The Contract with America Looking Back and Looking Forward: What Does It Mean for the Twenty-First Century?

September 27, 2004

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording

Proceedings:
MR. BLANKLEY:  We want to, first of all, thank the Congressional Service for providing documents, which from my memory they do a lot of.  And FreedomWorks for sponsoring this event.

The title of the conference is:  "The Contract with America Looking Back and Looking Forward:  What does it mean for the Twenty-First Century?"

I would encourage our panelists that you look not only backward and forward, but left and right, up and down, any way you want.  This is a free-form thought process.

I think everybody here--let me just briefly introduce the panel before we get started:

Newt Gingrich needs no introduction, so I won't give him one.

Dick Armey, also, needs no introduction, I won't give him one either.

Joe Gaylord, only needs introduction for anybody who has not followed congressional politics for the last third of a century.  He is one of or the premier congressional, political consultant operatives and has been Newt's senior and closest political advisor since, I believe, 1979, when Guy Vanderjack, told him to keep Newt out of his hair.

Michael Barone, obviously, one of the great journalists in Washington.  And I believe the only journalist who has visited and studied every congressional district, perhaps, almost every precinct in America.  It's said that the--when a butterfly flutters its wings in the Amazon, it affects the weather in Manhattan.  And Michael is capable by discerning the effect on national politics of slight movements of borders of, you know, the 4th congressional district of Tennessee.  And he is, along with being a formidable, journalist--also, the author of the "Almanac of American Politics," which everybody who cares about politics has by their typing stand.

Jennifer Dunn was one of the members who was leading us throughout the contract period and beyond.  She's been characterized in the Washingtonian as one of the 100 most-powerful women in Washington.  So, I will not be arm-wrestling her today.

Let me talk very briefly about the Contract and what we're doing here today.  And, then, we'll have some opening thoughts by each of our panelists.

Some people thought that when Newt conceived of the Contract--there was, of course, a lot of people involved in developing it and we'll be talking about that today--and then we won the election based on it and took over the House after 40 years in the wilderness.  There were analogies to Moses.  And some people even compared the Contract with the document that Moses brought down from the mountain.

I would point out that, after Moses brought the document down, many of the chosen people chose to roast fatted calves and bow to craven idols.  And one of the questions today will be whether the chosen people, the Republicans, have kept faith with the Contract in the ensuing years.

Each panelists will talk about whatever they want, because they're all powerful enough and I can't stop them.  But let me throw out a couple of questions that, perhaps, some of them will address during the opening comments or beyond.

First, I wonder how much, on a policy basis, the Contract affected or deflected the Clinton policy agenda between 1994, when it was announced ten years ago today, and January of 2001, when Clinton left office.

A few other thoughts to look at, particularly what has been the legacy of  our reforms in agriculture; telecommunications; deregulation; welfare reform; term limits in Congress; and, perhaps, most notoriously, deficits and balanced budgets.

With those thoughts in mind, let me now turn to Joe Gaylord who will, I think, talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of the political process that got us the Contract and where we've gone since then.  Joe.

MR. GAYLORD:  Tony, thanks very much.  I'm delighted to have the opportunity to be here this morning in such distinguished company.

I think it's helpful as you start to think about the Contract ten years later and what it all means and all of that, to think about it in terms of what it meant for electing a majority; and part of the mechanics of the process itself.

After being involved in congressional elections for about 100 years, and falling to elect majorities in about all of those except for one, and then working at keeping the majority in two others, there are some principles that come through that I think make sense that people should keep in mind.

And the contract was the re-enforcing part of that principle and, perhaps, the most-important part.  And that is for electing a majority for either party, you have to be able to tell people what it is you're all about and what it is that you are for.

And then you have to be able to describe what it is you're for in a language that people use every day.  So, both the principles that were found in the ten points of the Contract and the Preamble, which defined what it was we were all about and what it was we were going to do became the organizing and message principle for the majority campaign.

The second thing was that we discovered that using a language that was not politicalese, not bureauratese, not governmentese was important, because people discuss things at their dinner table differently than politicians and campaigners generally discussed mt on the campaign trail.

The third thing was to have a slate of candidates who were trained in the issues and contained in the Contract itself, so that they knew what they were talking about.

That was highly controversial at the time in 1994, because people said you cannot stick these candidates out in the country with these ten things that the Democrats will hang around their neck.

