Winning the Future

February 25, 2005

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording

9:45 a.m.	Registration
10:00	Introduction:	David Gerson, AEI
	Presentation:	Newt Gingrich, AEI
11:30	Adjournment

Proceedings:
MR. GERSON:  Good morning.  I'm David Gerson, AEI's executive vice president.  I want to welcome you and thank you for braving the weather.  I'm sure that your decision to brave the elements this morning will be well worth it.  AEI is proud to be offering the debut of Newt Gingrich's exciting new book, "Winning the Future, the 21st Century Contract With America."

When it comes to a contract with America, Newt Gingrich is the expert.  In 1994 Newt offered the American people a choice to vote for a contract that reflected their values, and they responded overwhelmingly.  Compared to 1990, there were--the number of democratic votes declined by a million.  The number of republican votes increased by nine million.  And the result was the first House majority for republicans in 40 years.  Newt used that mandate in a big way.  He brought the first major tax cut in 16 years, brought the first four consecutive balanced budgets in 70 years, and reduced the welfare roles by 60 percent.

The 21st century contract with America proposed in this book covers a very wide range of coverage.  It includes security issues.  We learn that North Korea is the world's largest exporter of ballistic missiles that results in 15 to 30 percent of their total exports.  We learn a lot about domestic matters.  That a young person who starts a health savings account and is one of the lucky 80 percent of people who don't have a serious health illness can expect to have a quarter of a million dollars accumulated in their personal account by the time they retire.

At AEI we believe in markets.  Of the 175,000 books published annually, fewer than 100 of those hardcover non fiction books make it to the national charts for even a week.  And fewer than a third of those last four weeks on the charts.  That this book has been on the New York Times Bestseller List for all six weeks since its release, climbing to number six, and that it's already in its third run with 200,000 books in print tells us quite a lot.

Newt will start the discussion this morning with a brief summary of some of the ideas embodied in this book.  Please join me in offering a warm welcome for our colleague, senior fellow New Gingrich.

[Applause.]

MR. GINGRICH:  Let me start by saying I was listening to David.  I don't know if you even remember this, but I was thinking all the way back 24 years ago.  Actually, longer, when we first met you were working for Dave Stockman.  I was a freshman.  We were writing a budget proposal.  Stock--this has been my whole career, Stockman was the brains behind that.  David was the brains behind Stockman.  And I was basically the guy who was making noise.  But they were giving me the ammunition to make noise with.  And we'll come back to this book in just a second.

Then in '81 David, both Davids, David Stockman and David Gerson went down to the Office of Management Budget working with President Ronald Reagan and began to look at how to dramatically change the government.  And '81 is one of only two years since the Second World War that domestic percent of GDP and we were very horrified that it would actually go up to maybe 9.

And when you look at the world from the standpoint of share of GDP and you got the problem big enough, you realize you couldn't solve them inside the box they were in.  So one of the people who sat through these intimate original briefings on the scale of our challenge was the then sophomore head of the Policy Committee named Dick Cheney.  And Cheney came back and was briefing me and walking me through these numbers in the summer of '81.  And I just, I looked at the numbers said as a historian, you'll never find, you'll never solve these inside the current box.  It's not possible.  You'll never get enough political pressure, enough political will power.  From that I began working on a book that came out in 1984 called, "A Window of Opportunity," and talking about the idea that we had a chance to really do some fairly big things.  It's actually a book which 21 years ago talks about terrorism, for example, and talks about health and a variety of other issues.

The book that is now out, and I actually didn't know till you mentioned it that they're now on with the third printing, which I'm delighted to hear.  And Wagner [ph.] has been a very, very good as a publisher to work with.  This book has a historic framework and a principle framework that I want to take a minute or two to explain.  Because I think it's part of what makes what we're doing different.  And it makes part of why I enjoy so deeply being at the American Enterprise Institute and having a chance to associate with colleagues who think about big ideas and who argue about history.  And I was just talking to my dear friend Ben Wattenberg whose new book "Fewer," is just remarkable in a seminal moment of change in terms of what's happening to population patterns and expectations that really is important for us to deal with.  Because if, for example, Europe is going to lose 200 million in net population over the next 25 or 30 years, that's a big deal.  That transcends whatever happened at a press conference with Gerard Schroder two days ago.  And these are profound underlying patterns.  And AEI is a place which has a long history going back to people like Justice Scalia when he was just a young academic working on regulatory reform in this building on these kind of ideas.

So I want to talk first about the genealogy, if you will, of the book, and then about the principles of the book.  And then I'll talk briefly about the book.  And then we'll, I know enough of you are pretty active people that I will toss it open and have, I think, a pretty lively opportunity to participate.

First in genealogy, I was very much shaped as a high school and college student by Barry Goldwater's constant conservative.  And the degree to which Goldwater began talking about a different way of solving our problems that had been the dominant elite.  Then as a senior in college I saw Ronald Reagan give his nationwide address in October of '64.  And in many ways it permanently changed my understanding of what we were capable of.  In '66 I watched Reagan run for Governor.  And you saw the rise of an intelligent populous modern conservativism.  And it was all those things.  People, I think, at the time on the left would never have used the word intelligent to apply to Ronald Reagan, but thanks to the terrific work of Kiron Skinner [ph.] and Marty Anderson and Annalise Henderson [ph.], we now know that Reagan personally wrote over 600 essays on government in the late 1970s, which became his radio show.  But that they were Reagan's, they're in his own handwriting.  We know that he, in fact, had thought a great deal at great depth about how Washington works and how government works.  And that he was prepared to lead in ways that were quite extraordinary.

So in many ways I saw what we did in the Contract With America as standing on Ronald Reagan's shoulders.  We had participated as young Reaganites in the seventies.  We had worked with the Administration in the eighties.  At one point I went down with a group of hard line activist younger members and we complained to the President, this is about 1987, that he wasn't doing enough.  and we all just yammered at him for almost an hour.  And I'll never forget, as we were talking out, he reached over, put his hand on my shoulder, Reagan, any President that puts his hand on your shoulder gets your attention totally, Reagan was one of those historic figures where you really felt, okay, and he's put his hand on my shoulder and he said look, "It took us a half century to get in this mess.  I have been the first seven years.  Maybe you guys will have to do some heavy lifting on your own later."  And he just smiled and wandered off.  Well, I never forgot that.

So in '94, if you look at the Contract With America, it is essentially standing on Reagan's shoulders.  We win the welfare reform fight, but that's a fight Reagan began in 1970 at the National Governor's Association.  Where not a single governor supported it.  Twenty-six years later, we've won the argument and Margaret Thatchers marvelous phrase, "First you win the argument, then you win the vote."  We've won the argument.  And when Clinton vetoed it twice, and we sent it down a third time, in the New York Times there was a poll that showed 92 percent of the country favored welfare reform, including 88 percent of the people on welfare.  Well, at that point you've won, you know, it's going to happen.  And Clinton, of course, promptly announced he was glad he had invented it and he was sorry it took so long.  He was thrilled to have gotten it done despite the Congress.  And we went on.

But that was the culmination of a quarter century of work.  And so sometimes in this city people will say, well, what are you going to do today that's practical, by which they mean usually trivial and small.  Because actually Ronald Reagan clearly in 1970 wasn't being practical.

Now, as a result of having passed welfare reform, 60 percent of the people who were on welfare are now either at school or at work.  The system is dramatically healthier.  The average income of those people has risen significantly.  Child abuse has declined.  Spouse abuse has declined.  And almost nobody really argues seriously that the reform was wrong.  But it took a long effort.

In many ways, and I was very pleased when in introducing me at an inaugural event, Ken Mehlman, the Chairman of the Campaign, and now the Republican National Committee Chairman, said to the group of republicans who were gathered that the 2004 campaign stood on the contract.  And I think that's right.  I think if you look at what we were fighting for and you look at what President George W. Bush is fighting for, just as we stood on Reagan's shoulders, he stands on the shoulders of the contract.  And in a sense I would argue "Window of Opportunity" now comes right--rather, "Winning the Future," comes right back and stands on President Bush's shoulders.  There's a continuum here, a genealogy of ideas that now stretches almost 50 years.  And it is building momentum.  It's getting clearer, more powerful, better understood.

