerfully is we were just wrong. We misunderstood the dynamic of the country. I was like the head coach who, frankly, had recruited for the wrong game. MR. WATTENBERG: But, the interesting thing is you suffered a personal defeat, but still after these 40 years of Democratic dominance the Republicans retained control of the House, the people’s House. MR. GINGRICH: When I watched President Bush’s first joint session and I saw Denny Hastert and Dick Cheney sitting behind President Bush, and then I watched minority leader Gephardt and minority leader Daschle, I felt a deep sense of satisfaction. I mean, I feel like -- and I was quite happy. If Gingrich not being there eliminated the easiest lightning rod to attack the Congress with, and I think it did, then I was quite happy to be in the private sector, and be at the American Enterprise Institute, and doing interesting things. MR. WATTENBERG: How does 2002 look? The redistricting on balance would tend to help the Republicans somewhat. MR. GINGRICH: The Democrats will do well in California, but they’ve done well in California for three consecutive decades. The Republicans will gain dramatically in Texas, they will gain in New York, they’ll gain in Michigan and Pennsylvania, they’ll gain in Florida, they’ll gain in Georgia, North Carolina. So on balance it’s somewhere between plus five and plus 12 seats for the Republicans. MR. WATTENBERG: Just sort of on the natural. MR. GINGRICH: On the natural, but remember the tone of October of next year changes a lot. If the economy is pretty good, the Republicans will probably keep control of the house, and may do better than people think in the Senate, because it’s a little bit like 1982, where the Republicans are in the middle of a recession but actually gained a seat in the senate, because the states that were up happened to favor Republicans. Well, if you look next year at the sates that are up they’re mostly states George Bush carried by big margins. And so the Democrats may not be in as good shape in the Senate as they thought. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Now -- MR. GINGRICH: No, let me say one other thing. MR. WATTENBERG: Go ahead. MR. GINGRICH: The most important thing for the future of the Republican party is whether or not we create a common community with Hispanics and with African Americans. If we do, if we’re at 50 percent of the Hispanic vote, and 12 to 20 percent of the African American vote next year, then we gain seats everywhere. If we do not, if we allow this gap to continue to grow, then I don’t see how we can be a majority party. MR. WATTENBERG: Let’s talk about George W. Bush. He gave this sort of State of the Union speech. It was in some ways very conciliatory. On the other hand, he got in there that substantial tax cut, which he would maintain, and I think you would, and I think I would, represents a change in direction, and yet, his pugnacity factor, if yours was an eight, his is about a two. But, is the product the same? Is that basically the Gingrich plan he’s putting forth? MR. GINGRICH: No. I think it’s the Bush plan, but it’s certainly one I could have adopted, I could have endorsed. Many of the ideas are parallel, we’re both for personal Social Security accounts, we both favor a big tax cut, we’re both for a strong military. And we both come out of a background of being concerned with education. The thing I find interesting is that Bush is open, friendly, flexible, and conservative. In this city, those four words don’t seem to fit on the same page. He has a little bit different style than Reagan did, and I think in a lot of ways more like Eisenhower’s style, in that Reagan always knew he’d only end up getting 70 or 80 percent of what he wanted, but he always pushed very aggressively to try to get 100 percent, figuring in the end you slide. Bush is going to argue for 100 percent, but is pretty cheerful about the fact that he’s going to get 70-80 percent. And, so there’s a little difference in the tone the two of them took. MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask you something about it. This huge argument about the tax cuts, is it simply a bookkeeping argument, or is there something philosophical at root in putting that forth, and if so -- MR. GINGRICH: This is not a bookkeeping argument. MR. WATTENBERG: What’s the argument? MR. GINGRICH: I think there are actually two very different arguments. Neither are articulated very well. The first is an argument about whose money is it? When the phrase is written, the government has a surplus, what it actually means is, the taxpayers sent more money than the government needed. Now, those two sentences strike a totally different sense of who owns the money. There is no argument historically in America for the government owning your money unless it needs it. And the idea that we have this magic surplus, and we’re talking about maybe even buying