But quite to the contrary, the candidates--who I would also mention for the first time, I think, in the history of our party--we ran, I think 433 candidates in the 435 districts in 1994.  There are only two that we didn't have candidates in.  So we had a full slate.  And the Contract actually became a lifeline for them, that they--in their debates with their opponents, could say, well, this is what I'm for.  Why don't you just tell me what you're for?  And the Democrats had a lot of trouble with doing that.

The fourth thing that's important in electing a majority is the ability to communicate with the electorate, both over, under, around, and through the media.  And, frankly, the 10 principles in the preamble of the Contract gave candidates the basis for what to talk about in the campaign.  And, again, it was the lifeline where they were able to go on the offense, as opposed to be on the defense and talk about what it is that we had done.

The fifth thing is that it allowed us the opportunity--and the important thing is to gather resources--and to gather resources, I think, in three different ways.  Not only in terms of the capital that's necessary for the campaign, in terms of cash or money or contributions, because people would give to whatever it is that folks are for, but, also, to allow us to put together the coalitions that were necessary at the grass-roots level to actually elect the majority.

And whether they were the antitaxers; or they were the progun folks; or whether they were the prolife folks; or they just played, as Grover Norquist used to say, the leave-us-alone coalition, they were highly activated in the 1994 election.

It's one of those elections, if you actually look at campaign financing, you will see that Republicans were clearly outspent in the congressional campaigns with the resources of people and the resources of ideas, along with enough cash at the time, actually, to put us over the top.

And then, finally, you have to have an opposition that is somehow weakened and you can't talk about the '94 election without saying that Bill Clinton did a lot to help.  Both in terms of weakening his party and weakening his candidates at every level.

So, those six factors, we found to be uniquely at play in the 1994 campaign.  And that was no more evident, early on, than the Ron Lewis campaign in Kentucky.  It was a seat that we had never won before that had carried at the presidential level.  And we had--our opponent was a top-flight Kentuckian who had been Secretary of Congress and President of the state senate and state chairman.  And we ran a 10-day campaign and beat him.  And it was clear, at that time, that the Speaker said to me, you know, this is one of those times when I think we could win 30 seats, but we better win 50 and we need to figure out a way to do this.

And that was not when the Contract was born, because that was floating around in his head for any period of time before that and he talked about it.  But putting the mechanics to work in that process, actually began after Ron Lewis's victory in Kentucky.

MR. BLANKLEY:  Okay, thank you.  Very succinct, thank you.  Next, I'd like to have Michael Barone, presumably discuss the media and the Contract, but feel free to roam where your mind takes you.  Thank you.

MR. BARONE:  The media and the Contract.  Okay, well, I'll just--let me start off by saying that I'm not the author, but the co-author of the "Almanac of American Politics" and I say that, in particular, because my co-author, Richard Cohen, is in the room and capable of rushing forward to grab a microphone, but through his innate courtesy, has refrained from doing that, congressional reporter for National Journal for many years now.  And, so, I wanted to note that.

I guess I was asked to be on this panel because, at least, so far as I know, I was the first person in what we in the blogosphere now call mainstream media, to write that the Republicans had a serious chance of winning the majority of the House of Representatives in 1994.  I did a column on that and it appeared in U.S. News the second week in July.

And it's interesting to go back, we've now gotten used to the idea that, yeah, hey, there's ten years of Republican Houses and so forth.  It didn't occur to anybody in the press or at least not enough to put it down on paper, that that could have occurred until, what would that be, four months before the election.

It had occurred, of course, to Newt.  And when Joe Gaylord said there was an idea floating around in Newt's head, there are always a lot of ideas floating around in Newt's head.

That, of course it was possible.  And I had predicted it, to some extent, in my introductions to "Almanacs of American Politics," in the past.  And you can actually go back and look at those under michaelbarone.com, where I've gone back and written a critique of each of my introductions, what I got right; what I got wrong and so forth, over 30 years.  And there's space for you to add your own comments, if you're interested enough to do so.

But I had a sense that there was something about the Democratic majority in Congress which everybody had come to think--in the House--that everybody had come to think was eternal.  That there were factors that were tending to work against it's being eternal over time.

Three factors pointed themselves up:  Number one, the spate of, really, able Democratic candidates who first won elections circa 1974, but also in the '72/'76 and even '78 elections.  Those talented people who held districts for many years, which, in the absence of an incumbent would probably tend to favor a Republican.  They were going to retire, drop out, run for the Senate or governor sooner or later.  And they might not be replaced by as talented a set of Democratic candidates.

