Newt

My continuing interest in American politics continues in today's blog, with this riveting Glenn beck Show interview with Newt Gingrich, former republican Speaker of the House.

If you are interested in what it truly means to be a Republican, and/or you have great respect for former President Ronald Reagan, then this is an interview you do not want to miss!

Enjoy!

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Newt Gingrich Interview

January 16, 2008 - 10:27 ET

GLENN: From Radio City in Midtown Manhattan, hello, you sick twisted freak. Welcome to the program. This is the third most listened to show in all of America. My name is Glenn Beck. It's wall-to-wall politics today with some great guests. We have Karl Rove coming up. I want to ask him if you could give somebody advice, who would be the candidate right now that you would like to get into the corner and say, okay, look, you are missing it by 5%; here's what you do. I want to talk to him. Also Mitt Romney will be with us, Rudy Giuliani will be with us, and we have Newt Gingrich on the phone with us now. Mr. Gingrich, how are you, sir?

GINGRICH: I'm doing great. How are you?

GLENN: I'm very good. Glad to have you on. I know that you were on with Mr. Limbaugh last, what, a couple of days ago and you said that we're at the end of the George W. Bush era and end of the Reagan era. He disagreed with you. But in many ways I think you're right because I don't think that there are enough conservatives out there, enough people that can cross over into the conservative camp that understand, pull yourself up by the bootstraps and what real conservative values mean. Is that what you're talking about?

GINGRICH: Yeah, what I'm saying is, and I worked with Governor Reagan when he was a candidate and I worked with him when he was President and I served in the U.S. House at that time and he was a tremendous leader who spent from 1964 to 1980 teaching the country conservative values, creating the framework for his presidency and then had an astonishing presidency. But you can't run a country on nostalgia. You can't simply say, gosh, I wish it was 1980 again. What we have to do for our generation is articulate conservativism, show people how we would solve problems and have better solutions than liberals, not cheaper solutions, not solutions that are kind of liberal-like but genuinely different, effective approaches that apply conservative principles in the 21st century and make them effective in solving problems. And by the way, when Governor Reagan first ran for office in 1966, he gave a speech called the Creative Society and he said almost exactly that. He said the job of leaders is to provide real solutions based on values that work and that's the test you ought to hold them to. I think our core argument with liberalism is that it doesn't work but in the end big bureaucracy, big unions, big trial lawyers, the Hollywood left represent a future that will not work for America

GLENN: But too many people in America no longer believe that because there's no one out there that is really truly able to communicate the idea of smaller government and what we have is a bunch of -- why I feel so betrayed by the Republican party is they are no longer conservatives. They no longer -- you know what? It's like the Democrats have become the left, the real left, they become full-fledged socialist. I mean, I think John Edwards should just put a star on his little furry cap and the Republicans have become the old Democrats.

GINGRICH: Look, I think there is something to that and one of the reasons I wrote Real Change was that I've been actively involved in looking at this since I was a Sophomore in high school, actively helped build the Republican party in Georgia from 1960 on. And, you know, and I worked since years to help create a majority in the House. And when I look at what happened to that majority and the degree with which Republicans lost their way, it seemed to me the first step is to be in redefining what the roadmap is and the roadmap is towards a market oriented, economic growth oriented personal responsibility oriented model that actually works dramatically better than red tape and bureaucracy and high taxes.

GLENN: So -- and in your book you talk about the solutions on -- I mean, look. We are -- just look at the top of Drudge. Stocks set to plunge today. Inflation rate worst in 17 years. Those are today's headlines. And yet I saw in the Democratic debate last night they were talking about a stimulus package. It's not about a stimulus package. It is about healthcare, Medicare, Medicaid, prescription drugs and earmarks completely out of control. If we were a company, our stock would be our dollar and it is collapsing. Do you propose a solution for this that people can actually connect to?

GINGRICH: Sure. First of all you don't want to propose a stimulus package. That's like steroids for athletes. You want an economic growth package and that package ought to start with less government spending, less bureaucracy, it ought to start with lower taxes, it ought to focus on how do we get people to create jobs, how do we compete with China and India successfully, how do we get breakthroughs in the cost of energy so that we can become less and less reliant on the Middle East. I think we need that kind of approach rather than how do I pump up the system in a way that is ultimately going to be very destructive. If all we do is transfer more money to government to hire more bureaucrats to give politicians more power, which is the essence of the Senator Clinton's proposal, we guarantee the country in the long run has lower growth with fewer jobs. This is the Michigan solution. You know, Michigan's a state which has an artificial recession, a recession caused by the Democrats in the state legislature and by the Democratic governor. It is not a state which has had to have this kind of future but at the very time when they had economic weakness, the Democrats raised taxes to hire more bureaucrats and the result is in one recent survey, 40% of the students who are graduating from Michigan and Michigan State have indicated they are going to leave Michigan as soon as they graduate because they have to go find a job outside of the state.

GLENN: Is there a candidate out there that you say, oh, if this guy would just do this one thing, he would be able to pull it off?

GINGRICH: No, I think there are several candidates who have promise and I think that this frankly, this extended competition is good for them. I think they are much better candidates today and have a much clearer sense of their message today than they did three months ago. And whether you are talking about Mitt Romney who legitimately earned a big win yesterday or you are talking about Fred Thompson who has a real shot in South Carolina, Governor Huckabee who I think is a much better candidate than he was three months ago, you know, or Rudy Giuliani who's taken, I think, an enormous gamble. But in my new book Real Change, I have a chapter on what Rudy achieved that is amazing, that when you look at New York today -- and you know this because you know the city so well. New York today is the safest big city in the United States. It had a 75% reduction in crime from 1993 to 2006. If you are in Houston, you have four times as big being involved in a crime than you do in New York City. That's an objective fact that's worth studying and that every political leader in the country ought to be looking at and you have to give Mayor Giuliani credit. That's fundamental change. That's a fundamentally different New York City than it was when he was elected.