I was very impressed at CPAC, the conservative session on Saturday, with how many young people were there.  Not just that there were 1,000 people, but well over half of them were young people representing the next generation of conservatives and the next generation of new ideas.   So that's the background.  This book should be seen as part of a half century long process of trying to understand what is modern conservativism, how do we meet the challenges of a global world, what do we do about scientific change, what's the nature of--

[Two minute blank spot on tape.]

MR. GINGRICH:  --the following four basic ideas.  First, ideas really matter.  It is ideas that in the end made Franklin D'Eleanor Roosevelt remarkable, not just pure tactical skill.  It is ideas that made Ronald Reagan a genuinely revolutionary figure who defeated the Soviet empire.  It is ideas that define the future, because it's ideas people rally around that give them a chance to organize power and to get something positive done.  And a political movement without ideas is essentially neolistic [ph.].  Maybe important to people who want power, but it is utterly destructive to the average person, because they're loaning power for no reason.  But a movement that starts with ideas, in fact, has enormous moral purpose and can then be measured against its ideas.  So when we passed the, when we signed the contract, we were setting up a yard stick.  And we did precisely what that promised.  In the first 93 days, we voted on every single item in the contract, which is exactly what we promised we would do.  Over 70 percent of them got passed, signed into law during the first couple years up through 1997 with the Balanced Budget Act.

And somebody pointed out the other day, Major Garrett has a new book out that goes back and looks at the scale of change involved.  You could make a pretty good argument that last Friday when the President signed class action litigation reform into law, that that actually had first come up as a piece of the contract.  And so it was one more step 11 years of continuing to actually implement these values.

So, first, ideas really matter.  Second, the country really matters.  You look at the great changes in American political history.  They don't start in Washington.  You will not find a single great change that starts in Washington.  They start in the countryside.  Whether it is the rise of the Federalist, the rise of the Jeffersonian, the rise of the Jacksonian, the rise of the Republican Party, the rise of the Progressive Movement, the development of the New Deal, the rise of Ronald Reagan and Modern Conservativism, again and again the wave of change begins because people across the country talk to themselves.  They decide this is a better solution for a better way of life.  And then they go to their politicians and say, what are you going to do?  And the politician, after a while, figures out I can't go home without an answer.  So the politician gathers their staff together and says, okay, this has come up at four consecutive town hall meetings.  What are we going to do?

And so my advice both to democrats and republicans is, if you want really big change, figure out how you're going to have a conversation with the country, and then the country will have a conversation with the Capitol.  But it is the country which leads the Capitol.  The Capitol merely administers the country.  And that's a profound, I think, failure of Washington centric news media and Washington centric analysts who over value the elites and under--talking about strategically, not tomorrow morning's gossip about who is going to be subcommittee chairman or will Amendment 23 pass.  But when you're talking about strategic ways of change, they, in fact, begin with the people and then force the politicians to follow.  They almost never begin with the politician.  And the waves of change begin with ideas.

The third thing I would argue, the first is that ideas matter.  And the second is that the grassroots, the country really drives the system.  The third point I would argue is that the changes have to seem practical and doable positive.  And here's where I want to disagree with some of my conservative friends.  Because conservativism under FDR was a minority position and basically psychologically remained a minority position till Reagan, conservatives never thought they had the right to govern.  So the attitude was, we have to do this really painful thing.  We're going to only have power for two years anyway.  So we better get this done right now because after all, they're going to throw us out.  That's actually the opposite of good market economics.  Can you imagine WalMart saying, we'd like you to drop by the store.  Our values are lower, our prices are higher, the goods are pretty shoddy, but, hey, you owe it to us.

The theory of a free enterprise system is that you should have more choices of higher quality at lower cost.  I want to repeat this, because it's so radically different than the way modern liberal bureaucratic redistributionist government works.  You should get up every day and say in a science-based, entrepreneurial driven, market-oriented society, I expect more choices of higher quality at lower price.  And all of you who, for example, have a cell phone that takes pictures, are living proof of this, all of you who have black [inaudible] are living proof of this, all of you who are alive today because of a magic drug that wouldn't have been here, are living proof of this.  Market systems really do work.

Now, how well do they work?  Well, when we deregulated airlines, and I was the ranking republican on the Aviation Subcommittee at one point, and I was the congressman who represented the Atlanta Airport when deregulation was underway, because we deregulated and went to price competition, because we invented systems like travelocity and expedia where you could actually see what the prices are before you made a decision, and because we have an open entry system where new competitors can actually start up, prices since 1978 have dropped from 23 cents a mile to 12, less than 12 cents a mile in constant dollars.

Now, apply that to health care.  What would happen to all of our out year budget projections if you got half of that rate?  And I want you to think about the core, because the core message here, and this is one of the things that happens when you get to Washington, people arrive in Washington and say markets really work, but we're going to have to coerce you into the next thing.  So, for example, a practical real application.  I am for a Social Security personal savings account that is voluntary in terms of choosing it.  Because if the younger generation--if the account really works, the younger generation will choose it.  But they'll choose it because it works.  They won't choose it because conservative social engineers coerced them into the conservative model.  And I think the idea of re-establishing the right to choose, whether it's in education, whether it's in health, across a whole range of things, really begins to create markets.  And I think that we ought to be looking at markets.

I think it's very interesting that we have had control of the Congress now for a decade, we've had control of the White house for five years, and yet if you look around the planet and say tell me the 10 most interesting privatization projects, they're not here because we're worn out about the idea of privatization.  So we try to fix Amtrak as a government bureaucracy.  Strikes me as stunningly implausible.  We try to, we still run almost all of our airports as public monopolies.  Go look at Britain.  I'm suggesting that there's this zone where in the country we believe in these things.  We actually say them in our rotary club speech.  We come back to Washington and go, oh, yeah, but now we've got to be practical.

So the third stand is to take the values of the big ideas that the country wants, translate them into practical, doable, positive solutions where people actually want the solution because they will be better off.  And that really is the mark of most great successful American political movements.  In the end, they offered better.  Go back and read the Jeffersonians, read the Jacksonian, read Abraham Lincoln on the Transcontinental Railroad, the Homestead Act, the Land Grant College, the Agricultural Extension Service.  It was about better.

The last great principle, the world is bigger than you are.  You're going to make mistakes.  You had better learn from them rapidly and fix it.  If we're going to be a governing movement, the goal has got to be not to say we never do anything wrong.  The goal has got to be to say, anybody who finds a better way to do it, tell us quick.  Anybody who sees us make a mistake, tell us quick.  Because the key to governing for a very long time is to respond to the mistake and fix it faster than reality can bite you.  And if you can't do that, you can't govern, because the world is too big.  It's too complicated.

Reagan was very good at this.  People tend to underestimate.  But there's a great story.  When Reagan finally decided that he actually had to raise taxes.  And he said that his feet were locked in concrete.  And he went to a press conference and he stood there staring at the reporters, and they were staring back.  And he said, "Did you hear that sound?"  And they all said, "What are you talking about?"  He said, "That was the sound of concrete cracking."

Because he had just gotten to a point in California where he had done all he could do and he couldn't fix it in his judgment.  Reagan was very good at going in a general direction.  But because he expected to be in the majority, he took a half loaf or a quarter loaf or a third of a loaf, because he was coming back in the morning.  And he just was relentless about never giving up.

And I think sometimes we get too rigid and then we have to kid ourselves about what we're doing.  And I'm very clear in the book, for example, on Iraq.  Where I think there are serious lessons we have to learn about the summer of 2003 because in the long run we're going to be facing similar challenges.  And we have to learn to do them right.  And that requires, frankly, a willingness to be self-aware, a willingness to be self-critical.  And that's very hard with people in power.  So I've given you a swift overview.