corporate bonds because we won’t have any U.S. bonds to buy anymore, this is nuts. You can’t find any precedent in American history for it. The other argument is very different, and one that conservatives have not articulated well since 1930, and it’s very straightforward. If you believe in success, if you believe in the work ethic, if you want your children to get ahead, why would you have a much higher tax on somebody who went out and started a small business and works six days a week, and kept investing. Now, the argument of traditional liberalism is very straightforward, it’s class warfare, anti-rich, they shouldn’t be allowed to keep it. And of course, their best -- MR. WATTENBERG: Well, a more neutral term is redistribution, the same thing. MR. GINGRICH: Redistribution is your right to take my money to give it to somebody you want to give it to. MR. WATTENBERG: Or some people are very poor, some people are very rich, and a society should play some sort of a leveling role. I mean, it’s not necessarily a malign idea, maybe you think it is, but I don’t think it is. MR. GINGRICH: But why is it that if you read the language, the language isn’t, this is how much money we need to take care of the poor. The language is, why are you cutting taxes on the rich? MR. WATTENBERG: Let me ask you a question, if you take those two ideas, whose money is it, and why punish success, is it possible if you’re trying to draw lines to understand this argument, is to say the argument is about liberty? I mean, most arguments in America are about liberty sooner or later in my own view. I mean, so you have the Republicans saying, we’ve done very well with liberty in the 20th Century, let’s do more of it, this is on an economic realm, and the Democrats saying, yes, we’ve done very well with liberty, now we’ve built up some real money, and we can do a lot of things for people and for liberty, but through running it through the government fist. MR. GINGRICH: In some ways, it’s the classic 18th Century argument which the founding fathers were on the side of the Whigs. I mean, the notion that a large government is inherently corrupting, it’s inherently dangerous, and that, in fact, what you want is to minimize the scale of government, and maximize the personal freedom, the personal responsibility, because in the long run that’s safer for society. MR. WATTENBERG: You know, I saw a quote in the paper the other day from Bruce Reed, who was the head of President Clinton’s domestic policy team, and somebody asked him, you know, what about the Democrats. And he said, well, we have to see now how we can operate without the goalie. And that’s an interesting metaphor because the way the political system works, if you don’t have the Congress, which Clinton did not have in the last six years, he still was the goalie. He didn’t have the ability to propose, but he had the ability to stop things. So, what you’re saying is that that change in the presidency allows this change in tonality in the Republican Party, that you don’t have to be -- to use some of the pejoratives, bomb-throwing, bombastic, militant, which is a term you use. You can say, hey, the goalie is on our side. MR. GINGRICH: I think it puts all the pressure on Daschle. If the Democrats have a goalie, it’s Daschle, and Daschle has got to figure out how to -- I mean, the Democrats currently are essentially the reactionary party in America. They’re trying to protect the trial lawyers, they’re trying to protect the bureaucracy, they’re trying to protect the public employee unions, they’re trying to protect the ideology of the last 50 years, and if there’s any place left where they can fight protectively, it’s in the Senate, and that makes Daschle -- Daschle has this very delicate balance, because he has in Bush a very engaging, positive, pleasant person, who is going to be saying over and over gain, surely we can work together. And Daschle is going to find that it’s very tricky, and it’s a problem we always had with Clinton, because Clinton was engaging at a charming level. I mean, I think over time people decided he wasn’t very honest about it, but he was very charming. MR. WATTENBERG: I never thought he was so charming. MR. GINGRICH: But people would say regularly, why are you guys fighting him when, in fact, we were insisting on say, welfare reform. And he was trying by every possible device to avoid doing it, while not being seen avoiding doing it. The other great virtue that Bush has is that moderate conservatism is the dominant ideology of America. So, you’re at a 60-65, sometimes 70 percent majority when you stay within this moderate conservative -- MR. WATTENBERG: Would you describe yourself, or have described yourself as a moderate conservative? MR. GINGRICH: I think Michael Barrone probably captured me best in that sense, and suggested that I’m actually very much almost of a goalist. I’m for a strong technology, I’m