Renewing American Leadership

MR. GINGRICH: (Cheers, applause.) All right, okay. All right, we got that part down. (Laughter.)

Well, first of all, Callista and I want to just take a minute to say it is a great honor that we get to work with Dave Bossie, who I think has become the most consequential conservative documentary producer in the country and just does a great job. And we really are thrilled to be here. (Applause.)

And as he mentioned, we're going to be unveiling, for the first time in Washington this afternoon, our new film, "Nine Days That Changed the World," about Pope John Paul II's visit to Poland. But in addition, he has a great new film, "Generation Zero," which I hope all of you are going to look at and take advantage of, which helps put the economic challenge right exactly where it needs to be. So it's a thrill to be back with Dave. With Dave Keene's help, we've sort of made this a habit the last few CPACs. I think this is the most important CPAC meeting since Ronald Reagan came and said that we have to have no pale pastels, but bold colors.(Applause.)

I'm going to shock some of you, because I've thought about what I should talk about. You've had great speakers all week. And this is a tremendous CPAC, and you should feel very good about it. And I've read about things. I know that Marco Rubio had an extraordinary reception here. (Cheers, applause.) I worked with Marco when he was beginning to develop the concept of 100 new ideas for Florida's future back when he was the speaker-designee, and he did a great job of an idea-oriented conservatism as speaker in Florida and I know that it was very exciting.

I know that Governor Romney made a powerful case here. (Applause.) Frankly, Governor Romney in his business career created more jobs than the entire Obama Cabinet combined, so he could actually talk about it. (Applause.)

And I know that Governor Tim Pawlenty came and did a great job and focused correctly -- (applause) -- and Governor Pawlenty focused correctly that our rights come from God and that that makes us a unique country in that our sovereignty is God-given and not politician-defined. (Applause.)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Amen!

MR. GINGRICH: So I thought to myself, with this quality, with these people who've already done such a wonderful job, what could I bring that was unique? And Dave hinted at a little bit of it a while ago. So I'm going to talk today about principled bipartisanship. Now, I don't know that anybody's ever talked about this at a CPAC convention, and I'm not totally sure that Dave Keene (knows and ?) will ever invite me back when I get done. But there's a very practical reason for talking about it.

Before I do, though, because I am a historian by training, I want to correct one thing that Senator Bayh said the other day that I was shocked by. Senator Bayh said that if he resigned and went into the private sector and created one private-sector job, that that would be more jobs than the Congress had created in the last six months.

I think that's an exaggeration. (Laughter.) President Obama has created at least three jobs I know of: Bob McDonnell -- (cheers, applause) -- Chris Christie -- (cheers, applause) -- and Scott Brown. (Cheers, applause.) And I guarantee you, as an historian, without Barack Obama, Scott Brown could not have won in Massachusetts. (Cheers, applause.)

If you get a chance to see the movie that Callista and I did with Dave about President Reagan, "Rendezvous With Destiny," you'll see that there's about a six-minute clip of Jimmy Carter. And it's really a helpful clip, because it reminds you that without Jimmy Carter, we might not have gotten Ronald Reagan. (Applause.) Without Ronald Reagan, there would probably still be a Soviet Union. So in a funny kind of way, all of us owe a debt of gratitude to Jimmy Carter for having defeated the Soviet empire. (Applause.)

Similarly, I can, I think, tell you that the coming massive conservative majority that will recenter this country decisively for the first time in 70 years would not have been possible without the Pelosi-Reid-Obama machine, which has convinced the country that if the choice is radicalism or conservatism, let's go ahead and defeat the radicals and put the country back on the right track. (Cheers, applause.)

And make no mistake about it. One of my bosses was up here a few minutes ago, the head of Regnery Publishing. So on her behalf I will say I have a book coming out this spring called "To Save America," because I believe -- I would never have said this at any time before now -- I believe we are now in a struggle over whether or not we are going to save America.

I believe that the radical left is a secular, socialist machine so dedicated to values destructive of America that, if it is allowed to remain in power, whether that's in Sacramento or that's in Albany or that's in the city council or that is in the federal government, that machine is antithetical to the survival of America as a prosperous, healthy country based on sound principles. (Applause.)

And I believe the most decisive way to defeat this secular, socialist machine is to slow the debate down. So I want to give you one slogan and three questions that I think can frame 2010 and 2012. And then I'm going to talk briefly about how we live through the next three years with principled, responsible bipartisanship.

