Newt Gingrich: Alright. Ok. We’ve got that part down. First of all, Callista and I want to just take a minute and 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 he just does a great job and we really are thrilled to be here. 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 gonna 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 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.

I’m gonna shock some of you, because I 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 and I know that Marco Rubio had an extraordinary reception here. I worked with Marco, with Marco when he was beginning to develop the concept of a hundred new ideas for Florida’s future back when he was the Speaker and not a designated – he did a great job of an idea-oriented conservatism speaker in Florida and I know that it was very exciting. I know that Governor Romney made a powerful case here. Frankly, Governor Romney and his business career created more jobs than the entire Obama cabinet combined, so he could actually talk about it. And I know that Governor Pawlenty came and did a great job and focused correctly. And, Governor Pawlenty focused correctly that our rights come from God and that that makes us a unique country and that our sovereignty is God given and not politician defined.

And so I thought to myself, with this quality that these people who have 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 gonna talk today about principled bipartisanship. Now, I don’t know that anybody has ever talked about this at a CPAC convention. And I’m not totally sure that Dave Keene will 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 more jobs than the Congress had created in the last six months. I think that’s an exaggeration. President Obama has created at least three jobs I know of. Bob McDonald. Chris Christie. And Scott Brown. And I guarantee you as a historian, without Barack Obama, Scott Brown could not have won in Massachusetts. If you get a chance to see the movie that Callista and I did with Dave on 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 ’cause it reminds you that without Jimmy Carter we might not have gotten Ronald Reagan. Without Ronald Reagan there would probably be still 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. Similarly I can tell you that the coming massive conservative majority that will re-center 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.

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 would say I have a book coming out this spring called, “To Save America,” ‘because I believe – and I would never have said this in my – 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 – it 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. 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 gonna 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. And after all, with our current education system, I’m taking a risk.

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 Gadansk and we interviewed Vufalopalvo 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.” And they never again were intimidated.

Part of why the Tea Party so deeply threatened elite media is the Tea Party looked around and suddenly realized, there are more of us than there of them.

Part of the reason that the concept of the contract from America is so creative is it actually suggests that American, not lobbyists, not union leaders, not the Harvard faculty but just everyday folks thought out a direct role in coming up with ideas for the country’s future. And that’s exactly the right direction.

But, in the struggle which the Pope helped ignite, for ten 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.

As Rick Tylers pointed recently in Renewing American Leadership, he drove three and a half hours out of Los Angeles so he was 15, turned south, drove eight and 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 Jeffersonian’s had a pretty good understanding of the Constitution. I am more cautious than Jefferson. I would only abolish the 9th Circuit Court as a signal.

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 in 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 under the window. It came from two places. One was Kamu’s novel, The Plague, in which Kamu 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 will find more than enough occasion in Washington and Sacramento and Albany and City Hall and County Commisioner’s, that they can’t stand the truth.

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 equal three, it equals three. And the innocent citizen is thinking, but 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’s 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 healthcare on this country is such a significant step away from freedom and away from liberty and towards a government-dominated society, and unless 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. 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 toward bureaucratic control of American hasn’t read the bill or is telling you a lie. The fact is these 4,500 pages were among the worst legislation ever to leave the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate.

So, let me give you an example of two plus two equals four. I’m gonna give you half a sentence. You fill in the second half. If you can’t afford to buy a house, don’t but it. How many agree, if you can’t afford to buy a house, don’t buy it? Raise your hand. Ok. Now we have had, 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 get in without a down payment. If you can’t afford to buy a house, we’ll let you add three years without paying any principal. If you can’t afford to buy a house, we’ll give it to you at 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 with work. We tried to have houses with saving. We tried to have government without responsibility. You can’t do it. The world does two plus two equals four. So, there are simple obvious corollaries. It is time to pass a balanced budget amendment and return this government to limited spending. 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.

And say, a second example of two plus two equals four. In the middle of the recession, no tax increase is justified because it kills jobs and any tax increase is a job-killing measure and should be defeated. Let me give you another example of two plus two equals four. And this will be one of the major fights for the next five years. The time has come to tell the truth about the corruption of the government employee unions in this country. Let me be clear. I want to define exactly what I just said because it will strike some people as very strong. I’m using corruption in the manner – the same way that Gordon Wood in his great history of the American revolution described it – he said the critique of both the wigs in Great Britain and of the American Revolutioners of the British monarchy was not corruption in the sense of a personal bribe – when you’ve got people like Chris Dodd – but I’m not talking about that. It was a systemic process by which rules were changes so the government got its way in totally inappropriate ways that were a fundamental violation of the Constitution. And they had a mob – the British Constitution is 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’s 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. 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 – I, 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 are on this side.

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 and any place, and let’s take on these issues. 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 onto real ground.

Let’s talk about the bipartisan failures in Albany and the entire 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 ’cause that’s the right attitude.

At American Solutions we are 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 gonna control the House and the Senate as of the end of this year. I believe we will elect a new president in 2012. However, however, history doesn’t stand by – history doesn’t say ok, 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 we 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 are going to be principled – I mean, I negotiated directly with President Clinton for 35 days. And we argued and we fought and we disagreed. But on 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, on one level this is a terrific thing. It means he’s figured out that he can’t pass the health bill without somehow pretending that it’s not the Health bill and they hope that we are 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 are glad to come to offer a truly bipartisan conversation. And, we’re glad by the way to bring to 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 with healthcare.

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 is 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 are really bipartisan. And, I hope they’ll say, here’s an offer we’re gonna 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 will agree to genuinely bipartisan working groups of equal number of democrats or 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 costs of healthcare would be a good starting point. And why don’t we agree as Jim Frogue with 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 healthcare, our estimate is at the Center for Health Transformation, between $70 and $120 billion a year is stolen. Now 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 is so incompetent it doesn’t even know it’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 my Chicago-Springfield background it’s hard to fully grasp that honesty could be a part of government.

But let’s test the president’s willingness to be bipartisan. If he is 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 in 2008 who was exactly right when he said, “Why don’t’ we put the conference committee on CSPAN?”

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 close with a line from John Paul II on his very first homily who said, “Be not afraid.” And I think we have to say, we are a free people. We represent people to who 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 gonna 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.

 

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