for a strong central government, I’m for big tax cuts, and I’m an American Nationalist, but I think I would have -- I was a Rockefeller state chairman in ‘68. So, I think, ironically I never voted as far to the right has Cheney, and Cheney never sounded as far to the right as I did. MR. WATTENBERG: But, as a Rockefeller Republican, that idea of being a moderate conservative is not so far afield, there is something -- MR. GINGRICH: No. If you look at my speeches over and over again, I kept saying, this is a center right country, this is not a right wing -- and I never gave a speech once where I said, this is a right wing country, because it’s not, but it’s a center right country, whereas I would argue that up until 1964 it was in many ways, from FDR through Lyndon Johnson, a center left country. MR. WATTENBERG: And you think now, with the Bush presidency, that center right majority can flourish and grow. I think Bush has the potential to be the kind of personality who could create a large public acceptance of a moderate conservative philosophy that would bring in 60-65 percent support. MR. WATTENBERG: How does the new era of technology interweave with that? I know you’re very interested in that? MR. GINGRICH: Well, I ask every audience a couple of simple questions, do you use an automatic teller machine? Almost every had goes up. So, you put in a card, you punch in four numbers, you wait 15 seconds, you get cash, because the technology exists to track your personal account, even if you’re overseas. I ask people, how many of you pump your own gas and put a credit card in. Almost every hand goes up. And how many no longer even get a receipt, about a third of the hands go up. Now compare the accuracy of your gas pump and your automatic teller machine with the guy in Florida holding up a dangling chad ballot, with a 1.6 percent error rate nationally. And those are the two models. The reason we can do personal Social Security accounts is, our generation has computers. If FDR had had computers, I think you would have gotten a personal Social Security savings account. I don’t think you’d have gotten a send the money to Washington and let the bureaucracy run it model. I’ll give you the perfect example. The Department of Labor has an obligation to get records from the unions and make them available to the members. It takes three to five years, but as you’re always three to five years late. There’s no reason the Department of Labor can’t adopt a rule that says, every union will file electronically, the minute it files electronically it will be available on the Internet to anybody who wants to look at it. So the union local member in Spokane, Washington, doesn’t have to come to Washington, D.C., or send a letter. They just go online. You need to eliminate all the bureaucrats who currently are paper- shuffling, handling all this data. You make the union file accurately, and you allow the worker to have real transparency in real time. Now, those kind of opportunities run throughout the entire federal government. MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. Are you enjoying yourself? MR. GINGRICH: Oh, Ben, the number of ideas, it’s sort of like the title of your show. I’m at the American Enterprise Institute. I’m at the Hoover Institute as a visiting scholar, at Stanford. The number of ideas that are flourishing in America is astonishing. This is a country at the edge of, I think, a generation of creativity. MR. WATTENBERG: You ought to do a program called Think Tank. Thank you very much, Speaker Newt Gingrich. MR. GINGRICH: Thank you. MR. WATTENBERG: And thank you. Please remember to send us your comments via email. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. ANNOUNCER: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1219 Connecticut Avenue, Northwest, Washington, D.C. 20036, or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS Online at pbs.org. And please let us know where you watch Think Tank. This has been a production of BJW, Incorporated, in association with New River Media, which are solely responsible for its content. Funding for Think Tank is provided by the T. Rowe Price Associates, an investment management firm providing mutual funds, brokerage services, and retirement plan services. T. Rowe Price, invest with confidence, T. Rowe Price Investment Services Incorporated. We’re Pfizer, we’re looking for the cures of the future, spending about $4-1/2 billion a year in search of new medicines for the 21st Century. Pfizer, life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, and the Dodge Jones Foundation. (End of program.) Back to top  Think Tank is made possible by generous support from the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Donner Canadian Foundation, the Dodge Jones Foundation, and Pfizer, Inc. ©Copyright Think Tank. All rights reserved. 
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