Transformational Government versus Managerial Government:
The Key Challenges for America's Future
May 14, 2001
Transcript prepared from a tape recording
Proceedings:
MR. ORNSTEIN: Newt is a familiar face and name to everybody in the room and watching and listening outside, no doubt.
Just to remind you, Newt grew up as an Army brat, living abroad for a good portion of his early life. Went to Emory and went on to get advanced degrees, including a Ph.D. in history from Tulane University. Went into an academic career for a while, teaching at West George State College. Ran for Congress for the first time in 1974, against incumbent Jack Flynt. Failed. Tried again in 1976. And then achieved success on the third time.
Nobody has ever said that Newt was lacking persistence.
I first met him soon after he got elected to Congress in 1978 at the first of a series of small dinners we held right here in this building with new members of the class of 1978, a rather remarkable group of people that included, besides Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney and Geraldine Ferraro, among others. So we had our share of leaders here.
From the beginning, from the moment of his election in 1978, and no doubt even before, Newt had a vision of how the Republicans could capture control of the House of Representatives. And the vision that he presented in late 1978 was remarkably and unerringly close to the blueprint that was carried out some years later.
And of course, as he moved up through an interesting career in the House of Representatives from '78 on, beginning as a gadfly and irritant to his own party leaders, not to mention to the Democrats, but moving on to eventually become whip, the Republican whip, succeeding Dick Cheney, and then on to his top leadership position.
And then indisputably being a transformational leader in taking his Republicans from 40 years, 40 consecutive years, out of power into a position of majority in 1994. That was a quite remarkable achievement. And an achievement, I might note, that was accomplished, really, with his participation in a way that I think is almost unprecedented, including going out around the country, recruiting members, candidates to run; providing them with campaign themes; almost singlehandedly nationalizing an election.
And in an election in 1994, the first in a Democratic president's time, the first two years of a president, the president's party loses seats. But I think I among others believe that it would fall within the normal range of what happens in a first term mid-term election, 25 or 30 seats. It ended up being 52. An election that was sharply nationalized, partly--maybe even largely--through the brute force of Gingrich's vision.
And then achieved a success that in many ways, historically speaking, was even more significant. The Republicans had last been in the majority in 1953-54. That was one term; they lost it. Previous to that, it had been 1947-48, one term; they lost it.
We had to go back 68 years for the last time that a Republican Congress had held on for two consecutive terms.
And as speaker, he actually kept his Republicans in a position of power in the House of Representatives, where they remain today, which in modern history was quite something.
The Contract with America, the other achievements early in the term, the polarization of politics, the ending of his speakership, all are things that we could talk about for a long time and on which books have been written.
But I think we can say that Newt knows something about leadership, for good and for bad, and knows something about taking leadership and moving it to a different plane.
This talk today I believe at least flows in part from an interesting piece he wrote in the New York Times within the last couple of weeks, talking about different kinds of leadership: managerial and transformational. What can occur during a time of crisis, what can occur during a time basically of peace and prosperity.
And he will pursue those themes and take them further today. And I give you my colleague, Newt Gingrich.
[Applause.]
MR. GINGRICH: Thank you very much, Norm.
This became a substantially more serious talk, given the nature of Norm's introduction. Those of you who know him well know that normally you could at least tell really bad jokes.
[Laughter.]
And when he skips that phase, it's a signal that this is a much more serious talk than usual.
I have to say, when you think back to my initial introduction--I knew of AEI and I had used their material as a candidate and as a college teacher. But when Cheney recruited me to come down here with him to be part of that freshman dinner, it was a little implausible to look around that room and realize how many people would end up either on national tickets or in major offices. It was a well-chosen freshman group.
And I still have a copy. Is it "Congress Off the Record"? Which is a remarkable background document.
And none of us are identified, but if you go through and parse it, you'll probably be able to figure out who is who in the process.
What I want to talk about today is creating a dramatically better, more prosperous, healthier and safer America. But I think this is actually, in a way, a worldwide message.
I say that because Berlusconi last Tuesday signed a contract with Italy. And I think his apparent victory, based on the early results, is the second center right political movement to win in the last year. And I think it's a sign back towards the kind of pattern we had with Reagan and Thatcher, in that I think President George W. Bush represented the first step in that direction.
What we tried to accomplish with the Contract with America was establish a positive but very bold statement of changes that we thought were possible and were desired by most Americans, so that it was an affirmative document rather than an educational document.
That is, it described things people already knew they believed in: Welfare reform was overwhelmingly popular. Balancing the budget was overwhelmingly popular.
The reason it was transformational was the one place in America that didn't think a Republican victory or these values being implemented was possible was Washington.
And I want to start by drawing a very stark distinction. Managerial politics takes the system as it currently is and attempts to operate it so you get some marginally better results, but the system basically stays the same.
Transformational politics assumes that a well-managed current system, in fact, is an inadequacy, that you're asking the wrong question, and that what you need is a different solution, a different structure, a different way of doing things.
If you look at welfare reform, where I think the case is pretty well over, over a 50 percent reduction in people on welfare, dramatic increase in people going to work and going to school. By every study I've seen, a decline in child abuse, a decline in spouse abuse, an increase in marriage, a significant shift in what it means for people who do not have disabilities but were, in fact, in effect being sent signals by the welfare state to stay at home, to be dependent, to accept food stamps and to not assume that they had any opportunity or responsibility to rise.
On balancing the budget, you can make arguments about cycles, et cetera. The fact is, there are only two times in recent history that you had a significant decline in domestic spending. One was in 1981 and the other was in 1995.
Combine that with welfare reform and the tax cuts and stopping the momentum of the Clinton regulatory machine until the last 6 months of his office, I think that you can see that we can claim at least some credit for the economic growth and some credit for initial restraints in spending.
Gradually, that slacked off. But if you took the continuing $200 to $300 billion a year deficit--interest rates actually had been going back up and the stock market had begun to stagnate.
The current stock market, by the way, is stagnated at a level that is 300 percent what it was when I was sworn in.
So you're talking about a different system, a different level of penetration of technology, a different level of wealth than we had 1994.
Those are transformational changes. The game becomes different.
I want to start with the notion that President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld are exactly right in not rushing in, promptly building up the Pentagon budget and buying whatever was already available on January 20 of this year; that their assertion--and they use the word "transformation"--their assertion, starting with speeches by then-candidate Bush last year, that we need a new generation of technology, a new generation of science, that we need to think about restructuring the entire Pentagon, Secretary Rumsfeld's willingness to go to Andy Marshall, somebody who has been studying the building for many, many years and is prepared to make arguments that force the building to really defend itself and really think about why do have an Army, why do you have a Navy, why are trying to get things done. Let me include the Air Force and Marines so that nobody I'm skipping over anybody.
But that core concept of rethinking the national security structure, rethinking the intelligence capabilities, I want to suggest is not only right for Defense, it is right for every single aspect of government.
