Newt Gingrich on Principles & Values Former Republican Representative (GA-6) and Speaker of the House

Sub-sections under Principles & Values:
• Past Elections
• Personal Life
• Other issues under Principles & Values

Is Obama a socialist? "Sure, of course he is"

ROMNEY: Pres. Obama takes his political inspiration from the socialist democrats in Europe. Guess what? Europe isn't working in Europe. It's not going to work here.

Tea Party prevents mistake of electing conservative Dems

A: Tea Party will help prevent Republicans from making same mistakes of 2004 and 2006 & help elect conservative democrats. The most important role for the Tea Party is not in elections, but in developing local solutions as we move power out of Washington. Permanently ending age of big government will be hard work and require a team effort between federal, state & local government.

If you're not loyal to U.S., you can't serve in my Cabinet

ROMNEY: Obviously, anybody who would come into my administration would honor their oath to defend and protect the Constitution.

GINGRICH: The Pakistani who emigrated to th US became a citizen, built a car bomb which luckily failed to go off in Times Square, was asked by the federal judge, how could he have done that when he swore an oath to the United States? And he looked at the judge and said, "You're my enemy. I lied." Now, I just want to go out on a limb here. I'm in favor of saying to people, if you're not prepared to be loyal to the United States, you will not serve in my administration, period. We did this in dealing with the Nazis and we did this in dealing with the Communists. And it was controversial both times, and both times we discovered after a while, you know, there are some genuinely bad people who would like to infiltrate our country. And we have got to have the guts to stand up and say no.

Start speaking out in favor of American Exceptionalism

Ten Steps to Restoring American Exceptionalism: Instead of waiting for government to reform itself, we should immediately start living our lives every day in ways that promote freedom, personal responsibility, and self-government. Here are ten thing you can do to help America's future be as exceptional as its past.
1. Learn about American history, exceptional Americans, and America's founding principles.
2. Speak out. Once you feel confident in your knowledge, start speaking out in favor of American Exceptionalism.
3. Question governmental authority at every turn.
4. Teach the children around you.
5. Insist on schools that teach responsibility and the fundamentals of American citizenship.
6. Defeat and replace bad judges.
7. Reestablish the work ethic.
8. Celebrate American holidays: Memorial Day; Veterans Day; the Fourth of July; Thanksgiving.
9. Volunteer in your community.
10. Run for office. Your country needs you.

American Exceptionalism is central to our nation's survival

Declaration assumes God created man

Five habits of liberty sustain American Exceptionalism

America is now facing a mortal threat

After leaving Congress in 1999 with a balanced budget and a booming economy, I certainly did not foresee Republican failure so vast that it allowed left-wing radicals to take over the House, Senate, and Presidency.

America as we know it is now facing a mortal threat.

This danger to America is greater than anything I dreamed possible after we won the Cold War and the Soviet Union in December 1991. We stand at a crossroads: either we will save our country or we will lose it.

Saul Alinsky is clear: Left needs to be dishonest

Many of his "rules" are guidelines for engaging in immoral, dangerous, political dishonesty, including the following:

• "In war the end justifies almost any means."
• "Concern with ethics increases with the number of means available and vice versa."
• "The less important the end to be desired, the more one can afford to engage in ethical evaluation of means."
• "You do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments."

Red-blue split in America is 85% Americans and 15% fringe

The media tell us America is a nation divided between conservative red states and liberal blue states. They tell us that red and blue are equally divided--which is why elections are so close, why Congress seems gridlocked, and why nothing ever seems to get done in Washington.

But that's simply not true. The reality is the American people are united on almost every important issue facing our country. The real division is between red-white-blue America (about 85% of the country) and a fringe on the left (about 15% of the country). Not only have the media perpetuated the myth that the country is equally divided, but the elites on the left fringe have also insisted that their positions hold moral superiority. Neither is true.

Red-vs.-Blue fails: propose Red-White-and-Blue solutions

The American People Want Red-White-and-Blue Solutions: Red-versus-blue can work for one or two election cycles, but eventually it set up three destructive dynamics.