The first -- I think the most important slogan of the next quarter century that will affect every young person in America is two plus two equals four. I know it's brave, bold, out on the edge. I know a few of you are sitting there going, "Let me get this straight." After all, with our current education system, I'm taking a risk. (Laughter.)

But Callista and I first encountered this -- we decided to make the movie about Pope John Paul II going to Poland when we were filming the Reagan film. And with Dave, we were in Prague and in Gdansk, and we interviewed Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa about Reagan. And both of them said the decisive moment shaking the foundations of the Soviet empire was actually a year and a half before Reagan was elected. It was in June of 1979, when Pope John Paul II went back home for nine days, aroused the people of Poland.

One out of every three Poles came to a meeting place. As one of them says in our film, they looked around at the millions of people in Warsaw and they suddenly realized, "There are more of us than there are of them." (Applause.) And they never again were intimidated.

Part of why the tea parties so deeply threaten the elite media is the tea parties looked around and suddenly realized, "There are more of us than there are of them." (Cheers, applause.) Part of the reason that the concept of a contract from America is so creative is it actually suggests that Americans, not lobbyists, not union leaders, not the Harvard faculty, but just everybody folks, ought to have a direct role in coming up with ideas for their country's future. And that's exactly the right direction. (Scattered applause.)

But in the struggle which the pope helped ignite, for 10 long years there was a continuing conflict between a totalitarian state and the people of Poland. Remember how difficult a government this was. This was a government which would not allow children to pray in school. This was a government which kept knocking down crosses. This was a government whose elite media would not broadcast about religion. I mean, it's hard to imagine how bad Poland was in that period. (Laughter.)

As Rick Tyler has pointed out recently at Renewing American Leadership, he drove three and a half hours out of Los Angeles on U.S. 15, turned south, drove eight and a half miles on a two-lane road, and found a cross in the middle of the Mohave Desert raised by the 1934 Veterans of Foreign Wars on behalf of those who died in World War I. The cross currently has a box over it, because, after all, the ACLU is such a totalitarian organization, it is threatened by a cross in the middle of the desert.

I simply want to say in passing, remember that the Jeffersonian Judicial Reform Act of 1802 abolished 18 out of 35 federal judges -- over half -- and the Jeffersonians had a pretty good understanding of the Constitution. I am more cautious than Jefferson. I would only abolish the 9th Circuit Court -- (inaudible). (Cheers, applause.)

So as the Polish people were struggling with the Soviet empire, they came up with a slogan: "Two plus two equals four." They printed it up. They put it on signs. They put it in the front door. And the Soviets knew it was somehow treasonous, but they couldn't -- how do you walk in a store and say, "You can't have 'Two plus two equals four' in the window"?

It came from two places. One was Camus' novel, "The Plague," in which Camus says there are times when a man can be killed for saying two plus two equals four, because the authorities can't stand the truth. I think you'll find more than enough occasion in Washington, in Sacramento, in Albany, in city hall, in county commissions, that they can't stand the truth. (Applause.)

Second, George Orwell in "1984" has the state torturer saying to the innocent citizen that he's torturing, "If the state tells you two plus two equals five, it equals five. If it tells you two plus two equals three, it equals three." And the innocent citizen is thinking, "Well, what if two plus two really equals four"?

Orwell points out, after the novel became famous, that the novel is not about the Soviet Union. The novel is about the logical extension of centralized government in Great Britain. The novel is proof of Hayek's principle that centralized planning inherently leads to dictatorship, which is why having a secular, socialist machine try to impose government-run health care on this country is such a significant step away from freedom and away from liberty and towards a government-dominated society.

And lest anybody tells you that we exaggerate, go to page 25 and 26 of the Pelosi version of the 4,500 pages. She did 2,000 and Reid did 2,500, but, after all, Reid had to bribe so many people, he kept adding pages. (Laughter.) The Pelosi version, page 25 and 26, says, in dealing with high-risk pools, if the secretary of Health and Human Services discovers she's running out of money, that she has the power unilaterally, by herself, to reduce benefits, raise premiums, or establish waiting lists.

Now, anybody who says to you this was not a step towards bureaucratic control of America hasn't read the bill or is telling you a lie. (Scattered applause.) The fact is, these 4,500 bills were among the worst legislation ever to leave the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate. (Applause.)