And it's right because, I want to assert today, there are two large waves of change that are coming.
Now, I've put this together because I think is such a complicated outline. This is something, those of you who know me well know, I almost never do, which is actually put together a written document that carries you through, step by step, the argument, as opposed to just talking off of notes.
And this will be posted later on today, both here at the American Enterprise Institute's home page and at newt.org, which is my home page.
And it's there because I think that this is a complicated and very, very important argument. It grows in part out of my service on the national security study group, what became the Hart-Rudman commission, which for 3 years looked out to defense in 2025, something that President Clinton and I agreed in 1997 that we would create, that we worked out in a bipartisan manner.
And for 3 years, a group of 14 national leaders on a bipartisan basis met regularly to look at: What will the world be like in 2025? What's the impact of science and technology? And how does that shape all of our national security interests?
Interestingly, we concluded that the No. 1 threat to the United States in the next 25 years is a weapon of mass destruction going off in an American city; that is, a biological, chemical or nuclear weapon. And that it was such a large challenge that we proposed creating a homeland security agency, because we think you have to really be prepared to deal with the consequences of a weapon of mass destruction causing incalculable levels of damage and substantial loss of life.
But our conclusion, and I think this surprised all of us as the commission evolved, our conclusion was that the second largest threat to the United States was failing to invest adequately in science and in math and science education.
And that's not where we started. It's not what we planned to do. But as we went through the first 2-1/2 years of the commission, the more we learned about the scale of the scientific revolution that's just now beginning, the more we began to realize how big the challenge was going to be and how much we had to invest, if we were going to be capable of sustaining our current relative advantage.
We believe, in the next 25 years, there will be more change than we saw in the entire 20th century. And I'll walk you through that in a minute.
But I just you to understand, that was the background, having served on that commission, that led me to believe that there are two large waves of change coming towards government. And that if you make those changes, if those changes are implemented and enacted throughout the government, that you really do change just an amazing share of what we currently think of as normal behavior.
I developed it, for today's purposes, into a set of eight propositions. And in part, I'm suggesting that President Bush has an opportunity that precisely 100 years ago President Theodore Roosevelt had; that President Theodore Roosevelt was in many ways taking the skills, the systems and the patterns of national industrial corporations, the things that had worked to make America the industrial leader of the planet by the turn of the century, and he was bringing those to the federal government.
And the Progressive movement and the process of Theodore Roosevelt's administration were a time of substantial change in peace and prosperity. And that's why I, frankly, looked for that analogy.
I mean, Franklin Delano Roosevelt got a lot done, but he had the Great Depression and the Second World War. Ronald Reagan got a lot done, and I think is the second most successful transformational president in the 20th century, but he had all the economic problems of the Carter administration, a culture that had come out of the Vietnam era with malaise, and a genuine contest with Soviet empire.
President Bush inherits a country which is largely satisfied, largely prosperous and largely safe. And therefore, he is, I think, closer to President Theodore Roosevelt's situation where Roosevelt had to create the excitement and create the understanding and create the commitment, and did so, I think, with remarkable success, much more than we tend to see, looking backwards.
So in order to look at how this might happen, I developed eight propositions, and I would like to just walk you through them briefly and then take questions.
My first proposition is that we are on the verge of creating an extraordinary explosion of new solutions that will dramatically improve our lives, our communities and the delivery of societal and governmental goods and services.
And let me say just a comment on how the news media works and how the modern structure of elite activities work, because they make it harder to get this across. If you read the science pages, you'll see everything I'm talking about. If you read parts of the business pages, you'll see everything I'm talking about. If you read the political pages, you'll see almost nothing that I'm talking about, since the people who make decisions and the people who make speeches are on the political pages.
This is exactly, of course, C.P. Snow's argument in "The Two Cultures" some 42 years ago in the Reith lectures of the BBC, once Snow, who was both a physicist and politician, said that there is this remarkable gap between those who know and those who talk, so that those who know tend to be articulate and don't show up on the "Today Show" and those who talk tend to be articulate but don't know what it is they're talking about.
So the more articulate you are, the more you'll be on a talk show, but the less you'll know what you're talking about. While the more you know you're talking about, the less you'll be able to explain it, so you won't be invited because you'll be too boring to be on the show.
[Laughter.]
Are you all with me so far?
Okay.
What I found in my first 3 years of having stepped down as speaker is when you go out to the NASA Ames laboratory and you look at their combination of sciences or when you go to MIT or to Georgia Tech--and Georgia Tech was great in hosting me for months--or you go to the Center for Disease Control and talk with the scientists, you see layer after layer of excitement.
If you go to Solara [ph.] and you look at the scale of the revolution in basic biological research that Craig Venner [ph.] has pioneered, you are stunned at the volumes of new knowledge that are pouring out of there every day.
But when you then go the Health Care Financing Administration, you somehow see an enormous gap. And the Ways and Mea ns Committee and the Energy Committee staff are driven by the issues of the Health Care Financing Administration; they're not driven by the opportunities available in these more exciting areas.
And so I want to suggest to you that when you look at the breakthroughs, it is conceivable for us as a country to literally set a set of goals that transform everything we currently expect. And I'll come back to this later, but I want to just thematically give you a taste.
We should have as a goal the elimination of Alzheimer's before most baby boomers are old enough to get it. Not treating it better; the elimination. That is not an impractical goal. That is not an conceivable goal.
If you look at pediatric oncology, children with cancer, 95 percent of them today are in a regular protocol where you have a regular massaging of the information, you share the information, people know what the procedures are; and 65 percent of them are in a clinical trial involving new breakthrough science to help that particular child.
When you get to be over 14 or you have something other than cancer, you fall off a cliff.
But in fact, the effort begun by Richard Nixon 1971 to declare a war on cancer at the National Cancer Institute has b egun to have a huge effect. And if you have a chance to talk with Rick Klausner, the head of the National Cancer Institute, and you listen to the scale of change he sees coming, you have to ask yourself why every member of Congress isn't getting that briefing and asking, "So how do we accelerate it?"
And we're about to go down a path towards a drug policy which will slow down the develop of new drugs, slow down the investment of new drugs. You know, twice under Clinton, he made statements which cost the drug industry billions of dollars in market capitalization. I mean, acts which literally slowed down the amount they had to invest when we ought to be doing the opposite.
We ought to be saying, okay, if we could, for example, eliminate Alzheimer's in 20 years, what does that save us in human misery and what does that save us in cost? Because Alzheimer's is going to be one of the major driving factors in nursing home care 20 years from now. And I would pick Alzheimer's as a starting point.
This is an explosion, an epidemic in diabetes today. And in the southwest, there's literally an explosion among 12-, 13-, 14- and 15-year-olds.