1. It continually narrows the playing field. Candidates give up on persuading anyone on the other side to join their cause and focus instead on narrow, partisan appeals
2. The requirement to maximize turnout with partisan appeals leads to a shrillness that eventually drives away independents & moderates
3. The most effective turnout mechanism is to scare or anger your side into voting, which in the long run leads to a numbness that convinces all but the hardest partisans that your messages are phony and misleading.

Creator as source of liberty is literally written in stone

[One can see in any tour of Washington DC] that our Creator is the source of American liberty--it is literally written into the rock, mortar, and marble of American history.

Media-academic-legal elite imposes radical secularist vision

This elite is especially hard at work in the courts and in the classrooms where it is attempting to overturn two centuries of American self-understanding of religious freedom and political liberty.

In the courts, we see a systematic effort by this elite to purge all religious expression from American public life. The ongoing attempt to remove the words “under God” from the Pledge of Allegiance is only the most well-known of these mounting efforts.

Constitution says freedom OF religion, not FROM religion

The language clearly prohibits the establishment of an official national religion, while at the same time protecting the observance of religion in both private and public spaces. In fact, two of the principal authors of the First Amendment, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who were also our third and fourth presidents, respectively, both attended church services in the Capitol building, the most public of American spaces. During Jefferson’s presidency, church services were also held in the Treasury building and the Supreme Court. Therefore, these Founding Fathers clearly saw no conflict in opposing the establishment of an official religion while protecting the freedom of religious expression in the public square.

Supreme Court hostile to religion, but building based on it

Throughout history, decisions of the Supreme Court have recognized that we are a religious nation. For example, in the 1952 case Zorach vs. Clauson, the court upheld a statute that allowed students to be released from school to attend religious classes.

The most striking religious imagery at the Supreme Court building is that of Moses with the Ten Commandments. Affirming the Judeo-Christian roots of our legal system, they can be found in several places: at the center of the sculpture over the east portico of the building, inside the actual courtroom, and finally, engraved over the chair of the Chief Justice, and on the bronze doors of the Supreme Court itself. There is also a sculpted marble depiction of Mohammad on the wall.

Reform traditional instruments of gov’t for 21st century

Only a grassroots citizens’ movement can insist on the level of change that is needed for our children and grandchildren to have a successful future. Such a citizens’ movement would have to be focused on goals rather than on interest groups. The goals define the America we want our children and grandchildren to have. To achieve this future we will:

1. Defend America and our allies from those who would destroy us.
2. Transform the Social Security system into personal savings accounts.
3. Recenter on the Creator from Whom all our liberties come.
4. Establish patriotic education for our children and patriotic immigration for new Americans.

Focus on 5 major challenges for the 21st century

1. Securing America & its Allies by Defeating America’s Enemies, especially the Irreconcilable Wing of Islam & the rogue dictatorships that empower them.
2. Defending God in the Public SquareThere is no attack on American culture more deadly & more historically dishonest than the unending war against God in America’s public life.
3. Protecting American CivilizationWe should not worry about people who want to come to the US to work hard & become Americans. What should worry us is ensuring that new immigrants learn to be American.
4. Winning in a Global EconomyThe challenge of economi competition from China & India will require transformations in litigation, education, taxation, environmental & health policies.
5. Promoting Active Healthy Aging[We need to reform the] Medicare & Social Security systems for the 21st Century.

Politics is war without blood

Polls are biased left; GOP wins on the issues

Source: Lessons Learned the Hard Way, by Newt Gingrich, p. 73-75 , Jul 2, 1998

GOP represents people, but Dems communicate better

They need to believe that we understand how people feel. This is sometimes an uncomfortable thing for Republicans to make convincing. Often we tend to talk as if we are a group of managers analyzing some problem in a boardroom. Democrats, on the other hand, whatever their other shortcomings, have a passion for both power and people and instinctively know how to focus in on both. You might say that they on the whole come on like a party of lawyers making an appeal to a blue-collar jury, while Republicans come on like a party of managers making an appeal to a board of directors. Guess who is more successful at mass communication?

Baby Boomers becoming Republicans while Dems become outdated

Most of these trends are barel noted in the media while they are happening, with the result that the view of the world that dominates in Washington and New York and Cambridge Mass, is almost 180 degrees different from the view of the world of everyday practical political leaders.