On the book, itself, I'll just say very briefly there are five major themes.  First, we have real national security problems.  And by the way, I think we have real national security problems much deeper than the system is dealing with.  If you read Porter Goss's [ph.] testimony last week about the likelihood of a weapon of mass destruction coming across the Mexican border, it is a very sobering testimony.  So we can't say we haven't been warned unlike 9-11.  But we're still not doing anything like enough about it.

The second section is on recentering our rights on our Creator.  And this has led, I think, to the most confusion with the news media.  This is a very core question.  Lots of people on the left prattle on about human rights.  And they have the right to this and the right to that.  My only question is, where do those rights come from?  Because if they don't come from your Creator, why do you think they're rights?  If you just randomly gather protoplasm, you have a current contract theory.  I think it's a very central question in the future of America.  We are the only society to say explicitly we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  Now, the reason that's central is in this society, God gives you rights which you loan to the government, which is why the Constitution begins, "We the people of the United States," because sovereignty is centered in us as individuals, because we got it from God.  Sovereignty is not centered in the state.  It's very different than the European model.  In the European model the state is the center of sovereignty and the state grants the people.  Very, big difference.

This is a debate we need very profoundly.  And I think we have sort of a clinching argument in the book because we have a chapter on a walking tour to the Creator in Washington.  And I think it is impossible to take that tour starting with the Declaration of Independence, going through, for example, Jefferson, the Jefferson Memorial, and not come to the conclusion that historically you cannot explain America without centering our political system and our political rights on the nature of God and on the fact that we actually believe that God plays a central role in American history.

The third principle is, and I have as a secondary part of that, by the way, a fairly clear definition of how Jefferson dealt with the courts in 1802 when he wiped out slightly over half of all federal circuit judges in the Judiciary Act of 1802, 18 out of 35 were abolished.  And I suggest modestly that we just take two in the Ninth Circuit, the two people who thought that we did not have the right to say, "One Nation under God," in the Pledge of Allegiance, and simply abolish their jobs.  It would send a solitary signal to the larger system.  That under our Constitution, judges are not the final arbiter in the Constitution.  Jefferson says explicitly that would be an allegory.  This is a 1958 war in court, abrogation of power.  Under the Constitution, there is a balance of power.  There are three branches,  Each branch has its own responsibilities.  No branch can instruct the other two.  But two of the three can always beat the third.  And that's what Jefferson did in 1802.

The third area is on patriotic immigration and patriotic education.  I believe, just based on having done a lot of talk radio and a lot of speeches in the last seven weeks, the biggest gap in Washington understanding of the country is on the issue of our borders.  And I think people really in this city don't want to talk about it, don't want to think about it.  But we need a comprehensive approach to national security, immigration, and citizenship.  And I have advocated a four part plan.  One that we do, in fact, need to control the borders for practical national security reasons, two, that in order to control the borders you should have a green card program where people give you either a thumb print or an iris scan.  You know who they are.  They are committed to paying taxes.  They are here as economic guests.  That does not presume they'll become citizens, but it separates out the law abiding from the criminals, the drug dealers, and the terrorists.  Third, that we ought to have an ability to deport people who are here illegally in 72 hours.  That this notion that the 14th Amendment somehow applies to people who happen to physically be here illegally is nonsense.  And I think Congress can write that in a way that the courts can't overrule it.  And fourth that we want people to become citizens, but to become citizens we want them to learn about American history and we want them to learn English.  And that's what I would call patriotic citizenship.

Now, in that context we also have to reform our schools because young people need to learn how to be American.  It's very important.  America is a cultural DNA.  It's not a racial DNA.  You know, unlike the Chinese, there aren't Americans.  You don't, you're not born American.  You may be born in America, but you learn to be an American.  And that's a function of learning our history.  It's a function of learning things like the rule of law, the work ethic, dreaming big dreams.  A whole series of things we do sort of automatically that are very different from the rest of the world.  And I think it's one of the reasons the rest of the world finds it hard, sometimes, to deal with us.  Because, in fact, we're so much more open in society, so much more change oriented, so much more willing to take risks than almost every place else in the planet.

The fourth area is competing with China and India.  I think it's time to have a national debate on this.  China and India, it will be the first time since 1840 that there are markets larger than the U.S.  This doesn't frighten me.  It's a fact.  We should want the Chinese and Indian people to do well.  If they do well, there are a lot of them.  So if we want to compete with them, we're going to have to roll up our sleeves.  I think we have to reform four areas:  litigation, regulation, taxation, and education.  We have to particularly fix math and science education because you cannot possibly compete with China when they're producing six times as many engineers as we are, and we're producing more lawyers than they are.  So our lawyers can sue our engineers who are even less productive.  And that means, everything said, and I have a list in the book of very, very profound changes in how I would approach math and science education.

But the core debate is pretty straight forward.  We either need to adopt a European strategy of elegant decay or we need to adopt an American strategy of changing as much as it takes to compete head on and win the competition.  But anything in between is just going to be a mess.

Now, the European system is pretty straight forward.  They are not going to compete with China and India.  They're going to hide behind walls.  They're going to decay gradually.  They're going to have a relatively smaller population over time.  They're actually not going to have much of an unemployment problem in the next 30 years because they're not going to have a lot of new people coming in the market.  On the other hand, we have the opposite attitude.  We have the highest birth rate.  This comes straight out of Ben's book.  We have the highest birth rate of any industrial country.  We have a fairly large number or migrants.  We increase jobs regularly.  We're a very dynamic society.  We grew 23 percent more than Europe in the 1990s.  And we are capable of, in fact, leading the planet for 50 to 100 years if we get our act together and pass really profound reforms.

The last section of the book is on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.  Because the truth is, if we don't fix those three before the babyboomers retire, we will bankrupt the country.  You cannot balance the Federal budget if you don't transform health.  And health is the most complicated single part of American society.  And so transforming the health system should be the number one goal of the two budget committees in the Capitol.  I think it should be the highest goal of the Administration.  Because if they don't transform the health system and get to a system that is individually centered, information rich, using information technology and prevention oriented, they are not going to be able to afford the current system.  The current system is not fixable, in my judgment.  It is just going to get more and more expensive and more and more dysfunctional.  And so we need very profound transformation, both to provide the right level of health as the babyboomers age, but also to be able to afford the system.

So that's a sweeping overview.  And on Social Security, obviously, I strongly favor a personal Social Security savings account.  My sense of urgency is not some abstract public policy question.  I mean, as a practicing politician, you can't get the American people worried about 2018.  I'll give you a simple test in your own life.  If I called you and said 10 years from today your roof is going to need fixing, would you like to sign the contract this afternoon?  You would say to me, how about calling back in 9 years, 10 months, and let's have that conversation.  All of you would.  And you're not wrong.  The urgency ought to be simple.  Every day young people, the young people in this room are denied the opportunity to have a personal Social Security savings account, they are cheated of that day's compound interest.  So we make them poorer every day we refuse to give them that option.  And that ought to be our sense of urgency. The young Americans deserve to have the best possible plan for saving for their own retirement.  It creates a huge pool of capital for us to compete with China and India.  And, by the way, it is what Franklin D'Eleanor Roosevelt described in his original message where he said, "Of course, in the long run, this will evolve into a personal savings account."  So we ought to be loyal to the tradition of Franklin D'Eleanor Roosevelt and create the personal savings accounts he described.  I would do it as an option.  I would do it so young people had the choice.  And I would do it as quick as we could, because there's no reason for us to cheat them of their right to have a better future.

So I've given you a sweeping overview.  And I appreciate, David, you letting me have this much time.  And let's, we have several microphones, I think.  So let's toss it wide open and we'll take questions.

Did you want to comment first?

MR. GERSON:  No.

If you would simply raise your hand, we'll bring you a microphone.  And please wait for the microphone so that everyone can hear your question.  We have an enormous amount to talk about.

The first question.

MR.         ;  Thank you.

Mr. Speaker, staying with Social Security, what do you think is going to happen between now and 2006 and what affect will it have on the election?  Because if we lose the House, because of a bad situation with that particular, with a Social Security plan and the seniors and the AARP have set up camp in one area and conservatives in another, what do you see happening and what are the two possible outcomes in your opinion?