Now, we ought to be responding to that with the same speed, intensity and clarity with which we would respond to an airplane crash. We have a National Transportation Safety Board; we have no mechanisms for dealing with something which will literally become the largest overall cost-driver in health care.
In fact, diabetes today is the largest single factor in the cost of Medicare. But despite the fact that we know that--in fact I was briefed the other day by a group who told me that not only the Health Care Financing Administration not responded positively to the challenge, but when we gave them, when I was speaker, substantially more money for diabetes education, they designed regulations so complex and so destructive, we are currently educating fewer people than we were when I became speaker, because they've actually forced programs to close down because of the complexity of their regulations.
Now, I would have thought that implausible if not impossible, but it tells you again the need for a transformational approach to how we're dealing with things, not just to an approach that manages marginally better the billion decisions and the 200,000 or 150,000 pages of regulations of the Health Care Financing Administration.
But let me go to a totally different topic: education. I met last week with Sequoia, a firm that in at least one school district has records of having improved literacy by 40 percentile points in a year. This is a computerized system, an outgrowth of IBM, a program focused intensely on the single act of teaching people to read.
Now, there's another program called Scientific Learning, which was founded by brain scientists at Berkeley, which has a clear, consistent record with over 50,000 students. The brain scientists did not have a theory of education; they had functional MRI scans that looked at how your brain works. And they found two big things.
The first is that language is essentially oral. People have been speaking for several million years. They've been reading for 5,000 years. The genetic patterns are for the spoken language, which is important because it means, in English, if you can't distinguish "d" from "b," it's very hard to learn how to read.
The second thing they discovered was, there are five places in your brain that work functionally when you read. So they designed five computer programs to exercise the five places in your brain.
I played the games, and when you first play them, you think, "This is really different." But it turns out, statistically, that of the first 50,000 students who have used the program, if you do it for 140 minutes a day for 5 days a week for 6 weeks--notice it does not fit any curriculum plan. It's 140 minutes, not 55. It's only for 6 weeks; it's not for a year.
But students who do that for 140 minutes a day, 5 days a week for 6 weeks, increase their reading ability between 1 and 3 years.
And contrary to popular belief, adults learn faster. Adults bring more to the table. They had one woman increase her reading ability 7 years in 6 weeks.
Now, my point is this: The Senate is fighting over whether or not we should require disgustingly bad schools that are cheating and destroying children to improve by 1 percent a year--1 percent.
So you're at the 39th percentile this year, and success in the Senate would be the 40th percentile next year.
We have technologies totally outside the current system. They don't fit the Title I program. They don't fit the way we normally do business. They are capital intensive. They are not labor intensive. Thea are not bureaucratized. They involve the student directly.
They only have one big virtue: They are revolutionary in their impact on kids.
And my point is that's a transformational approach to learning. It's not slightly better teacher certification; it's a different approach.
So I just want to suggest to you, in zone after zone--the core premise of this presentation is that in zone after zone, there are new sciences and new technologies that are going to lead enormous change.
My second proposition is that failing to make the transformation will cost more in human lives. Or to put it in a positive way, making the transformation will do far more to improve people's lives than any micromanaging of the current system.
That is, take all the hearings this year in Congress on the current system, the current failures, the current problems, and then look at the tiny number of hearings that we even begin to explore the possibilities of the future, and it is exactly the wrong focus.
It is as though we were a stagecoach company that insisted on holding long hearings on better axle grease for the stagecoach when we were surrounded by people trying to talk to us about the automobile. And we kept saying, "Please don't bother us. Can't you see we're busy?"
And I mean it quite that literally, that we are at a point where, if we will focus on the transformation, if we will have the dialogues with science and technology, if we will bring in the entrepreneurs, if we will ask the right question--and Secretary Rumsfeld is asking the right question.
There are at least 20 major high-tech companies that refuse to bid on federal procurement. And Secretary Rumsfeld has asked the right question, which is, "What kind of federal procurement program would encourage you to bid?"
But they think the current system is so bad, they won't even try. And the answer is to replace the current system, not to repair it.
Now, if you start to focus on the transformation--and here I recognize that I'm a little bit where I was in the '80s, as Norm was pointing out, when I would walk around the House and say to Republicans, "You know, our goal ought to be to be in a majority."
And people would say to me, "You're nuts. You can't be in a majority. Are you crazy? Why are you saying this? You just make me feel bad. I'm pretty comfortable being in the minority. I don't want to try to climb a big mountain. Can I climb a small mountain? Could we gain 10 seats? Would you be happy if we gained 10 seats?"
I'd say, "No. The goal of a party is to be a majority."
We literally had a meeting in the spring of 1995 with Kasich, Livingston, Archer and Armey, and we sat in a room and we said, "Are we prepared to force a balanced budget?" And we collectively made the decision, with our top staff people there, that we were prepared to stake everything on balancing the budget in a way that had not been done in 70 years. And people initially thought we were nuts.
So I'm confident my point here today will be the same way by many who don't get it. In a time of dramatic, bold change, if you're not focusing on transformations, you're focusing on things that are going to disappear. They're going to be irrelevant.
Designing a marginally better Health Care Financing Administration is a waste of time. You don't get a large enough improvement to matter.
Take the same number of hours, the same quality of people and invent the replacement. And you will transform the way the system operates.
And I would also say, by the way, that every day we don't transform, people suffer. I mean, this city read recently about a 9-month-old baby, who was given 10 times the dose of morphine the baby was supposed to get, and she died. The doctor filled out the form wrong, the transcription clerk didn't catch it, and the nurse didn't catch it. And the baby died.
That was totally avoidable error. And as somebody who has served on the aviation subcommittee, let me tell you, if you simply take the FAA model for dealing with aviation mistakes, which is a collaborative model of sharing the information, bringing in the manufacturers, bringing in the airlines, issuing a correction--so that, by the way, every mechanic on the planet gets the same information--and you compare that with the Institute of Medicine report that it can take up to 17 years for a new procedure to reach a doctor, and you look at the Institute of Medicine projection that between 44,000 and 98,000 Americans a year die of medical error, and you look at the pathetic lack of serious response, and then you look at that baby and her mother, and you ask yourself, so how many children have to die?
Or you look at hospital-induced disease. If you're in a hospital more than four days, the odds are even money you will get a disease induced by the hospital.
And then visit a place like Visacue [ph.] created by Johns Hopkins spinoff, and you see people who have invented an intensive care system using 21st century technology that allows an intensive care specialist to monitor every single room simultaneously in several hospitals, so that you don't call the doctor any more on the golf course to get them to answer their page. You have a real professional monitoring in real time and, in many cases, anticipating the problem and eliminating it before it happens.
It's a totally different model. And we will literally lose somewhere between 44,000, if you count hospital-induced illnesses, somewhere between 44,000 and 200,000 people a year.
Now, compare that with the acceptable loss rate in aviation, which is zero. A bad year in aviation, we lose 200-and-some people. A good year in health, we lose more than that many people every morning.