Liberals exploit weakness; conservatives offer strength

Culture of irresponsibility began in 1965

Our civilization is a shared opportunity to pursue happiness

We have gone from being a strong, self-reliant, vigorous society to a pessimistic one that celebrates soreheads and losers jealous of others’ successes. I came out of my two years of reviewing American history convinced that our first need is to rediscover the values we have lost. In my reading, I found five basic principles that I believe form the heart of our civilization:
1. The common understanding we share about who we are and how we came to be
2. The ethic of individual responsibility
3. The spirit of entrepreneurial free enterprise
4. The spirit of invention and discovery
5. Pragmatism and the concern for craft and excellence.

Search for progress in successful lessons of the past

Many newspaper editorial boards contain socialists

To call someone socialist is not necessarily to questions that person's patriotism. In the press reaction to the socialist tag was the suggestion that somehow Gingrich was reviving McCarthyism. It is a case of the offended protesting too much. Socialism has a lengthy American tradition, even if it is now on the wane. After all, President Clinton's Secretary of Labor, Robert Reich, proudly called himself a democratic socialist in the days after his Rhodes scholarship. As Gingrich said, "I'd be glad to get you a collection of editorials that only make senses if people believe that government's good and the free market is bad."

If you're afraid or broke or uneducated, you're not free

If you can't afford to leave the public housing project, you're not free. If you don't know how to finds a job and don't know how to create a job, you're not free. If you can't find a place that will educate you, you're not free. If you're afraid to walk to the store because you could get killed, you're not free.

And so as all of us in the coming months sing that song, "As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free," I want us to dedicate ourselves to reach out in a genuinely nonpartisan way.

1998: Resigned after election loss of House seats

1994 goal of durable conservative majority lasted until 2008

Newt Gingrich's 1994 "Contract with America" campaign led the party to one of its greatest triumphs in modern political history--and sparked another, younger generation of conservatives to action. In Bill Clinton's first midterm election, Republicans rode their anti-government rhetoric to victory. They captured both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years. Six years later, George W. Bush added the presidency, and for a time Republicans controlled all the levers of power in Washington and held a majority of the governorships, stirring dreams of a durable conservative majority long into the future. Bush's descent brought an end to those aspirations. Republicans were adrift and pessimistic about the future of their party.

After 2000, Republicans failed to govern successfully

1. In Great Britain, Thatcher failed to change the culture of the Conservative Party, which reverted to an unthinking, non-reform style as soon as she left office.
2. Reagan failed to change the culture of presidential Republicans; the first Bush administration got rid of virtually all the Reaganites as soon as it could, and within two years was cutting deals with the Democrats to raise taxes.
3. Those of u who believed in a reform-oriented, majority Republican Party could not change the minority mindset of the House Republicans. The minority thinkers had no idea what it had taken to win the majority in 1994, and they had no interest in learning.

1979: wrote Art of Transformation; 1990s: implemented it

1. What do you value?
2. What vision of success do you have for achieving what you value?
3. What metrics would tell you whether you are making progress toward your visions?
4. What strategies would enable you to achieve your vision?
5. What projects would enable you to implement your strategies successfully? (A project is a definable, delegatable achievement and the key to entrepreneurial management.)
6. What tasks have to be done well to complete each project?

1998: Proceeded with unpopular impeachment "because we can"

Later in November, Erskine Bowles had a very different conversation: Newt told Erskine that they were going to go forward with the impeachment despite the election results and the fact that many moderate Republicans didn't want to vote for it. When Erskine asked Newt why they would proceed with impeachment instead of other possible remedies such as censure or reprimand, the Speaker replied, "Because we can."

The right-wing Republicans who controlled the House believed that they had now paid for impeachment so they should just go on and do it before the new Congress came in. The right-wingers in the House caucus were seething over their defeat. Now they were going to seize back control of the Republican agenda through impeachment.

1972: State chair for CREEP, committee to re-elect Nixon

But the pragmatic graduate student, in 1972, went from opposition to Nixon to being state chairman for the CREEP, the committee to reelect Nixon.