MR. GINGRICH:  Well, I think it depends on whether or not the Administration decides to, in a sense, pull back and relaunch the discussion.  If, if you make it optional, if you focus only on the right of people to have an account, if you do it with off budget financing and you do it in a way that you clearly will generate more capital than you're going to borrow, so the net affect on interest rates is downward, not upward, I think you can probably make a case for creating those accounts.

I think if we stay in the current muddle, it will just disappear.  I mean, it will be a lost opportunity.  I don't think, and this is actually a sign of their maturity, I do not think the House and Senate Republicans will try to pass a bad bill. Because I think they know it will be politically a disaster.  So I think that there's a chance that what you'll see them do is pull back a full step, rethink it, and come back at it again a second time.

But I do think you could make a case, as long as seniors were guaranteed nothing was going to change for their accounts, I think you could make a very powerful case for the right to have individual accounts that people voluntarily can choose.  And I think you could probably pass that.  And actually, again, my theory of politics is you ought to pass things people will like you passing so that they decide to re-elect you.  If you do it right, I think you also have a profound affect on the long term costs of Social Security.

MR.          :  Mr. Speaker, I want to ask a question going back to your remarks about the mentality that conservative republicans had for such a long time, that they weren't entitled to govern, that they had this minority mentality for 40, 50 years.  It strikes me that, I wonder if you agree that it's necessary to accept that you're a minority in order to enter into a period of self-renewal where you do generate new ideas.  In other words, it seems to me that one of the problems the democratic party has today is precisely its sense of entitlement, that it deserves to rule the country even though it keeps losing elections, as best exemplified by Ted Kennedy's recent speech saying, Although we're a minority, we represent a majority of Americans."

It seems to me impossible for a party to actually enter a period of self-renewal if it has that attitude.  And so historically speaking, wasn't that, in fact, necessary for republicans to have a minority mentality in order for them to renew themselves and become what they became under Reagan and yourself?

MR. GINGRICH:  I'm not sure I'd say it that way.  Only, Steve, because I don't think Reagan ever thought he was in the minority.  I think he actually would have said--Teddy Kennedy's speech.  So, but I think that's something different.  I think you have to, you have to come to the conclusion that you're in a different era.  And the problem with liberal democrats today is they think that somehow they can prop up the era that once had them as a dominant party.  And they don't, they cannot come to grips with the fact that that's gone.  That it's over.  And I think that that's the bigger thing.

Reagan, remember, Reagan, as you know, because you've written a biography of him, I mean, Reagan was an FDR democrat.  And that, that gave him a natural majoritarian viewpoint.  He was also a movie star who wanted his movies to sell and I think only got one positive review from the New York Time for "Kings Row," and all of his other movies got panned.  So he was already hardened to the idea that probably they wouldn't like his politics either.  And I think that was a great asset for him.  That he was, as long as people, you know, went to the people and bought popcorn, he was winning.  And so he could ignore the elites in a way that was very hard for most republicans to do.

I think what the--to take the case of the democrats, and I would argue, by the way, that the republicans have the same problem right now.  The things that made us a majority aren't the things that will keep us as a majority.  Just having the Congress churn out legislation to prop up the welfare state on behalf of more highways is not, in fact, going to sustain a republican majority.  Because we are, in fact, a party of reformists who want vastly more than that out of our government leaders.  We want to change Washington, not merely manage it.  And so I think that we are actually psychologically maybe have the same challenge the democrats do.  And that's part of why I wrote "Winning the Future," as kind of a handbook to say, look, you need to think about a 21st Century contract, because you need to remain the party of reform.  And I would argue that if both parties focused on the customer, which is the citizen, you know, I mean, I don't understand, for example, how--I just did Paul W. Smith's radio show yesterday in Detroit.  And Paul W. was saying that the Detroit City schools were offered $200 million from a private benefactor in order to create charter schools so the children of Detroit could actually have a choice about getting a good education.  And the Teacher's Union and the politicians rejected the $200 million.

Now, I understand as a power struggle inside Detroit why the people who are living off the carcass of the collapsing system don't want to give it up.  That's, that's understandable.  And there, there--as somebody once said to a young person, there may be a wreckage, but I'll own the ruins.  You know, I understand that part of it.  But what about all the kids who aren't getting an education?  I mean, shouldn't there be some liberal who cares enough about those children to actually stand up and defend their right to expect--that's what I find fascinating on the left.  Is that in each of their zones they are not allowed to talk about the problems that need to be solved on behalf of their constituency.

The challenge we have on the right is there's a grave danger we're going to become the party of government, rather than the party of changing government.  And that would be a disaster for us.  I mean, if we become the party that explains Washington to the country, rather than the party that explains the country to Washington, we have no natural base.  And republicans need to really understand that.  We have succeeded, starting with Reagan, as the reform party.  And to the degree we remain the reform party, I think we can be a majority for a long time.

MR.          :  You've already eluded to two problems at once.  And I'm trying to get a picture of where we go from here.  We know that America, American children graduate high school at the bottom of the world in math and science education.  We also know that numerically Asia and various parts of Asia are numerically way larger than America in the future.  We don't seem to have the will to do things.  We're spending $1 billion a day on education across America in every kind of spectrum of system, but nothing is coming from it.  Where do we go from here?

MR. GINGRICH:  Well, you know, there's an old saying that if you're in a hole, quit digging.  And I think that relates to the current model of education reform.  Starting in 1983, under President Reagan, when "A Nation at Risk," was published, we have said to ourselves regularly for 22 years, we have a problem.  When Hart-Rudman, the commission that President Clinton and I created for national security, when we issued our final report looking out to 2025 in March of 2001, we said the number one threat to America was a weapon of mass destruction going off in an American city probably from a terrorist.  We called for a preventive, a prevention, pre-emption strategy.  And we called for a Department of Homeland Security.  Now, in March of 2001, that was kind of ho hum.  By September 12th it was a very pressy and foresighted, you know, boy, they really got it right.

What nobody then did is read the second recommendation.  The Hart-Rudman Commission unanimously said the number two threat to the United States is the failure of math and science education.  And it is a bigger threat than any conceivable conventional war in the next 25 years.  Now, that's a fairly--if you take that sentence and put it up on the wall, that's a fairly stark, sharp statement, to which we've had no real reaction.  And the reason is, all the changes are outside the current system.

And I'll give you three that are examples that are in the book.  First, we ought to say anybody who has substance knowledge can teach part-time.  I mean, if you said in every town in America, does anybody in this town have substance knowledge of chemistry, you'd find there are people in virtually every town who know chemistry.  They're not certified to teach.  They don't want to work eight hours a day in a school.  They may well be earning far more.  But if they could come into the high school to teach one hour of chemistry a day, or if they could teach a five hour block one day a week, and that's all they had to do.  No Mickey Mouse, no baloney, no hanging out at the teacher's lounge.  Two things would happen:  you'd have a lot more adults in the schools, which would change the schools in a positive way, and you'd actually have somebody teaching chemistry who knew chemistry, which would be a radical change.  You know the numbers better than I do.  But I think over half of all current science teachers don't know the science.  And we wonder why the kids don't learn it.  I mean, imagine the contempt you have if the teacher knows they don't know it, you know the teacher doesn't know it, and you know the teacher knows they don't know it.  It just turns it into a waste of time.  It devalues the whole experience.

So, number one, simply pass a law in every state that says, anyone who can prove they have substance knowledge, like Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton in Physics, you know.  Now, does that mean the kids might have a harder time actually understanding them because they won't have had education ease and they won't have been certified as a caring, nurturing teacher?  Yeah.  I mean, is that good?  I think it's actually good.  What if you actually had to learn physics in order to be the physics teacher?  So that's number one.  And you would overnight improve the quality of science teaching in America.