And the system doesn't respond, because it can't think beyond the current system. So there are real human costs. There are children who don't get educated by schools that are failing, and there are people who die because of hospital systems that are failing. And the government reaction is to have more bureaucracy, more litigation, you know, more negativity, but not to think fresh about how you transform it.
My fourth proposition is that there are two very different waves of change, and you have to understand the scale of that change. The first is stuff all of you live with. It's the information revolution. I'll just give you two quick examples.
How many of you get cash out of an automatic teller machine? Just raise your hand. Virtually every person in this room gets cash out of an automatic teller machine.
How many of you pump your own gas? Almost all of you.
How many of you now use a credit card to pump the gas rather than talk to the gas attendant? Almost all of you.
How many of you no longer get a receipt? About half of you.
Now, I want you to think about that. You're now asserting that the gas pump is smart enough that you don't need a receipt.
Now, remember the guy holding up the ballot with the chad in Florida?
[Laughter.]
I mean, that's the right symbol. The average error rate in voting in America is 1.6 percent. The average error rate for an automatic teller machine is better is better than 6-sigma, which is 99.9999. It's better than that. Now, is there a hint here?
In most of the areas, in phase one of the transformation, we're not talking about the future. We're talking about the--if I were to come in here and said, "Eureka, I have discovered an automatic teller machine. Let me tell you about the future," you'd think I was nuts. If I said, "I have this vision. You'll be able to pump your own gas."
We're talking in phase one about bringing government into the 21st century. That's all we're talking about. Just catch up with all the things that occur in the consumer world and occur in the business world today.
If you ran the Pentagon like Wal-Mart or UPS or FedEx on the logistics side, there's one estimate you would save $35 billion a year, just by doing that one thing.
These are not new technologies. There are people at Wal-Mart, FedEx and UPS who get up every morning who know how to do this.
If you took General Electric's driving attitude towards research and brought it into the Pentagon, you would change things again. If you took the seven best procurement companies in he U.S. and applied them to Pentagon procurement, you would save money again.
You could finance a very large part of the modernization of the American military by simply not throwing the money away. It's that big a difference.
If you took the Health Care Financing Administration, which handles a billion decisions a year, a billion transactions, and does many of them in paper, and you went to American Express, Visa and MasterCard, and said, "Gee, do you think you could run a different system in a different way with faster real-time turnaround?" This is not heavy lifting, except in government.
So the first wave of change is to simply catch up with systems we know work because we can find companies that every morning are making them work.
The second wave of change takes more imagination. And it's a combination largely of three zones: nanoscale science and technology, quantum behavior and biology. Let me briefly explain.
Nano is a term meaning a billionth. It will become as common in the next 15 years as Internet is today. Internet, remember, 25 years ago would have been a very weird term. And somebody who gave a speech at AEI even 15 years ago, talking about how much the Internet will change things, how much e-mail will change things, would have seemed slightly strange.
Well, nano is, I think, going to be the largest single area of breakthrough because, when you get down to nanometer, which is a billionth of a meter, you're talking about the world, basically, from one atom to about 400 atoms. Now, why does that matter?
Well, first of all, that's where all real biological function occurs. DNA, genetic behavior, proteins, it's all down at the level of one to 400 atoms.
For example, because we know have the instrumentation at the nano level, we know that your ear has a million moving parts. Something we didn't know 15 years ago. Just literally didn't know.
And that begins to allow us to think about the human body. It allows us to think about agriculture. It allows us to think about the environment in totally new ways.
But second, when you're down at that level, the rules of physics change. You go from the model of Newtonian or classical physics--what you and I understand, if you have a pencil and drop it or a book and drop it, it goes down.
You go into a very different world called quantum behavior. And there, the easy way to think of it is: It's all magic. I mean, you can get more complicated things--not from me. You can get a physicist to come in here and explain it.
But Richard Feinman, who is the leading explainer of physics at this level, would come back again and again and say: Basically, we don't understand how it happens. We can tell you what happens with great accuracy. We can't tell you anything about why it happens.
Why is that important? Because when you combine very tiny objects--IBM, for example, just built a tiny proto computer chip which is 500 times smaller than any current chip, which means it is dramatically faster.
When you start getting down to that level, and you add size, which is tiny, with quantum behavior, you get very different results.
For example, the National Science Foundation estimates that a quantum computer would be a million times the power of a current computer. It would eliminate all the encryption on the planet and could break any code in something less than a second. And conversely, it could not have any of its own patterned decoded by anybody.
Now, that's a big deal. That changes lots of things. But it also means it's very, very likely with 20 years we'll have a devise that you take--it'll be semi-organic so you can call it a device or a pill--that you'll drink with your orange juice that will basically hate cancer.
Today, we begin to discover cancer when you have enough of it that the systems show up; either your blood pattern changes or something else changes or we can detect it with an MRI or a CAT scan. But by that time, there's a fairly substantial number of cancer cells.
The goal ought to be to have something which basically loiters in your body. You drink it with your orange juice in the morning. It hangs out. The second the first cancer cell shows up, it eats it. If more than one cancer cell shows up, it may send a signal. And you find out, you know, you go to the doctor that--or the signal may actually go through your telephone or through your laptop or through what by then may be a wireless that you can just carry in your pocket.
For example, imagine you're somebody from a family with a propensity for breast cancer. Rather than go through something like having two radical mastectomies, which a good friend of mine did as a preemptive device, because the percentage was so high, you might have a capacity to literally defeat the cancer by knowing you're in a very small niche of people who ought to take this particular anti-breast-cancer device every day.
You drink it every morning. The first time you have breast cancer, it defeats it.
Now, this is all within 20 years. This is not 50 years out or 100 years out. But it requires a focus on making it possible for it to occur.
So you've got two large waves of change. You've got the revolution in biology, the revolution in nanoscale science and technology, and the revolution in quantum behavior, which is the underlying river. Think of it as like the Mississippi in full flood.
And then above it you have these existing changes that we see every day in our commercial life, we see every day as customers, but which have not been translated into the government.
And I think the government out to literally take them as two successive waves, focusing first on bringing itself up to the 21st century and then ought to look at adapting the deeper and more powerful changes.
The fifth proposition is very straightforward. And as it comes from a historian, I guess it's almost inevitable. We've seen these things before.
I studied history as a vocational degree. I think history is really useful because it's easier to imitate than it is to invent.
The fact is, Adam Smith was codifying the rising commercial-industrial world. The "Wealth of Nations" is not a theoretical book. The "Wealth of Nations" is a book of observations developed into a set of rules about--when he describes a needle factory, he's been to a needle factory.
And part of what we're looking for is the equivalent of Adam Smith going to a Solara and going to an Ames laboratory for NASA in California and putting together for the next wave the equivalent of the "Wealth of Nations."