So let me give you an example of two plus two equals four. I'm going to give you half a sentence; you fill in the second half. If you can't afford to buy a house --

AUDIENCE: Don't buy it!

MR. GINGRICH: How many of you agree, if you can't afford to buy a house, don't buy it? Raise your hand. Okay.

Now, we have had, for the last quarter century, a continuing lie. If you can't afford to buy a house, we'll waive your credit. If you can't afford to buy a house, we'll let you come in without a down payment. If you can't afford to buy a house, we'll let you have three years without paying any principle. If you can't afford to buy a house, we'll give it to you below interest rate. And guess what: None of it worked.

Now, if you say that to one couple and they go bankrupt, that's a personal tragedy. When you have a million families doing it, it's a national crisis. Yet have you heard a single national figure tell you all the crises of the recent past are not economic, they're cultural?

We tried to have diplomas without learning. We tried to have jobs without work. We tried to have houses without savings. We tried to have government without responsibility. You can't do it. The world -- two plus two equals four.

So there are some simple, obvious corollaries. It is time to pass a balanced-budget amendment and return this government to limited spending. (Applause.) And let me remind anyone who challenges you on this, for four years of principled bipartisanship while I was speaker, we kept spending at 2.9 percent a year, including the entitlements, which is the lowest rate of increase since Calvin Coolidge in the 1920s. We balanced the federal budget for four years by controlling spending while cutting taxes to raise jobs. (Cheers, applause.)

I'll say a second example of two plus two equals four. In the middle of a recession, no tax increase is justified, because it kills jobs, and any tax increase is a job-killing measure and should be defeated. (Cheers, applause.)

Let me give you another example of two plus two equals four, and this will be one of the major fights the next five years. The time has come to tell the truth about the corruption of the government employee unions in this country. (Cheers, applause.)

Let me be clear. (Laughter.) Well, I want to define exactly what I just said, because it'll strike some people as very strong. I'm using corruption in the same way that Gordon Wood, in his great history of the American Revolution, described it. He said the critique of both the Whigs in Great Britain and of the American revolutionaries, of the British monarchy, was not corruption in the sense of a personal bribe. You've got people like Chris Dodd, but I'm not talking about that. (Laughter.) It was a systemic process by which rules were changed so that government got its way in totally inappropriate ways that were a fundamental violation of the Constitution. And they had a -- in the British constitution it's not written, but it's very deep culturally.

Now, I'll give you a specific example that I would love to debate and I would love us to make a centerpiece of the campaign this fall. There was an article in The New Yorker last August called "The Rubber Room." It is a study of the fact that the union contract in New York is so destructive and so selfish that it takes up to seven years to fire a truly bad teacher. And so they've invented rubber rooms, which are rooms where they place the teachers who are so bad they can't allow to be with the students.

Now, the annual cost of this room is $50 million a year in New York alone. And that's understating it, because the teachers who are sitting there waiting to be fired, having been found incompetent, are actually getting a pension increase every year they wait while they're sitting there.

MR. GINGRICH: Sick is the right word. This is what I mean by corrupt. So I think we should wage a campaign on a simple premise. We should challenge every Democrat in the country. Everybody who believes that we're better off spending $50 million on people who can't teach in order to keep them sitting so the union's happy, they're on one side. Everybody who believes that $50 million spent in poor neighborhoods to help poor children learn how to read and write so they can go to college instead of prison, they're on this side. (Cheers, applause.)

Our friends on the left will say this is all too strong. And I say let's get it on. Let's debate anywhere in America, at any place, and let's take on these issues. (Cheers, applause.) Let's talk about the systemic corruption in Sacramento and the degree to which, in fact, it's time to clean house in California and get the state back on real ground. (Cheers, applause.)

Let's talk about the bipartisan failures in Albany and the fact that it's time to get back on the right track. And, by the way, it couldn't be better in New Jersey than to elect a former prosecutor as governor, because that's the right attitude. (Cheers, applause.)

At American Solutions, we're working to develop this range of ideas. But this week is a particularly important time to talk about responsible, principled bipartisanship, which we need for practical reasons. I believe we're going to control the House and the Senate as of the end of this year. (Cheers, applause.) I believe we will elect a new president in 2012. (Cheers, applause.)

However, however, history doesn't stand by. History doesn't say, "Okay, could you all please do nothing for three years?" History says there are issues. There are budgets. There are problems. There are foreign threats. There are things you should deal with. So how, therefore, should conservatives in general and Republicans in particular -- and they're not always the same -- but how should they try to be responsible and principled?