The second one was redistricting.  Redistricting favored the Democrats heavily in the 1970 and '80 Senate cycles.  Less so in the 1990 Senate cycle.  And, in fact, in the 2000 Senate cycle, we see redistricting, in my judgment, mildly favor the Republicans.  So, that was a factor that was going to change.

And, third, the South.  When Newt Gingrich was elected to Congress in 1978 from Georgia, he was, as I recall, the only Republican in the House delegation in Georgia.  Now, of course, Georgia is a heavily Republican delegation and the South has a majority of southern delegates.

Interestingly, a presage of the 1994 election results was in 1992, that was the first election--except for the reconstruction elections--in which the Republican Party got a higher percentage of votes in House races in the South than in the rest of the country.  Even as George Bush was going down to defeat, the Republican Party--that upsurge was available.

You also saw in the '92 elections the defeat of such a talented Democrat who'd held a Republican district for 18 years was Tom Downey in Rhode Island.  That was a signal, as well as what might be coming in '94.

So, if you go back to those "Almanac" introductions, you will see, in several cases, perhaps, tutored by Newt, I predicted that the Republicans had a chance to win a House majority.  It's sort of like, you know, when Alan Greenspan referred to the economists that predicted ten of the last three recessions.  I predicted four of the one Republican takeover.  But, in fact, those factors did come to play in 1994.

As Joe Gaylord said, you also had political circumstances.  You had the Clinton Administration advancing a program, particularly on the health care, which neither Clinton nor her husband could defend.

You had, for the first time, since 1980 in 14 years, you had a Democratic Party, you know, in control of Congress, in control of the White House, setting the national agenda that turned out to be unpopular.  This gave the Republicans a chance to move into the gap to run on favorable terrain on many issues.  And then, I think the Contract did a good job of providing a national theme.

Joe's described how it was something that candidates could point to.  Each of the provisions was widely population.  They were a contrast, they enabled the Republicans to run as citizen politicians, the new guys in town against the old cynical professionals that had been in there for so many years.

In effect it was a device that was imitated in other countries in subsequent years.  I went to Italy to cover the elections in April 1996.  I believe fervently in covering Italian elections.  And Salvio Balescone's polo del liberta [ph] coalition had a platform that was called, del concato ode vie Italiani [ph].  Contract for the Italians that had five or six provisions of what they were going to do.

In the United Kingdom in 1997, the May '97 election.  The Labor Party, Tony Blair's new Labor Party had a little playing card sign of thing and here are five or six promises that new Labor is going to keep.  And they listed them down there.  And, so, they had been watching American politics, as well.

And actually I was--the last Republican National Convention was, I suspect the only national party convention in history in which there was spontaneous applause for two British Prime Ministers, one of the Conservative Party and the other of the Labor Party.  Interesting.

How has the Contract done?  How has it held together?  Well, as has been pointed out, most of the Contract, I think all but one of the Contract provisions was passed by the Congress.  And some of them have now gone into abeyance.  The Office of Speaker is term limited, but it's not clear to me that Denny Hastert, there's a Republican House elected in 2004 and 2006 will retire as Speaker, we'll see.

It's the committee chairmen are limited, although I think an exception was made for Porter Goss, of the Intelligence Committee, which is, indeed, a different kind of committee.

The budget was, indeed, balanced, though it is no longer.

Line-item veto was ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.  So there's been some erosion.  And there's also been, I think, some erosion in the on spending, generally, in the House of Representatives.

And Newt Gingrich never had more than 235 House Republicans in the Chamber in which 218 was a majority.  Denny Hastert has never had more than 229 since he's been Speaker.

And my, sort of overall analysis is that one of the ways that the Republican leadership has held together its narrow majorities and they have on, virtually all major legislation, with only a few exceptions, is that the glue to do that is called money.

And you want to--Newt is a veteran, I believe, of the Transportation Infrastructure Committee or Public Works, as it was called in his time.  It's interesting that the House wants to spend a whole lot more money on the highway bill, transportation bill than the White House does and so forth.

So, I think that's one of the crisis the Republicans have paid for not being able to expand their majority beyond--significantly beyond the 230 seats that they won in 1994.