1960: first political activism: student volunteer for Nixon

His political activism began in March, 1960, his junior year at Baker High, when he volunteered in the presidential campaign of Richard Nixon. Gingrich and his classmate and closest friend, Jim Tilton, dreamed of creating a Republican majority. The classmate remembers that Newt's goal was to be the first Republican governor in Georgia since Reconstruction and then to use that prominence to vault him into presidential politics.

He volunteered for the Nixon campaign and had his first taste of political defeat. Newt was shaken after Nixon's loss. He took it hard.

Cooperate on Contract, but no compromise

"At the end of the opening day, we will introduce the 10 bills we described in the Contract. We will read the Contract as the opening item of business every day for the first 100 days, and at the end, the American people will be able to say they saw a group of people who actually said what they were going to do and kept their word.

"We have an enormous amount of work to do. All I can promise you in the side of the House of Republicans is that we're going to be open to working with everyone, that we will cooperate with anyone, and we will compromise with no one, and that 's the base of where we're going and that what we believe this election is all about."

Four House Ethics complaints against "Newt Inc." GOPAC

1. Gingrich's college course constituted a political activity disguised as an academic endeavor and was improperly financed
2. He abused his office by allowing an auction for a book won by a publisher with business before Congress
3. He accepted free time on cable TV for his lectures
4. He plugged the toll-free phone number through which to order his Renewing American Civilization lecture tapes while he was speaking on the House floor.

Authored Conservative Opportunity Society manifesto

"Marianne and I went to see Dick Nixon late in 1982," Gingrich told me. "He said, 'You can't change the House yourself. You have to go back and form a group.' You could say that the idea for the COS came from Nixon. He was responsible for a great deal of political change in this country."

The idea had been germinating well before Nixon offered his advice. Gingrich had spent four years seeing his fellow Republicans in the House react instead of act. The group met weekly and planned.

Those who argue that Gingrich in inconsistent or a slave to pollsters and public opinion would note the 1983 Conservative Opportunity Society manifesto. As outlined in a conference in Baltimore to signal the arrival of the COS, it is remarkable for its consistency with 1995's Renewing American Civilization lectures.

Parents married only a few months; named after stepfather

The baby born June 17, 1943, was named Newton Leroy McPherson. His mother was just 17. His father, Newton McPherson, was away in the Navy, soon to be sued for divorce by Kathleen.

Newton and Kit, as she was known, had been married when she was just 16 year that her father was killed in a car accident. Newton was 19 and a mechanic. Kit Gingrich likes the story of how she left Newton three days after her wedding, but in fact, it was several months. Newton came home after a night of carousing. He and Kit quarreled, Newton struck her, and Kit fled to her mother's house, which would be Newt's boyhood home.

When Newt was three years old, Kit married a young Army veteran, Bob Gingrich. Newt's sister was Candace Gingrich, 23 years Newt's junior.

Dated his geometry teacher in high-school; married her later

"If you live your life hostage to everybody else's decisions," he told the Washington Post years later, "you either have to live a very narrow life or you have to spend a lot of time in pain. I hoped my mother would come..I never held it against her. I never held it against him."

Contract with America: 10 bills in 1st 100 days of Congress.

As Republican Members of the House of Representatives and as citizens seeking to join that body, we propose not just to change its policies, but to restore the bounds of trust between the people and their elected representatives. That is why, in this era of official evasion and posturing, we offer instead a detailed agenda for national renewal, a written commitment with no fine print.

Within the first hundred days of the 104th Congress, we shall bring to the House Floor the following bills, each to be given a full and open debate, each to be given a clear and fair vote, and each to be immediately available this day for public inspection and scrutiny:
1. The Fiscal Responsibility Act: Balanced budget amendment & line item veto
2. The Taking Back Our Streets Act: More prisons, more enforcement, more death penalty
3. The Personal Responsibility Act: Limit welfare to 2 years & cut welfare spending
4. The Families Reinforcement Act: Use tax code to foster families
5. The American Dream Restoration Act: Repeal marriage tax; cut middle class taxes
6. The National Security Restoration Act: No US troops under UN command; more defense spending
7. The Senior Citizens Fairness Act: Reduce taxes on Social Security earnings
8. The Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act: Incentives to small businesses
9. The Common Sense Legal Reforms Act: Limit punitive damages
10. The Citizen Legislature Act: Term limits on Congress