GLENN: I remember coming to New York City in the early Eighties before he took over and it was a frightening, frightening place. And I saw it after. You know, it was nothing but hookers and crack dealers in Times Square. Now that is practically Disneyland in Times Square and it is all him. And, you know, I wonder, because we were talking about this last night, how Rudy Giuliani's only getting 3% here and 3% there where he was the frontrunner before and I think that it is probably because most people in America never really understood what he did in New York City. You know, I hear that, you know, oh, we're tired of him talking about New York City. But what he did here in New York City was damn near a miracle.

GINGRICH: Well, it was. I think if I had any advice to offer Mayor Giuliani, it would have been to describe for America what you would do for America and then use the city stories only as backup that you could do it. Because I think what happened was, this is my point about not trying to reinvent the Reagan era but trying to take the principles of Reaganism and apply to 2008. People want to know now: So what are you going to do for America now. And frankly has Mayor Giuliani gone to Philadelphia which has had 3,000 people killed since 1988 and has arguably the worst murder rate in the country. Had he done a major speech in Philadelphia on the number of lives that would have been saved if Philadelphia politicians had followed his.

GLENN: Yeah.

GINGRICH: You know, you go down that kind of a list and he could have had a much more direct impact. Now, the question for him's going to be, does his strategy of going to Florida work, is he able to skip all of these early results and not collapse. I just did an interview early this morning with the Miami radio station and they said he has a very, very big presence in Florida and that they thought he had a very real chance of winning the Florida primary. If he does, then he is right in the middle of the game.

GLENN: Yeah. I mean, you look almost like a prophet at this point with the name of your book, Real Change. The thing that drives me nuts is so many people, especially when it comes to Obama, they will say, yeah, we want change. But people don't -- I mean, change is -- you know, going from a steamship to the Zeppelin turned out to be a really bad kind of change. It's not just change for change sake. The name of the book is Real Change. What is that real change?

GINGRICH: Well, let me say that there are three kinds of change. First of all there is the politician who's consultant, a focus who learned to say why didn't you say the word change, I'm for change, let's have change. That has zero meaning. It's, I think, so shallow as to be laughable. Then there are people as you point out like Senator Clinton and Senator Obama who are for the wrong changes. They are for changes that are going to have higher taxes, bigger bureaucracy, more red tape, more trial lawyers, more left wing social policies. We have no evidence anywhere on the planet that that model works. And we have every evidence that when it's tried, the economy gets worse, people get more unhappy, the country gets weaker and so bad change is not a good thing, either. But I think what America, the American people understand and what the Republican party has to come to grips with is the current solutions aren't working. The current systems aren't working. Whether you are talking about our energy policy or whether you're talking about what's happening with the failure of the Detroit schools to teach people or whether you're talking about the visa program. You know, there's a grave danger that London will replace New York as the leading financial center in the world. That has a huge economic complication not just for New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut but that has a big economic implication for every American if, in fact, the center of financial activity leaves the U.S. and goes overseas S. It's going to indirectly affect the cost of every bond issued by every city and every state government. It's going to indirectly affect the difficulty of raising capital for every person who wants to start a small business and I think in that sense we need to take seriously what are the real changes we need in order to make sure that New York remains the leading financial center, what are the changes we need to make sure that American workers can compete with China and India successfully, keep their jobs and increase their prosperity. And what are the changes we need to invent the technology of the future so that we can get off of oil as a primary source of energy and be in a hydrogen economy, in an alternative fuels economy, in a conservation economy, in a package that enables us to basically ignore Saudi Arabia and Iran and Iraq and Russia and Venezuela and just say, fine, if you want to use those petrochemical stops but we don't need to buy them.

GLENN: I'm on a tight schedule today and let me just ask you one quick question before I cut you loose. With what you're seeing in the economy, with what you're seeing in CitiBank and everything else and what I, you know, fear might happen and we would have Democrats come into the White House and congress, how worried are you about our economy and what you think is on the horizon?

GINGRICH: Well, I'm worried about our economy at two totally different levels. I'm worried about it in the short run because there's a grave danger, if you look at the price of oil and the price of gold and if you look at the jump in wholesale prices last year, there's a grave danger we're going to start reinventing the Seventies and have a kind of stagflation where we're not growing economically but we have inflation. That's the worst of all worlds because, you know, you can't reduce interest rates in order to get the economy growing because you have to worry about inflation. And if you raise interest rates enough to deal with inflation, you crush the economy. And that's what happened to us under Jimmy Carter. If we are drifting into that kind of policy, we are in big trouble. The second thing I worry about is longer term. If we're going to compete with China and India in a world of dramatic scientific change, we have to have schools, we have to have young people learning math and science, we have to have a tax code that encourages savings and investing and job creation. We have to have a tax code that encourages buying new equipment and new technology and we have to streamline our red tape and our litigation so that it's desirable to create jobs in the U.S. I think you have both the short-term, how do I get through the next few months, and you have a long term, how do I make sure that the policies I adopt to get through the next few months actually move me towards being more competitive and being more energy independent because those are the two keys to our having a healthy economy over the next 15 years.

GLENN: Author of the book Real Change, Newt Gingrich. Thanks, Newt.

GINGRICH: Thank you.