Those general observations that Smith wrote through his disciples modernized the government of Britain under William Pitt the younger, made it possible for Britain to win the war against Napoleon. They would not have had the money, they wouldn't have had the resources without that revolution.
Similarly, in this country, particularly with Alexander Hamilton, who was a disciple of Smith, you create the modern drive toward nationalism economically. And Smith, in that sense, had a very profound effect on the world.
You then saw an entire wave of change: textile mills driven by steam; steamboats, which were driven by steam. Robert Fulton, an American, invented them. The railroad created by Stephenson.
And I would suggest that if you want a model example of transformational politics and transformational government, read Stephen E. Ambrose's "Nothing Like It in the World," which is a description of the rise of the transcontinental railroad and which points that Stephenson invents the train in 1829, and by 1832, Abraham Lincoln, in his first campaign at 23 years of age, is talking about railroads in Illinois.
He has never seen a railroad, and he is campaigning with the railroad as a plank. Ultimately, he becomes a railroad attorney in the 1850s, wins a key case on whether or not bridges are liable for barges for hitting them because they're an obstruction. It was a very important case because the barges wanted to destroy the railroads.
He then, as president, campaigns on a platform which includes a transcontinental railroad. They have--the Congress--I'm going to actually try to get the historian to find us the room up there.
The Congress actually gave the lobbyists for the railroads an office. I mean, it's an amazing story.
So the Congress was encouraging the lobbyists to come lobby the Congress by having an office in Congress where members could go to see the maps so they could get the support to get the subsidy to build the railroad.
And, again, I would argue that both extreme libertarians and extreme government-control people are both wrong. And if you look at the rise of the railroad, which was combination of science and technology, government investment, government funding, private entrepreneurship and private capital, an ethnic work force largely of immigrants, I mean, it's sort of the perfect parable for the early 21st century.
Again, I said earlier Theodore Roosevelt was another example. And I think it's important to note, by the way, that l eaders actually learn a great deal about this.
In fact, my sixth proposition is that when you look at a transformational era, you're looking at leaders who pay attention to the transformation.
Theodore Roosevelt is the first president to ride in a car. I don't think that's an accident. He was a person who was very vividly aware of modernity.
Winston Churchill learns how to fly in 1913. Now, think about that. In fact, the pilot who teaches him dies in a crash that summer.
Here's a guy who is a rising politician, a major force in the British government already by 1913, home secretary, which is the third leading job. He goes out on his own, learns how to fly; the airplane is 10 years old. The army has only had a contract for five years.
I would be like five of--the next five presidential candidates deciding that Tito was right and they had to go fly into space before they felt that they were ready to run for office. It's a totally different model of awareness.
Churchill, of course, also then helped invent the tank.
Reagan, people tend to forget, was very involved in technological change. Early in his working life, he was a broadcaster on WHO radio in Iowa at a time when it was illegal to broadcast news. Remember, the newspapers had blocked radio broadcasting on the grounds that it was inappropriate competitive advantage to deliver the news instantly.
And Reagan used to tell this great story about broadcasting the news one night illegally because they had an earthquake in Los Angeles and there were so many Iowans in Laos Angeles and they wanted to share the information as it came out of the AP. So they would talk about the AP story, accidentally turning down the big band music coming in from New York, so it became a background music as they happened to chat with an open mike about what they just got from AP, because it was illegal.
Reagan then went on, of course, to Hollywood, which was very high technology in the '30s. He then went on to television. And then he went to work for General Electric at a time when their slogan was, "Progress is our most important product." And he spent--his income was going around the country touring General Electric labs and talking with General Electric workers about the net technology they're building.
So Reagan was a natural transformational figure. He had lived a lifetime of techno-change.
And I would suggest that every political leader, every government leader, every leader of a government agency ought to be thinking every day, "So how am I going to learn about these changes? How am I going to be immersed and involved in what's coming?"
I would also suggest that that means that the political and governmental reporters really ought to sit down regularly with the technology, science and business reporters and compare notes. "What is it that we're learning over here in science, business and technology that ought to be appearing over here?"
Because, I tell you, the morning a White House press conference has four questions that come out of the science and technology part rather than out of the normal gossip and negativity part, you're going to change dramatically the underlying flow. It's a totally different way.
You cannot explain what you don't understand, what you don't have words for. And it's very hard for a political figure to explain big change if you literally can't get it covered because nobody understands what they're covering. It's a very major concern in terms of the way the modern system works.
Seventh, I think that's important to recognize that creating a transformation requires asking new questions and creating new systems, attitudes and habits. I think if you walk through sets of questions, you know, it is possible, I think, to devise, as I said earlier, to devise questions such as:
Could we eliminate Alzheimer's? Could we turn most cancers into avoidable, minimizable or manageable events? Could we create a system for both the individual and for society that would make diabetes either curable or controllable with virtually no unhealthy consequences?
Could we minimize the carbon dioxide load, which is the global warming issue, without lowering our standard of living? And for that matter, could we design a worldwide climatology project for less than 1 percent of the cost of Kyoto that would actually give us dramatically more information than we currently have about what really affects the underlying patterns of our climate? Could me create a system of managing biodiversity across the planet?
Could we create a permanent 24-hour-a-day, 7-day-a-week access to learning, from basic literacy through advanced degrees, so every American could learn all their lives?
I mean, I think it's inexcusable to take all the people who are currently illiterate who are over 7 and begin to conclude that we've lost them for a lifetime. First of all, you can't afford it in the work force, you can't afford it for citizens. It dramatically minimizes their future.
And yet, we don't have any practical model that says we want to make it accessible to you at home. I mean, in a world where PlayStation 2 is more powerful than a laptop, it strikes me that it is possible to build a 24-7 real-time access from your vacation spot, from home, from work, from virtually anywhere, for people to have an opportunity to learn in ways that we simply aren't historically used to.
Could we reduce the size and cost of government while increasing its effectiveness? Something virtually every major corporation does routinely. And could we develop new methods of public safety and national defense that improve our safety and security significantly, but within the new science and technology and the new management system?
Those are examples that I think the committees, frankly, in the Congress ought to start each year, asking: What are the transformational questions we should be holding hearings on? Who are the people inventing the future we should be learning from?
And they should design a totally different model of learning on the Hill, as opposed to the gotcha kind of system where we figure out what the latest scandal is we can hold the hearings on to be negative, to find a new excuse for micromanagement and a new excuse for overregulation.
Proposition eight: Transformation requires a new model of governance which is entrepreneurial, capital- rather than labor-intensive, science- and technology-focused, incentive-pooled, success-honoring and rewarding, growing small businesses in big successes.
In addition, transformational requires a willingness to coach those seeking to learn, which is the agricultural agent model; a willingness to prosecute for illegality only those will clearly illegal intent; decentralization; sensitivity to local cooperation; and eagerness to be flexible in achieving local success.
