TDR Interview: Newt Gingrich

By Michael J. Ellis and Scott L. Glabe | Friday, April 22, 2005

The Dartmouth Review: You talk a lot about policy in your book. In terms of some of the more practical things that are going on in Washington today, do you see similarities between styles in leadership in the House today and styles in the Democratic leadership in Congress before you took over?

Michael Audet

—Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his new professorial glasses.—

Newt Gingrich: I say in Winning the Future that I think we need to loosen up the rules some to allow the Democrats, and for that matter bipartisan coalitions, to have greater opportunities to offer amendments and to shape the debate. I think it wrong to be too tightly restricted in how the House is run.

TDR: In terms of Tom DeLay, I thought that just yesterday you came out very strongly—

NG: I'm very clear that Tom DeLay has every right to defend himself and clear his name. He's indicated that he's prepared to be investigated, he's prepared to cooperate with the investigation, he's prepared to turnover whatever they want to see. But I think that the Democrats have an obligation to take "yes" for an answer and to be prepared to have the investigation.

TDR: You come from a very unique role, from being an academic before you entered politics. Do you think that this gives you particular advantages? Do you bring a different sort of view to the table?

NG: I think a little bit like Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill because I like to write and I like to read. You know we have a whole series of Civil War novels, for example. I really think that having politicians who care about ideas is healthy and useful and I think it does shape how I fill my particular space. I see myself as more of a teacher than a candidate and as somebody who is engaged in a debate over ideas rather than just maneuvering for position.

TDR: The debate we need to have is one of your main points. How do you see that being conducted practically within the Republican party after George Bush?

NG: Well, one the reasons I came to New Hampshire is that my hope is that people will look seriously at the idea of the twenty-first century Contract with America. They'll look seriously at the five large challenges I'm describing, and whenever somebody says "Yeah, I'd like to consider running," they'll say, "Great, what's your position on the Five Challenges? How would you solve math and science education? What are you going to do about Medicare and Medicaid?" and not let them get away with politics as usual. I mean I think we can shape the debate both for the Democrats and for the Republicans and really have a much higher level of questions being asked in 2008 than we normally get in a normal presidential race.

TDR: What sort of strengths and weaknesses do you think the Republican candidate is going to have in 2008? Do you think that they're going to be tied to President Bush's legacy, or do you think that they will really be able to articulate a new vision like you've been talking about?

NG: Well, first of all, I think that inevitably you are part of your party and in that sense that you're going to be reflective of the President. But I also think if we run as the defenders of Washington, we're going to lose. If we run as the advocates of further change, more change, transformational change, we'll win. We have not transformed the government enough to run for office as the defenders of the status quo. We still have years of work to do before we have a government that we can be proud of and to go the country and say, "This is working the way we want it to." I think it's very important that Republicans not get so mesmerized by the process of presiding over the Left that they think that somehow presiding over these bureaucracies is adequate. It's not. You've got to change them. You've got to actually run the government, not just preside over it.

Student: You're visiting New Hampshire and you're trying to go to Iowa. What is your status as a potential presidential candidate?

NG: I'll think about it in the summer of 2007. I am in New Hampshire, and I'll be in Iowa, and I'll be back in New Hampshire, and I'll be back in Iowa because they are the best—if you wanted to set the terms of the 2008 debate, these are the two best states to set it, because when every candidate and every political force is up here, I want them to be thinking about these five ideas. What's your answer to these Five Challenges? If we do that in these two states, we will change all the politics in 2008 for everybody who's running.

TDR: Looking at your own career, what would you say is your greatest accomplishment and deepest regret?

NG: My deepest regret is not having tripled the size of the National Science Foundation budget when we doubled [the National Institutes of Health]. Probably our largest achievement was welfare reform. It profoundly changed the quality of life, gave people a chance to go to work and to go to school, and 60% of the people who had been passively independent were now out working and going to school Just a huge change of human beings. The other thing I would say is that I was very honored when the 9/11 commission said I was the only person to get an increase in intelligence spending in the 1990s. I was told that George Kennan at the time said that the system would have been really broken if I had not gotten money, so I'm very proud of that.

TDR: In your book, you were talking about the role of God in American society and that we get into this divide within the Republican Party itself about the issue of religion, between the growing power of the evangelical Right and more secularly-based conservatives.

NG: There might be. I think that it depends on what you're arguing for. I mean I think that when you have 91% of the country that thinks you should be allowed to say "one nation under God"—

TDR: You think there's enough common ground to—

NG: Well, I think there will be a serious argument and you'll have stress within the majority coalition, but I think—you know, you remember the Democrats were the majority at one point. They had the only black congressman who was from Chicago, and they had segregationists from Mississippi. And they were both Democrats. And they had stress inside the coalition, and they had to negotiate it out, they had to live with it. They had to understand what to do about it. I think it's the nature of majorities in a country this size—you're going to have differences of opinion. And the question is, "How do you manage it?"

TDR: Now, in terms of the Democratic Party, you say that one of the things they need to do is to create new ideas. You were very successful with that in 1994 in training candidates to go back and get everyone on the same message. Do you think the Democrats are starting to do that today? Do you think they're making progress?

NG: I don't see any—and I don't mean this negatively—I don't see any evidence of a Democrat writing a book like Winning the Future. I don't see any evidence of a Democrat stepping to the plate and saying, "Here's the answer of Medicare. Here's the answer on Medicaid. Here's how to fix math and science education." It's almost like they think that if you can be negative and partisan and shrill that people won't ask, "What's your policy? What are you going to do?" And I think that's a profound mistake, and I think the effectiveness we had with the Contract with America was in part because we were reaching out to the country. If you go back and read the TV Guide ad, which was the most expensive ad ever run for a congressional campaign up to that point, it doesn't mention Bill Clinton, it doesn't mention the Democrats. It's just totally positive. Very profound in our getting nine million more people to vote than in 1990, the largest one-party increase in an off-year in American history.

TDR: What do Republicans have to do to win the showdown on judicial nominations?

NG: Well, they've either got to get the votes or change the rules or they've got to decide that they're going to keep the Senate in seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day until people get so sick of the filibuster that they put pressure on people like [Sen. Charles] Schumer [D-NY] to agree to let the judges get voted on. I don't think the country would sustain a Senate filibuster for very long. I think people would think it was sick. And Schumer's arrogation that forty-one outvotes fifty-nine wouldn't stand up in any second grade in America that was going to have a class election. You say, "Now, the person who got forty-one just beat the person who got fifty-nine"—they would think you were just crazy! So I don't think they can in the long run sustain the argument. The Constitution doesn't say, "advise, consent and filibuster." It says "advise and consent."

TDR Interview: Newt Gingrich

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