We did this when I was speaker. We passed welfare reform, and half the Democrats voted for it because back home they had no choice. We passed balanced budgets. We passed tax cuts. We did things that were very serious, but we did it in a way that said, "We're going to be principled."

I mean, I negotiated directly with President Clinton for 35 years. And we argued and we fought and we disagreed. But my position was Reagan's position, which is "Trust, but verify." As long as we stuck with our principles, it was the right thing.

So the president has announced he wants to have a bipartisan summit. Now, at one level, this is a terrific thing. It means he's figured out they can't pass the health bill without somehow pretending that it's not the health bill. And they hope that we're so foolish or so timid or so weak that we either will allow them to maneuver us into being the bad guys or we will cave in order to avoid being the bad guys and help them pass a really bad bill.

I think there's a different alternative. I hope the Republican leaders will say, "We're glad to come to offer a truly bipartisan conversation. And we're glad, by the way, to bring two governors with us, whether you invite them or not, because if this is bipartisan, we get to invite people too." And we have some terrific governors who will do a great job of helping. (Applause.)

And I hope the Republican leaders will say, "And since you want this to be bipartisan, we'll divide the time 50-50. We will control half the time, and you and Pelosi and Reid will control half the time. We will bring our recommended agenda. You have your recommended" -- nice agenda; the president's all for the things he's for, but we get to be for the things we're for. We don't have to start with the things he's for if we're really bipartisan. (Applause.)

And then I hope they'll say, "Here's an offer we're going to make to you. If you will agree to drop the 4,500 pages of legislation currently sitting at the White House and you will agree to start over and you'll agree to genuinely bipartisan working groups of equal number of Democrats and Republicans, then let us have a conversation about what we can agree on."

And I'll give you two simple, small examples. Why don't we agree that litigation reform to lower the cost of health care would be a good starting point? (Applause.) And why don't we agree, as Jim Frogue at the Center for Health Transformation put it in the recent book that he published, which is entitled "Stop Paying the Crooks" -- again, bold, out on the edge, two plus two equals four. You want to save money on health care? Our estimate is, at the Center for Health Transformation, between $70 (billion) and $120 billion a year is stolen.

Now, when I say stolen, I don't mean marginal fudging. I mean a dentist in New York who filed 992 procedures a day. I mean five pizza parlors in Miami that were certified by Medicaid as HIV/AIDS transfusion centers -- real theft from a bureaucracy that it is so incompetent, it doesn't even know what's going on.

Now, surely the president could agree with us that theft from government is not good. Again, I know it's bold. It's out on the edge. I know from a Chicago-Springfield background it's hard to fully grasp that honesty could be a part of government. (Cheers, applause.)

But let's test the president's willingness to be bipartisan. If he's willing to start afresh, we can do it. If he's willing to focus on what we agree on, we can do it. If he's willing to write smaller bills, out in the open, transparently, with the American people seeing every step of the way, with open rules in the House for amendment and open opportunity for amendment in the committees and open conferences -- and I have an idea; I think there was a candidate who was exactly right when he said, "Why don't we put the conference committees on C- SPAN?" (Applause.)

And so let's give President Obama a chance to be as idealistic as candidate Obama by keeping the word he gave in 2008. And if he'll agree to those steps -- I'm not frightened of bipartisanship. It'll be tough. It'll be hard. But if we're going to have three years in which the president loses energy, Pelosi and Reid become isolated, the left cracks, we can't just sit back and hope that the world will let us wait. We can't go on recess. And so we have to have the courage to stand up and say, "We know what we believe. We know what the American people believe. We know what is good for America's future. We can do this together."

And I'll close with a line from John Paul II in his very first homily, who said, "Be not afraid." (Applause.) And I think we have to say we are a free people. We represent people to whom God has granted sovereignty. We represent the opportunity to stand under the rule of law. We are the home of the free -- the land of the free because we are the home of the brave. If you're not brave, you're not going to be free.

We should be brave enough to stand up and say, "Let's work together until we finish defeating the left," and then we won't have to work with them as much. But candidly, we should adopt rules that say even when they're in a small minority, down to the last 15 or 20 left wingers in the Senate, the last 100 or so in the House, we should still have rules that allow them to bring their ideas to the table, because we should not be afraid.

Thank you. Good luck, and God bless you. (Cheers, applause.)