Now, I put that together as a framework because I realized over 3 years of listening to people around the country, both in what works, talking to government contractors about what doesn't work, looking at the science and technology people about what they do best, that the current system--which is bureaucratic, litigious, adversarial--is exactly wrong.
If you look at how we deal--again, when we have an aviation accident, the airline cooperates, the manufacturer cooperates, because we know what's statistically possible. There's actually a recording device in the airplane. The National Transportation Safety Board automatically moves in a positive way. We bring people together to find a solution.
If you look at the Centers for Disease Control working on a danger of an epidemic, it is a cooperative local-federal relationship in which people share information and work together openly. It is the opposite of what has evolved.
Go back and look at the agricultural agent model, and imagine that you took the current Health Care Financing Administration's adversarial, litigious, criminalization mind set and you applied it to agriculture.
Every agriculture agent would only come to your farm on the grounds that you probably are cheating, they probably should put you in jail, and they'd like to see your paperwork so they have proof that would allow them to do that. And you would stop all the flow of information.
And so I just want to suggest--again, I think when there's criminal intent, we ought to throw the book at people. When we're certain it's a real problem, we ought to deal with it as a real problem.
But to treat daily mistakes as though they are criminal guarantees that you never go through the learning and the improving and the coaching to get they system to work. And it also means, by the way, that people won't tell you the truth.
We know know that's true with doctors, over half of whom say they routinely lie and fill out the form they need to f ill out to get the patient what they need to have rather than filling out the form accurately, if that means that they system won't code it right.
It means that most doctors and hospitals code high in their application for billing because they've learned how to game the system. So HCFA then designs a new way to balance it, so you have a permanently downward spiral.
The same thing is true in schools where every time I talk to a high school senior class, every student knows people who cheat.
So when get into an adversarial cycle--
[Tape change.]
I believe that the scale of change is coming and is unavoidable, just as the rise of the steam engine was unavoidable and ultimately every country in the world had steam engines. The rise of the internal combustion engine was unavoidable, and ultimately every county in the world has accepted the automobile and the aircraft.
But the difference is countries whose leaderships learn about the changes and actively, aggressively apply the changes evolve much faster.
The British adopted very rapidly in the 18th and 19th century, began to slow down their adaptions after 1870 and found it very hard to go through the transformational that led to the rise of the internal-combustion-engine, radio-wave world.
They actually lost ground to Germany and America after 1870 in part because they couldn't bring themselves to make the cultural changes to be the kind of managerial, engineering nation you had to be in the age of the automobile, the airplane and radio waves.
We have been stunningly successful. We should not assume that success will be permanent, because, in fact, change means everybody gets to start over. If the Japanese or the Chinese or the Europeans make the breakthrough in nanoscale science and technology faster than we do, we could our leadership in a decade.
Conversely, at a human level, the difference in the quality of health, the difference in the quality of learning, the difference in the quality of life, the difference in the quality of government services, and the difference in the quality of our environment and our biodiversity are massive, depending on whether we accelerate going through the change or we hide from it.
I think the president's instincts are transformational. I think you see that with defense. You see it on the tax cut. You see it in terms of the way he would like education to work, with us being able to identify schools that fail, change schools that fail, find systems that work, and rapidly disseminate those systems so every child can have a chance to leave poverty.
I think he really does believe we should leave no child behind. And I think he really does find the idea of the Senate model of 1 percent a year improvement just absurdly irresponsible and, frankly, very destructive for the poorest children trapped in the worst schools.
I think the president's instincts are in the right direction across the board. But I think the scale of transformation we're describing takes many, many people, both in the legislative and executive branch; it takes a lot of people in the news media. And it will be, I think, the work of probably 20 years.
So that's a sweeping overview. I appreciate your patience. And if we can throw it wide open.
Yes, sir?
QUESTION: I'd like to make a couple of brief background points and then ask you what Bob Novak would say, "the big question."
First of all, the late Ray Cline, who was debilitated with Alzheimer's and finally died from it, had a vision some years ago to force Congress, really, and the White House to pass a statute calling for an annual review of the real threat and the type of technology and military stuff we needed to meet that threat, which is now a statute.
Secondly, Dan Graham used to make the point, the late Dan Graham, the biggest problem with getting SDI passed in Congress was not the critics; it was the bureaucracy and the defense contractors that were not doing SDI type stuff that wanted to save the defense budget for their stuff and not the SDI stuff.
Number three, there was a defense contracting lobbyist, who was a good friend of mine, who made the point that most of their time they spend selling their products, they don't really spend most of their time selling stuff that we really need to meet the threat. And there needs to be reversal there.
And then finally, Billy Mitchell's court-martial, where he was 10 or 15 years ahead of his time, calling for air power, the battleship. And cruiser manufacturers and bureaucrats in the Navy didn't like that, and they had him court-martialed. He almost was convicted.
With that as a way of background, and your experience in Congress, what do you think are the chances of getting media and bipartisan support for the kind of things Rumsfeld is liable to come up with on SDI space-based defense and other things that may call for a fairly major change in the mix of defense procurement, contracts and emphasis?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, I think it depends on how it's positioned. I think if Secretary Rumsfeld can attract enough people like Jack Welch to make the case that you really couldn't keep General Electric in business if you had the rules that the Pentagon currently has, you couldn't keep Wal-Mart in business if you had the rules the Pentagon currently has.
And I think that if enough people from the larger society who are already doing the right things go to see their member of Congress, then I think the Congress has a huge incentive, because it is, after all, the young men and women from the congressional districts who serve in defense.
And it's a fairly tough case if a member of Congress believes that the current rules mean that the young men and women of their of district are more likely to die in combat because they literally can't get through the procurement hoops to buy things.
But I think if it's between Rumsfeld and the Congress, he'll lose. If it is between the larger community, which is why I think the issue ought to be brining the Pentagon into the 21st century--it shouldn't be--I think that if you basically make the case with enough of the American community looking at how absurd the current system is--I think they currently require over 850 annual reports to the Congress.
I mean, there's not a business in America that could function in that kind of micromanaged absurdity.
But I think the case ought to be made by a lot of other people that that's the right scale of change, and that they have to be pretty clear about what they're going to demand back from Rumsfeld.
What they ought to demand is a dramatically modernized force, using the best technology and the best systems to minimize the risk of American loss of life while enabling us to support our allies and to protect the country.
QUESTION: Karen Robb from Federal Times newspaper.
I'm the information technology reporter. And what you were saying about the stagecoach arguing, and you mentioned HCFA, the CIO of HHS has spent the last four years tying to get HCFA and everyone to be on the same e-mail. They're on something called "Happy Mail."
The FBI lost those 3,000 documents because they're on a 15-year-old commuter system. And they can't get Congress to appropriate the money.