Number two, we need a National Library of Science comparable to the National Library of Medicine.  You ought to be able, as an adult, because you know the scale of scientific change is exploding.  My estimate is that we'll have four times as much scientific change in the next quarter century as the last quarter century.  Because there are more scientists alive than in all previous human history combined.  They're connected by internet and cell phone.  They're then connected by licensing and royalties.  So the system, the engine of change literally from now to 2030 will equal 1905 to 2005.  So I don't care how smart you are, you're going to have to learn every day.  There ought to be a National Library of Science on line like Medline Plus.  You ought to be able to go there and say, I don't quite understand this newest breakthrough.  And that ought to be part of continuing education.  It would allow the teachers to get upgraded.  And it would allow young people to learn the best science.  And it would allow adults to keep up their education.  And probably ought to be run by NSF, the way Medline Plus is run by the National Institutes of Health.

Third, this is the most radical, but I'm happy to defend it.  Pay the kids.  If you can do calculus, if you can do math, physics, chemistry, and biology at a genuinely good level, this is not let's name this a course and we'll all sit here together.  And as long as you show up, I'll give you money.  But if you can actually learn this stuff, it's hard.  This is something, I'm a history major, this is something most of my liberal arts friends don't like to hear, science is harder.  You have to work more hours.  So what do we say to a kid?  Why don't you go out and practice basketball?  You might make $22 million when you're 17.  Why don't you go out and practice soccer, you can make a couple million dollars at 14?  Why don't you become a rock star?  Or, you could be morally noble, hang out and do chemistry.  And by the way, your brother who decided not to do chemistry took the hours you're spending studying, he's now working at McDonald's and he's having a date because he can afford it.  Then I go, gee, I wonder why we don't get any kids, you know.

This is a country where people respond to signals.  And if we announce tomorrow morning, where I'd like to start with is the 30 poorest school districts in America.  You know, let's just with the 30 poorest school districts in America and say, in those school districts we will pay any child who is actually learning any of the sciences or math, we'll pay them hourly rate comparable to McDonald's.  You will overnight change the culture of the poorest neighborhoods in America.  You don't have to be a pimp, a prostitute, or a drug dealer. You can just learn chemistry.  And the money is not 22 years from now, it's every Friday.

Now, it's a radical idea.  But why wouldn't we do it?  We do it, I mean, you know, we're perfectly happy to go out and raise millions of dollars for Friday night football.  That's really important.  But this science stuff, that's weird.

So we've got to have this debate.  If you're going to compete with China and India, if you're going to be the leading power militarily, if you're going to have the best economy, if you're going to solve your health concerns, you had better invest in math and science.  We don't have the nazis sending us refugees.  We don't have the communists sending us refugees.  And as the third world grows, people can go back home.  So we can't rely, as we did in the 20th Century, on Einstein showing up.  I mean, think about the great figures who came to America because they were driven out of Europe.  Think about the people who came to America from Asia and didn't go back because there was no place to practice.  In the next generation, we actually have to grow it at home.  And that's going to require very profound changes.

MR.          :  In your remarks you referred a number of times to the elite and the country, a little bit of an echo may be the old British court and country idea.  But could you say a word about the definition of the elite.  Who is this elite that we have to be careful of?  Maybe it's us.

MR. GINGRICH:  Well, I think it's partly a set of attitudes and partly a set of values.  But there's a very deep American tradition of elites defending the immediate past against the masses.  I mean, you can go back and look at the Whig reaction to Jackson.  You look at the, the reaction of the academic class to Ronald Reagan.  The core elites in America are essentially academic professionals, the news media, to some extent the entertain crowd.  It is people who have a set of values, at least this is how I use the word elite, they have a set of values which start with a premise that if only we could be a lot more like Europe and a lot less like America, we'd all be so much happier.

I think you could, I have a test at the very beginning of the book where I list ten values.  Because it turns out at a values level, this is not a narrowly divided country.  This is one of the great mistakes of the news media.  This is a partisanly divided country.  It's not a values divided country.  93 percent of the country believes--or 91 percent of the country believes you ought to have the right to say "One Nation under God."  So the New York Times sense of balance is 91 percent of Americans versus the atheists.  So their sense of the middle is at .8 out of 100.  And you go down, and we list at the beginning we list a whole series of tests.  I have a friend of mine who is a reporter on television who took--

[End Side A, begin Side B.]

MR. GINGRICH:  --stunning power in terms of the academic world, which includes public school.  So it's a fairly big influence in the society, far out of proportion to its actual numbers.

MR.          :  Mr. Speaker, you've talked about reforming the health care system.  And we saw an actuarial study that came out yesterday that basically said within 10 years the average that we're paying per person will go from $6,000 yearly to roughly $12,000.  Can you speak to the implications of not reforming the health care system and the affect that would have on our economy if we go from 15 percent of GDP to 20 percent, how that affects us in the world?  And then how we, as policy makers, can interact with the country in a way that helps them to understand this instead of being large numbers that we can deal with in 10 or 15 years?

MR. GINGRICH:  Well, I mean, it's just very clear that if the current system, which is, I think, hopelessly destructive.  First of all, third party payment models don't work.  And all of you know that if you've thought at all about the psychological dynamic of a third party payment model, where one person pays, a second receives, and a third gives.  It's an invitation to destruction.  Binary systems work, buyers and sellers.  That's markets versus bureaucracies.  Second, paper based system kills people.  I mean, paper kills is the simplest way to think of the next time you get a prescription, if it's in paper, there's no way to check it against an expert system to see what you're already getting. Third, and paper is very expensive.  And third, an acute care system guarantees you need acute care.  So, you know, for example with diabetes, we know what we ought to do with diabetes.  We ought to get you to change your behavior as an individual before you're a patient so you don't become diabetic.  I'm talking now about Type II, not about Type I.  But Type II Diabetes is largely a function of culture. So, first of all, we ought to reinstate physical education in every classroom in every school, K through 12, real ed, real physical education.  Because kids need to get off, turn off the TV, turn off the Game Boy, go do something for an hour.  Because exercise is a major component of avoiding diabetes.

Second, we need to worry and change diets.  Because the first thing you want to do is get people not to be diabetic.  When you become diabetic, we want a system where you are managing your health so you are tracking every day your diabetes because the--in the long run, if we don't do that, you're going to have amputation of limbs.  You're going to go blind.  Diabetes is the largest cause of adult blindness.  You're going to have kidney disease so we give you very expensive kidney dialysis.  And you're going to have heart disease.

We have had a system which, up till now, has said, we're not going to actually treat any of that until you're really sick.  But, now, the minute you need a monthly stipend for your blindness while we fit you for your amputation, while we're sending you to the kidney dialysis center, we'll pay for all that.  Because we're really generous.  That's really a very destructive model.  And so you've got to shift the entire system towards prevention, wellness, early detection, self-management.  And you've got to incentivize that new system.  If we don't do that, to go back to your question, it's very straight forward, we're going to go to rationing.  I mean, anybody that things the system won't, at some point, decide--the system will get so tired. Businesses will become so tired they'll go to a European national health service model.  And there's one thing to remember about these national health services.  They are terrific if you are not sick.  The reason people, they're popular is, people don't ever use them.  So you go talk to the average person and you say, what do you think about it?  I think it's terrific.

Now, what happens when you need it?  Well, in Britain it turned out you were three times as likely to die of breast cancer if you stayed in Britain as if you went to France.  That was an enormous shock.  As all of you know, Canadians have a simple answer to the Canadian health service.  It's called America.  Go look at the University of Michigan hospital.  Look at the number of people who come south the minute they have a serious problem.  Because they're not going to wait for nine months.

I just talked to a good friend who is 84 who just got a knee replacement, very athletic, very aggressive, very smart person.  In Europe he would have been told, what you need to do is relax, accept how old you are, and be in a wheel chair.  It's selfish of you at 84 to want a knee replacement.  And I think that we either transform the system so we retain the liberty to pursue the best possible health or we will inevitably go to rationing because we won't be able to stand the economic pain.  I think this is a very serious problem.

Ben has been trying to get attention up here if we might?

MR.          :  Mr. Speaker, I wonder if you could describe for us your views on the rise, I guess, of neoconservativism as opposed to conservativism and what you think about that whole movement or tendency or persuasion, or whatever it's called?  Secondly, and related, I think, you didn't really bring up the notion of the spread of democracy around the world.  How do you rate that as an American priority in comparison to some of the things you're talking about?  And then the third thing is, you told us how to deal with diabetes through exercising.  You said, but you said there's a dietary component.  I'm curious as to what it is.

MR. GINGRICH:  Okay.  Sure.

I feel like I'm going to earn my pay just answering those three questions.  First, on neoconservativism, I think that it is a very, very important component of why in the 1970s conservativism suddenly became a majoritarian mentality.  It was the introduction of people like Irving Crystal, Norman Pudhoris [ph.], Midge Dector [ph.], Jean Kirkpatrick, yourself, Bill Bannon [ph.], I mean, there are a whole range of people who came out of a historically democratic but anti communist background who brought to the conservative movement three things:  intellectual fire power for foreign policy, which Ronald Reagan promptly used and used brilliantly.  Second, was a sense of being in the majority because like Reagan, they had been FDR democrats so they thought about, okay, how are we going to create a majority as opposed to how do we manoeuver as a minority, and it's a very, very important change.  And, third, a kind of tough minded intellectual realism.  The republican party, you could argue from the Bull Moose split of 1912 on, had ceased to be the party of the intellectual center of Furman.  And all of the sudden, there were a bunch of very argumentative, smart, interesting people showing up at the party.  And, and teaching people it's okay to have these arguments.

So I think it's fair to say today, if you were to look at the 30 or 40 most interesting ideas in American politics, almost all of them are on the right.  And that's because it was literally--and I would say one other person, who is not a neoconservative, but Reagan, Reagan had as an extraordinarily able ally, Jack Kemp.  And it's very hard to go back to the seventies and not realize how big a role Kemp played in all this.  And Kemp, like Reagan, was attracted to ideas.  And I think found people like Jean Kirkpatrick just enthralling.  And as a result, you had a natural bridge for what used to be, I think, called the Scoop Jackson democrats.  When Henry Jackson ceased to be a major factor in the democratic party, people who had been sort of the idea machine, Richard Pearle would be another example, the people who had really made a huge difference for Jackson, found themselves migrating towards the republican party initially only rallying around Reagan.  And then sort of saying, well, I'm not really a republican.  And then saying, well, maybe I'm a republican, but I'm a different kind.  And by today, you can't--this stream of energy was extraordinarily important, I think, to what we're doing.  So I think neoconservativism is a big component of how we became a majority.

Second, I actually think spreading democracy is both practical common sense and good idealism.  And I think it's important how you ask the question.  But, I mean, I'm pretty happy to debate anybody who thinks that keeping people trapped in a dictatorship is a useful strategy.  And, now, I think the President, and again, in the sense of genealogy, the President, in a sense, stands on Reagan's shoulders.  Reagan, in many ways, stood on FDR's shoulders.  FDR stood on Woodrow Wilson's shoulders.  But you go all the way back to Jefferson in terms of talking about the importance of freedom.  And if we're not the natural country of freedom, what's our moral explanation?  And so we ought to favor freedom.  We ought to favor freedom everywhere on the planet.  And we ought to favor freedom, even when it embarrasses our so-called allies.

And the reasons, the reason at a selfish level is very straight forward.  In an age of weapons of mass destruction and nuclear weapons, in an age of weapons of mass murder, biological weapons, you cannot afford to have dictatorships turning entire generations sour so that they decide that violence is their only future.  And if we're going to defeat the irreconcilable wing of Islam, which is a mortal threat to our survival, this is a wing of Islam 3, 4 percent of Islam which is 39 to 42 million people, funded largely from Saudi Arabia and now increasingly from Moslems in Europe, and funded, by the way, in the European case, in reaction to European societies that are very anti immigrant.

And here, I want to say flatly for my many conservative friends who like most of what I say, we are a nation of immigrants.  I am very prepared to have security on the border.  I am very prepared to have citizenship relate to understanding America.  But I am for immigration and I am for a country that absorbs people and that allows them to think you could rise in Austria and end up as Governor of California and it's okay.  And if you look at the cost to Europe of an anti-immigrant psychology which refuses to absorb people, we are seeing a cancer grow in Europe.  And you saw it in Holland, a very liberal society, a very open society.  And when the movie director Van Gogh made a film attacking honor killings, which is the irreconcilable wing's model in which fathers can kill their wife or their daughter, brothers can kill their sister or their mother in order to preserve the family's honor, Van Gogh was killed on the streets of Holland by fanatics who were Dutch.  And this is a very severe problem we face with the irreconcilable wing of Islam.  It is going to be, I describe it in the book as the long war.  I think it will take 30 to 70 years, if we're lucky.  It will take longer if we're unlucky.  I think it is a mortal threat to our survival if they ever get biological or nuclear weapons.

And I think that if you don't create democracy, if you don't create freedom, if you don't give young people a chance to have a prosperous better future, I don't quite understand how you're going to beat those people in the Middle East.  So I am very much in favor of maximizing freedom in the Middle East and maximizing prosperity.

MR.          :  What about diet and diabetes?

MR. GINGRICH:  I'm sorry.  On diet--I apologize, on diet it's very straight forward.  You can go to Medline Plus or to Web MD or to the American Diabetes Association.  We have a very clear idea of what you should not eat if you're young and you want to avoid diabetes.

And, and, and I would say to you, by the way, it almost certainly guarantees that sound public health is not going to have 30 ounces of soft drink available in schools.  I mean, you're going to really--we have to recognize it.  We, as a species, are not designed for a sedentary life eating fat and sugar.  We like having a sedentary life eating fat and sugar, but it kills us.  And we have to really, as a culture, decide this was an interesting detour from being healthy, but we need to rethink our school lunch programs.  We need to rethink how we label things.  And we need to be very straight about this.  We are faced with an explosion of diabetes that both has a human cost and a financial cost that nobody is yet taking seriously.

MS.          :  As you know, our universities are deeply dysfunctional.  It's become obvious to everyone--not everyone, but to many over the course of the past few weeks that shrieking mobs at Harvard and the War Churchill [ph.] at the University of Colorado.  In your book you briefly mention the need for patriotic education.  And you seem to include the universities as part of the plan.  How can we even begin to think about initiating any change?  I visit the campuses frequently.  I find them getting worse and worse with each passing year.  The younger generation of scholars are more fanatical than--and less educated than their predecessors.  And I think conservatives need some new ideas and new ways of thinking, new paradigms.  Any suggestions?

MR. GINGRICH:  Sure.  This is actually the core of almost everything I've done in my career, what I'm about to explain to you.  And it goes back to one of the great moments in modern history when in 1979, 1980, there were two wings of detente in America.  There was a conservative wing that was cautious and careful, but knew you had to accommodate the Soviet Union.  And there was a liberal wing that was pretty cheerful about disarmament and knew you could trust the Soviet Union.  You may remember the famous moment where the Russians invade Afghanistan and Jimmy Carter goes on national television in and interview and says how disappointed he was.  And you have to sort of think to yourself, had he missed his entire adult lifetime.  But he had.  I mean, it was a great shock to him that his good friend, Brezhnev, you know, Leonid, how could you do it?  It was almost like a scene from Dr. Strange Love.  I can see the phone call, Leonid, how could you do this?

Now, on a magic day somebody totally outside the establishment said when asked the question, what's your vision of the end of the cold war?  We win.  They lose.  Eleven years later, the Soviet Union disappeared.  It has been politically incorrect in American to describe winning and losing.  One of the big mistakes of 1991 was not stopping and saying, you know, maybe we ought to have a monument in Washington to the victims of Soviet oppression.  Maybe we ought to talk openly about the fact that they lost, because we didn't want to offend them.  And the result was we couldn't talk honestly about what a big difference Ronald Reagan had made.