So how do we do this transformation when you have these really aggressive CIO types trying to get the money now?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, I think it's got to be elevated to the level of the president and Mitch Daniels and Dick Cheney. I mean, Edwards Demming, who was probably the leading advocate of quality in the world--the Demming award in Japan is named for Demming, and I was a student of his.
Demming had a clear rule: If the CEO wasn't personally engaged, he wouldn't work with the company because you couldn't get the level of change.
So the president and the director of the budget and the vice president are going to have to decide, along with their Cabinet officers for the respective Cabinets, that they are for a block modernization of the federal government.
QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE)
MR. GINGRICH: Right. I didn't defend that. I'm answering your question.
To modernize this government, they have to look through what is it going to take to modernize the system.
And I would argue that has to be a very, very high priority.
But let's take the example of the IRS. It will cost less to run the IRS 6 years from now if 70 percent of the taxes are filed electronically. Now, that would suggest to me, if you looked at airlines, who figured the same thing out with airline reservations, that they probably ought to bring in some people from the hotels and the airlines who are already doing this and design the optimal transformation for you, the taxpayer, to make it in your interest to file electronically, because it costs less; it doesn't cost more.
I mean, you do have to ask yourself the question, how do we manage to design government, education, defense and health so the answer is always more money, which doesn't seem to be the case--yes, you may spend more on IT at Ford, but you somehow spend less somewhere else. Or may spend more on IT at Wal-Mart, but you somehow spend less somewhere else. Only in government does better information technology become a cost-plus kind of world.
And so, you know, I think there are lots of ways to start solving it, but I think that I would agree with you that for what I'm describing to come true, the president and the vice president and the director of the budget are going to have to make a block modernization into the information age a very significantly part of their goal for the next 3 or 4 years.
QUESTION: What would be the transformative approach to taking the solution to Alzheimer's (OFF-MIKE)?
MR. GINGRICH: Well, first of all, we don't know what the solution to Alzheimer's is.
I mean, it may be, if it turns out--I mean, a good example of transformational health care is Salk and polio vaccine. And there we had a very simple solution. We made it available to everybody virtually overnight. It was a very large block transformation.
In 1950, the major incentive was, how can get to an aluminum lung? How can I modernize the iron lung? I mean, that would be a managerial response.
By 1960, the answer was how to make sure that everybody has a polio vaccine so we don't need an iron lung. And it's been a radical success.
In the case of the small pox virus, we systematically eliminated it. I mean, small pox viruses probably don't exist in more than 30 or 40 laboratories in the world, two of which we know about; the others we probably don't know about it. But it literally does not exist in the wild, to the best of our knowledge, anywhere on the planet anymore.
You look at the small pox deaths up until the eradication of small pox, that's an extraordinary change.
I mean, we don't know today. Alzheimer's may turn out to be something that requires a complex genetic solution. It may turn out to be something we can engineer with a--it's conceivable, for example, the nun study indicates using your brain postpones Alzheimer's.
There was a study of longevity among nuns, and there's pretty solid evidence that by a significant factor, if you play bridge regularly, you were less likely to have Alzheimer's. That's anecdotal, but brain scientists believe it's absolutely true.
So it's conceivable that you'll have a program much like we have now for cardiovascular disease, where we'll say, here's the diet and here's the exercise for your brain, and this will give you a 95 percent likelihood of not getting Alzheimer's before 95.
Or it may well be that it's a prescription drug. We don't know. If it's a prescription drug that preempts Alzheimer's, we are nuts if we don't buy it and distribute to everybody, just as with diabetes, we are irrational at not giving away insulin.
We will give you lifetime kidney dialysis when get sick enough. We will amputate both of your feet, and we will pay you a stipend for disability. We will take care of you with a stipend when you go blind, and diabetes causes 95 percent of the--I mean, causes almost all the adult blindness in the United States. We will ensure you get heart disease operation after operation once the heart disease is bad enough, but it's caused by the diabetes.
But we will not give you insulin and enable you to avoid any of those things.
Now, that's just nutty. I mean, once you make the decision you're going to take care of somebody when they have kidney dialysis, it is stunningly cheaper to not have the kidney dialysis. It's also better for their quality of life.
My uncle spent 7 years on dialysis before he died. It is better than dying, but it is not a preferable outcome, comparing to learn to manage yourself.
We have no systematic, large-scale effort in the United States today to learn to manage ourselves.
And by the way, it's politically incorrect to say it, but the worst place is among Native Americans, because tribal cultures don't tolerate the level of intervention necessary when 50 percent of a tribe is diabetic. So we suffer human pain at levels that are stunning.
And your point is right. I mean, something which is a universal class action behavior we ought to deal with as a universal class action behavior. I don't see that as a problem.
QUESTION: Interesting talk, but not the one I thought you were going to give. I'm looking at some of the things that were in your blurb in the AEI that came out earlier, and it was more about engaging the public to help pass the agenda that the Bush administration has already put forward. And I'm wondering where the public involvement and where the engagement and how--I thought, for example, you were going to be addressing things like the Social Security, selling that--
MR. GINGRICH: Sure.
QUESTION: --kind of change to the public and the way in which the Bush administration has to go about that if they're going to things that you've already identified as transformational.
MR. GINGRICH: Well, I think that--I'd be glad to talk about it because I think it's the same topic, and that's sort of phase one, if you will.
And I give Bush a lot of credit, as I did in the New York Times article for, I think, being a transformational leader in terms of setting large goals, staying focused on them, being very repetitive, which is one of the keys to transformational leadership.
Mike Deaver, by the way, has a new book out on Reagan called "A Different Drummer," which I believe in 223 pages is the best introduction to why Reagan was successful. And you see the calm, cheerful, steady repetitiveness that was so effective.
Let me just suggest to you that Bush has been very successful by any reasonable standard in going to the country on tax cuts, and that there's a case where he spent a lot of time for 4 months out at various places, including South Dakota. They had lots of public meetings. They dominated the local media in the markets they went into, much more than the national media.
The net effect is he is currently on track to get about 70 percent of his tax cut, more or less; 85 percent? Okay, I'll accept Rick's more generous version.
I think you would have to argue, when the Democrats started with Gore at $300 billion and they ended up somewhere in the $1.3 trillion level, you know--and Bush gets to come back in January and propose another trillion if he wants to, if the economics looks like it can sustain it.
So I would say that that has to be considered a general success. I think that they have worked hard at communicating some of the education issue.
I think they have to be much tougher on the Senate bill than they have been so far. That may just be a difference of tactics, but I just think they have the absolute upper hand at demanding real reform, if they're prepared to pay for it.
And I wouldn't focus the argument on how much to spend. I would focus the argument on how much schools have to change and the moral principle that no poor child should be left trapped in a lousy school, which the Senate bill absolutely guarantees.
I mean, it's just a disgracefully anti-poor child bill in its current form. Take care of the union, take care of bureaucracy, let the kids get ruined. I think that that--Bush ought to draw a pretty firm line there.