Now, gradually we're coming out of that.  But even today, people don't talk clearly about how totally wrong the establishment was.  So let me take the--

In the 1960s I arrived in Georgia as an army brat.  I looked around and thought, this is a one party state.  It's segregated.  What--and I was an Eisenhower republican, so I was an integrationist and a republican and a yankee.  And I thought, what if we had a two party system.  Well, that was, obviously, you know, a sign I was whacked out.  Because, after all, young people rose in Georgia by being democrats.  I got to Congress in 1978 and I walked in before I was sworn in and I said, my dear friend Guy Vanderjack, who was Chairman of the Campaign Committee, what if we became a majority?  And he knew I was whacked out.  And, you know, it took 14 years.

Any, any reasonable person would look at my career, 16 years, rather, you could look at my career and say at any point you could have bet against me.  And prior to the summer of '94, you'd have won.  And then, of course, magically we won.  And people forget the 16 years.  So now I'm going to use the same--we said the same thing as welfare.  We said, and this is largely due to work done right here at AEI, Charlie Murray's extraordinarily important work losing ground, which changed the underlying debate.  And so we said, gee, giving people money to sit around do nothing destroys them.  And we had a radical idea.  Let's quit doing it.  And people said, well, that's crazy.  So, now, let's take your point.  Ward Churchill is a viciously anti-American demagogue.  He has every right to have free speech.  And I am for him having free speech by not paying him.  He has no right to subsidize speech, none.  Tenure is an invention of the late 19th Century.  It is purely a social invention.  We don't need tenure in this country anywhere.  I mean, the idea that Ward Churchill will somehow be deeply oppressed if the taxpayers of Colorado don't pay him is just silly.  There are 75 whacked out foundations that will pay him for life.  There are dozens of Hollywood stars who will do fundraisers for him.  You know, his life will become a film by Michael Moore.

So we're, we're not talking about oppression.  We're talking about what obligation does the society have to fund its own sickness.  And I think we ought to say to the campuses, it's over.  This idea that left wing professors own the campuses.  The student who was told when they wrote a pro-American paper, "You need psychotherapy," direct quote, "You need psychotherapy if you can write this."  That professor should have been fired.

And I'm just, look, I represent populism at its most basic level.  I do not believe any elite group has the right to say to the American people, not the nine judges of the court, not the tenured faculty, not the New York Times editorial board, that the entire American Nation is wrong.  Shut up and send the money.  I think we, as a people, have the right to say, that's it.  Let's change the [inaudible].  You know, Jefferson basically said every generation needs its own revolution.  One of the revolutions we need is on campuses.  And we have to say, if you're determined to be viciously anti-American, we are confident your right of free speech will be protected.  I will fight to the end for your right to speak freely.  I just won't pay you a dime.  And the minute you start doing that, you'll see just dramatic change.

But then we, on the right, and this is what got me in so much trouble in the nineties, I was pretty cheerful about standing up for the left.  That actually infuriated them more than losing the election.  I mean, if I had lost--if I had won the election but I promptly sold out, they'd have been happy.  But I was cheerful about saying, you guys are just wrong.  That infuriated them.  So we need to have the courage to go on college campuses and say, you know, bring out your three nuttiest profs and let's debate.  We'll be happy to debate, you know, because they're wrong.  And then I think we have to say to state legislatures, why are you putting up with this?  Boards of regents are artificial constructs of state law.  Tenure is an artificial construct of state law.  So you could modify, you could introduce a bill tomorrow morning to modify tenure law to say, proof that you're viciously anti-American is automatically grounds for dismissal.  And it would be over.

MR.         :  Mr. Speaker, whatever moderate things you have to say about universities and about borders and other things, I think the really inflammatory parts of your book have to do with what the American people think about God.  And I particularly like page 204 and page 64.  Page 204, you're just walking through the Lincoln Memorial, and you point out the little text from the Gettysburg Address, "This Nation Under God shall have a new birth of freedom," so, I mean, people who don't like "Under God."  In popular opinion, you've got 91 percent of the people and Lincoln on your side, but not among elites.  You left out one elite.  The law schools, the lawyers, the judges.  And then on page 64 what I like is you have an extended quote from Justice Hugh Black from 1947.  And some of the really stupid things he says are, for example, interpreting the First Amendment, "No tax in any amount large or small can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion."  But wouldn't that disqualify most of the monuments you describe?  Wouldn't that mean no tax money could be spent on at least those parts of the monuments you describe in Washington which are filled with religious text?

MR. GINGRICH:  Sure.

MR.          :  The main them of them.

MR. GINGRICH:  There's a fascinating intellectual history called "The Commanding Heights," which describes the 20th Century as a great duel between John Maynard Caines and the Austrian School of Economics.  And for almost all the 20th Century John Maynard Caines wins.  And redistributionist government run bureaucratic models are the dominant.  In fact, Nixon, at one point says, you know, we're all Cainsian now, I think shortly before Watergate.  And then it all broke, fell apart and disappeared.

Hugo Black represents a 50 year tradition in America in which the Supreme Court has steadily gotten nuttier about the issue of religion.  So that the Supreme Court which has the Ten Commandments on its Wall hears cases about whether or not you can have the Ten Commandments.  And you have to say to yourself, I mean, there's a point here where it's just--and I use the word nutty deliberately.  I know it's inflammatory.  I know people will come back and say it's not serious enough.  But we need to break out of this idea that unless you're pompous you can't be, you know, these, these are things so profoundly wrong we shouldn't take them seriously.  We should simply change them.

So let me, let me talk about the courts for a second.  All of Hugo Black's models based upon a complete misinterpretation of Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson writes a letter to the Danbury Baptist and he says, there should be a wall of separation between church and state.  This is the number one quote for everybody who wants a secular America.  Now, what no one tells you is, first of all, Jefferson is describing a world where governments ran churches.  And he doesn't want a government run church.  So he doesn't want an established tax paid Church of England.  There's no Church of America.  Second, two days after he wrote the letter to the Danbury Connecticut--to the Danbury Baptist, Jefferson walks out of the White House, gets in his carriage, rides up Pennsylvania Avenue, and goes to church in the U.S. Capitol.  Because until after the Civil War, there was a church service every Sunday in the House Chamber.  In fact, I'm trying to get a member to introduce a resolution to put a plaque on the wall commemorating that Statuary Hall was a church until after the Civil War.  Jefferson also allocated the Treasury Building as a church for eight years because Washington didn't have enough churches.  It was a brand new town, you know.

So this notion that Jefferson would have said, oh, yes, and you shouldn't be allowed to pray, you shouldn't be allowed to put your hand on the Bible, he would have thought we were insane.  You go to the Jefferson Memorial, because we're always told--I got this from a New York Times reporter yesterday.  He said, well, wasn't he a deist?  I said, not in the way you mean the word.  Go to the Jefferson Memorial.  Three of the four walls of the memorial refer to God.  Around the top of the memorial Jefferson says, "I have sworn upon the altar of God Almighty eternal hostility against all forms of tyranny over the minds of man."

I say to my secular friends, what do you think he meant by "altar of God Almighty"?  And they, of course, being good post modern linguist analysts says, well, that is actually a secret code for large purple banana.  Because actually he can't have meant God, because if he meant God, then he would have meant God.  And that would mean God would exist.  And since God can't exist, he must have meant something else.  So we wonder what the code is for.  Does this make, I mean, this is what we're up against.

And part of the reason I'm trying to say, you know, we as a Nation have the right to say to the judges, you're wrong.  And I believe one of the first steps in that is in this whole zone of reasserting our Creator.  And I think the most useful first step there is to say that the two judges in the Ninth Circuit who actually thought that it was unconstitutional to say "One Nation Under God," we should simply close their offices.  We don't have to impeach them.  Just close the two offices.  It's the Judicial Act of 1802.  It's absolute precedent--remember, this is a Jeffersonian Administration.  Jefferson writes the Declaration of Independence.  Madison is his Secretary of State.  Madison helped write the Constitution, helped write the Federalist papers, and authored the Bill of Rights. So if Madison thought you could close the judgeships, the odds are fairly high historically that you can close down the judgeships.

MR.          :  [Inaudible] you are wrong.  Most of the European republics and the majority of the European states are republic, is sovereign [inaudible].  The second thing which I wanted to remark, you said, they said, "We win.  You lose."  A prime minister in Austria, an immigrant, by the way, was the only one which in the Helsig conference in '75 said, do communist [inaudible] democracies--this was in '75 so, you know, there have been many hostile remarks towards Europe.

MR. GINGRICH:  Okay.  The only question I ask you back, for a second is, what, what--in European society what is the basis for your rights?

MR.          :  Suppose something that informed to a certain extent also the, the [inaudible], The Declaration of Independence and your Constitution make the idea of a contract [inaudible] is sovereign to conclude a solution of the contract is [inaudible].

MR. GINGRICH:  But in our case the contract is bounded by the fact that our rights are inalienable.  So it's not just contract rights.  In our case the rights come, we assert--you may or may not want to believe it--but we assert that our rights from God, and therefore, they are inalienable.  The government cannot take them away.  They're inviolable.

MR.         :  This is a second question.
Where [inaudible] the original origin of your rights [inaudible].

MS.          :  Hi, Mr. Speaker.  I had a couple of questions for you on immigration.  First, I was wondering what your thoughts were on Representative Sensenbrenner's Bill in the House?  And, second, I was wondering if you thought that the President's guest worker program can work?  To me, it seems that unless we enforce our immigration laws along with the plan, the plan won't work.  Because if we don't enforce our deportations, then these illegal immigrants will not have enough incentive to sign up for the program.

And one more comment.  I agree with you that we are a nation of immigrants.  But one point that doesn't seem to get brought up often is that illegal immigrants are taking spots and jobs away from people in other countries who are trying to come here legally and are trying to follow our laws and have waited for years.  And, also, one more thing.  I am a college student.  And I have also faced a lot of liberal professors.  But I want to say that there is hope because I have debated a lot of these professors.  And I haven't had one teacher who has discriminated against me.  And I have found that there are people who are open to listening to new positions.  And I've had teachers change their positions or the way they phrase the arguments because of points I and other conservative students have made.  So I don't think the situation is as dire as some who are now out of the system think.

MR. GINGRICH:  Good.  We will encourage all sorts of young people to follow your leadership and be aggressive in debating.

Well, I don't know the details of Sensenbrenner's Bill, but the essence of it which is we need to have a reliable accurate way of identifying people I think is real.  And I think it doesn't make me comfortable.  And I want to draw a very sharp distinction.  I am a conservative in terms of giving power to the state because I do think the lesson of the English Civil War and the lesson of thousands of years of history is that if the state has too much power, it's very dangerous.  So there are things I would do with the Patriot Act, for example, where I'm prepared to give power to the state for the purpose of stopping terrorism, but I would not tolerate U.S. attorneys using that power for any other purpose.

And so I would say the same thing here with identity.  I think we probably have to have an identity system.  But I want to, I want to bound it as much as I can because I do not trust the state.  I don't care who the current President is.  I don't care who the current attorney general is.  The long term pattern of power is that it tends to corrupt.  And absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Acton was right.  And I think it's very dangerous to give the state unnecessary power.  But I do think we have to have some method of accurate, hard to counterfeit identity.

And currently it's a joke.  I mean, currently we do--this is one of the things that I go back to this notion of getting to the root of things.  We play at a lot of things.  So we've, we now have a Department of Homeland Security.  And we have more effort on the border.  So, I mean, do we really think it's dramatically harder to get through than it was three years ago?  No.  Do we really think--I asked, I met with a group of senior military people the other night and I said, if you assigned a team to come across from either Mexico or Canada, what do you think the odds are they'd make it?  They just broke up laughing.  I mean, you know.  So let's start with the idea, I think, because I think you put your finger on something the White House should pay a lot of attention to.  They need a package.  That's why I described four components.  We need a package that says, we're not going to tolerate people coming in illegally.  We're going to deport you quickly if you do come in illegally.  We're going to make it easy for you to come in legally if you give us a thumb print or an iris scan and you agree to pay taxes and you agree to be an economic guest worker.  And we're going to agree that you can apply for citizenship if you learn American history and you take the test in English.  Now, if you do those four things, I suspect you've got 80 or 85 percent of the country on your side.

And I agree with you.  I think anything which implies amnesty is wrong.  But we live in an age when frankly, everybody who is currently here illegally could go home, apply for a guest worker pass, and come back.  But they would have been forced to go through the process of obeying the law.  And I think it is a, I think your point is a non trivial thing.  I don't see any way that you give them amnesty in place because you are discriminating against everybody who has been legal and tried to come here and tried to do it legally.

One or two last things.  This lady back here.

MS.         :  Mr. Speaker, you wrote in a Washington Post op ed about the need for the republican party to really address minority issues, in particular minority health.  And I was wondering if you could talk about your ideas in particular for addressing racial and ethnic disparities in health care?

MR. GINGRICH:  Well, I think it's an area where we both have a moral obligation as the emerging governing majority, and we have a practical obligation.  I would start with the Native Americans.  I mean, when you realize that Pima Indians in Mexico have a very low rate of diabetes and Pima Indians in Arizona have a 50 percent rate of diabetes, you know that it's cultural and not genetic.  And when you look at the tragedy of the reservation, I mean, it really deserves to have a lot more attention paid than people pay to it.  The level of alcoholism, the level of diabetes, the level of suicide, this is one of the great American tragedies.  And people just kind of harden to it.  Oh, yeah, that's unfortunate.

We ought to actually have a national debate about why should people be trapped like that?  Why should people be forced into positions where the Indian Health Service clearly can't get the job done?  Part of it's the condition of life.  Part of it's the culture.  But that, that's a debate we need because young children today are trapped on reservations in the settings where we know statistically they're going to have a much higher alcoholism rate, a much higher diabetes rate, and a much higher suicide rate.  And we ought to care about them as part of America and insist on the idea, why would you tolerate that level of lack of care and lack of health and lack of opportunity.

Second, I think there's enormous hunger.  I just had a very good conversation yesterday with David Scott, who is a member of the Georgia Delegation, a member of the Black Caucus, about creating a really aggressive outreach program on minority health.  We have an ability to identify by Zip Code where the disparities are.  We have an ability to recruit churches, to recruit the local retail pharmacists, to recruit communities.  And I think we could dramatically improve health in the poorest areas of the United States.  But it requires breaking out of the normal mindset.  And it requires reaching people with mass media.  And it requires deciding that we'll take health to where people are.

And we're working with one group on the notion of the minister's spouse being the minister of health in a church.  Because we've found that you can reach people in churches that you may not be able to reach through normal public health services.  And so I think we ought to have that kind of approach.  We ought to have that kind of concern.  I start with a very simple model which is, if we think everybody in America was endowed by their Creator and we think every person in America is an American and we intend to govern the country, then explain to me how you're going to write somebody off.  How can you not be concerned?  And how can you not insist that we redesign the programs to help people at all levels and to, you know, just a simple model.  Take the bottom quarter, move them up to the average while you're moving the average up.  And you've automatically had a revolution in life expectancy and a revolution in quality of health.

And, by the way, it's cheaper.  If I can get people to take care of themselves, instead of showing up in the emergency room, I can save a ton of money.  And we know this is true.  We know in the case of diabetes, if we can get you to the right kind of maintenance, we can save somewhere between $250 and $1,000 a year off the current cost.  But it's a different model.  It's a different approach.

So, do we have time for one last one, do you think?  Okay.

So we may have worn you out.

But let me just say, I do encourage you to take a look at "Winning the Future," but to do so in sort of the tradition of conscience of a conservative and other efforts to lay out a framework.  This is, this notion of a 21st Century Contract With America I think is useful both for the Congressional Republicans, but even more so I think it's useful so the conservative activists around the country and people who are looking at how do we solve problems for the next generation have kind of a workbook to start the dialogue and start the discussion on.

Appreciate very much the opportunity to share ideas.

MR. GERSON:  Thank you very much.

[Applause.]