I think the big challenge, you put your finger on. And I think it comes in two forms. The Social Security commission has to stick to the single question: What's the best way to develop a personal Social Security account?
I mean, I would openly urge everybody who cares a personal Social Security account to repudiate the commission the second it steps into pain. You don't need to deal with pain in this commission. You shouldn't deal with retirement age. You shouldn't deal with benefit changes.
You should focus only on what is the appropriate, what is the best way to have a personal Social Security account. Because if we win that issue, and we are able to get personal Social Security savings accounts for every working American when they start working, and the poorest 16-year-old in America, or 14-year-old with a work permit in some states, is able to see at the end of that first year of work that they are actually saving money, earning interest, et cetera, I think you're in a very, very different world.
And I believe what that requires is for the president right now to lay out basically four strategies: a substance str ategy of making sure they get the right proposal, a proposal which saves Social Security for seniors, which saves Social Security for the baby boomers and which saves Social Security with a personal account for young people who will get three to six times as much return if they're allowed to invest that money; second, that the president have a legislative strategy to begin proactively right now building the base of understanding and support; third, that he have a communication strategy in the normal media; and fourth, I think they really need a "Younger Americans for a Safe Social Security" or a "Younger Americans for Personal Social Security Savings Account," some kind of grassroots mechanism that gets people involved in the 15-30 age outside of normal politics and outside of normal legislation, to really get across this notion this will change their lives decisively.
And I think that if they do that, then you have Theodore Roosevelt-scale success.
One last question, and you get to be it.
QUESTION: Carl Leubsdorf of the Dallas Morning News, losing his voice.
I'm trying not too be negative in this question--
MR. GINGRICH: Go for it.
QUESTION: That's the press's role, I guess.
Critics would say that despite your success in electing and keeping a Republican House, that a lot of the more transformational aspects of what you sought were not achieved. The initial budget was not accepted, and the House in many ways is like it was under the Democrats except that it's the Republicans who are screwing the Democrats rather than the Democrats screwing the Republicans.
What evidence do you have that the system, the political system, is at all capable of accepting the kind of transformational change that you are advocating, which I'm not saying are bad ideas, but can the system really accept them?
I mean, Bush, for example, is getting his tax cut but he's having a terrible time getting any reform on education and the other things that are much more sweeping.
MR. GINGRICH: Well, let me just ask you a couple of quick questions, Carl.
Do you ever use the Thomas system to get information?
QUESTION: Yes.
MR. GINGRICH: Okay, the Thomas system, for anybody who is watching and doesn't know, is the system we opened the day after I became speaker, and the Library of Congress has hosted it, which allows anybody on the entire planet for free to access information about the U.S. House without having a lobbyist, belonging to an association or paying a dime.
It also now has all the bills that are introduced on a regular basis, has committee hearings, has transcripts, has the debate on the floor, and is a pretty amazing step towards transparency.
Second, did you ever notice that you're not covering some of the people who were chairman last year?
QUESTION: You mean because of term limits? Yes.
MR. GINGRICH: Because of term limits.
Does it strike you that having term-limited chairmen, which survived after I left, which I was, frankly, worried about, isn't that a rather remarkable change, compared to the Congress you covered up through '94?
QUESTION: It hasn't changed the way Congress works.
MR. GINGRICH: But it's changed--
QUESTION: It's changes some of the people.
MR. GINGRICH: Okay. But that would have been considered, in '94, a fairly substantial change.
When is the last time you wrote about the impending deficit?
QUESTION: But we can get into a whole argument about why we don't--
MR. GINGRICH: Sure.
QUESTION: --have a deficit.
MR. GINGRICH: Yes, we could. But I think it's an interesting fact that, as Ronald Reagan once said, he knew his program was succeeding with the press quit calling it Reaganomics.
I mean, only one group in America ran promising to balance the budget. Only one group in America closed the government and took the beating over balancing the budget. Only one group in America insisted on getting it done in 7 years rather than whatever number the president came up with that week.
And it does strike me as interesting that having done it, that somehow didn't count.
But let me throw the other one in: welfare reform. I mean, it strikes me that welfare reform is clearly our largest--
QUESTION: But you could argue that--Democrats could argue that President Clinton campaigned on the basis of--
MR. GINGRICH: But you know enough about--
QUESTION: --ending welfare as we know it--
MR. GINGRICH: --the welfare bill--
QUESTION: --and that you came together.
MR. GINGRICH: No honest--
QUESTION: So you're saying basically that the system can accommodate the kinds of changes that--
MR. GINGRICH: It can accommodate a set of changes at a time.
Now, I remember complaining to Reagan about 1986, and I was very impatient. There were about seven of us down there to beard him one afternoon. We were all showing our impatient, younger Reaganite selves, and he finally stopped and he said, "You know, it took us 50 years to get here. By the time I'm done, I'll have taken step one. Maybe you guys just have to do some heavy lifting after I leave."
It was very blunt and very straightforward. "Glad to hear you guys complain. Your turn."
My point is--I said it at the end of my talk. I believe this is a 20-year process of transformation. I believe Reagan got a bite. I think the Republicans of '94 got a bite with the contract. I think Bush's first phase is pretty good bite.
I've suggested the second phase is this whole theme of bringing government into the 21st century, which is the information technologies modernization.
And remember, I'm talking about things like how does General Electric procure, how does Wal-Mart do logistics? I don't just mean have computers and e-mail.
And then I think the next phase after that is the systematic application of the impending scientific revolution. I really do think--and I think it'll take at least 10 or maybe 20 years, just as you could argue the progressive reformations that begin in some ways with LaFollette's 1896 governor's race, become really profound with Theodore Roosevelt, are codified in a phase one with Wilson's "New Freedom," and the reemerge with Roosevelt and the Great Depression, that that's actually a pretty long cycle of change.
I suspect you could go from Reagan to the presidency of 2016 or 2020 and see a similar cycle of transformation.
Thank you all very much.
[Applause.]
MR. ORNSTEIN: Thank you, Newt.
You can see why having Newt around here is particularly interesting and exciting for all of us.
And we will see whether, in coming years, with the tightest partisan margin almost in American history in the House and the Senate; and with a government that has less than 10 percent of its top policymaking people in place, and perhaps won't have them for its first year; with a Defense Department where the Republican senators are holding up some of those nominees because they're already uneasy about the scope of change that Secretary Rumsfeld is proposing; how these challenges will be met of the course of the next year or two.
Tomorrow morning, here in this room at 10 o'clock, our Transition to Governing project will hold a session on how is Bush governing, in which I promise you, with Fred Greenstein, presidential scholar and historian at Princeton, and David Gergen, Tom Mann and myself, we will directly pose some of these questions about transformational and managerial leadership and put it into that context to continue this dialogue, which I'm sure will go on in many other ways.
Thank you all.
[End of presentation.]