Counterfactuals, what would have happened, if there hadn't been a Contract with America?  Would the Republicans have been able to win the 52 seats they won and get up to 230 or would they have been stuck at, say, 32?  Leaving them short of them short of the majority.  What would have happened to the Congress with a very Democratic majority?  Would Bill Clinton have changed and moved his public policy proposals and Gore as much as he did in response to the Election of a Republican Congress?  Probably not, though one cannot be sure.

You have had a situation where the Democrats, still technically in control, would have been seen as so incapable of governing that you might have had a Republican sweep across the board, including for President in '96.  Remember that if you looked at President Clinton's re-election numbers in early '95, they did not look very good.  And I think it was going around in many people's heads, particularly Republicans, he would not be re-elected.

So, you can do these sort of counterfactuals as long as you want.  And the permutations and combinations when one starts going, doing this ten years later, I think, are many.  No one can say exactly how much the Contract contributed to the Republican victory.  But I think it's at least possible that it accounted for the 218th seat through the 230th.  And those have turned out to make a lot of difference in American history.  And so, I think it is worthy that we have a panel on this subject, ten years later.  Thank you.

MR. BLANKLEY:  Thank you, Michael.  Next we're going to have Congresswoman Dunn give a unique perspective as a member, the only one on this panel who was a member then and is a member now--and I'd be interested in anything that she has to say, but, particularly her perspective from what was a back bench and now a power player in Congress ten years on.

MS. DUNN:  Thank you very much, Tony.  This is as interesting to me as it is to all of you in the audience because I think one of the great things about having a panel of this sort is that it makes you sit down and think about what you went through.  It was a wonderful time, an exhilarating time; a time of great focus.  And I think that was one of the lessons that I learned from Newt's development of this whole concept.

I was a freshman in Congress at that time.  I had been elected in 1992.  I had read Joe Gaylord's book, "Flying Upside Down," to tell me that I was supposed to be out there as a candidate meeting people and raising money.  And I had listened to all of Newt's GoPac tapes and that's pretty much what I had to go on when I ran in '92, it was the Year of the Woman, some of you will recall.

But in Washington state it was the year of the Democratic woman.  And it was a very lonely election for me.  I was the only Republican elected that year from Washington state.

It is a very different situation since the Contract with America.  And so, when I came to Congress in 1993 and a wonderful gentleman who was our minority leader, Bob Michael, called me about 7:00 o'clock one morning, he said, Bill Gratison has retired from a congressional reform panel and I would like to have you take his place on this panel.  I was one of 104 freshmen members of Congress; knew nothing about what I was doing.  Went to every meeting I could find on the Hill just to figure out how the Congress--how it worked.

And so, this was a wonderful opportunity for me to sit in for a couple of years on a reform panel that came up with some very serious reforms.  And the irony of the whole thing is that Democrats were in control.  And we took our list of reforms that would make the Congress work better, not in a partisan way, but in a very bipartisan way, because this was a bipanel, bipartisan 24 folks that met once a week.

For two years, we took our ideas to Tom Foley in the House and he said we don't have time to consider those ideas on the floor of the House.  So, for me, those two years were spent learning what could be done better.

And when Newt decided that we were going to do Contract with America, I was one of his top cheerleaders.  We had some items that became, later, the 14-hour opening-day agenda on the floor of the House in 1995.  And I will just recall for you, some of those things, all of which came out of our joint committee, were turned down by Tom Foley.

And, by the way, Michael, I appreciate that you were the first to predict that the House was going to go Republican.  I think I must have been the first to predict that George Nethercutt was going to take out our Speaker of the House, Tom Foley.  And he was from my state.  So it was a pretty exciting time for me.

Required that all laws apply to the rest of the country that also apply to Congress.  This was a serious recommendation because OSHA would walk into the businesses in the United States and tell them that they had to close down for a period of time until they obeyed OSHA's requirements for change.  In the Congress, we couldn't appreciate that.  Because we had free reign.  And OSHA never walked into our offices.  So we believed that this would be very useful for members of Congress to have to live under the same laws.

Select a major independent auditing firm.  Do you know that the House had never been audited by an independent auditor ever in its history.  Price Waterhouse came in and did that audit after we proposed this as part of the rules on opening day.  They found some very, very egregious mistakes being made.  There were people who went to prison for that.  There was also a huge turnaround in that as we got that first report back and it said we can't even give you an answer, the financial House is in such bad order.

We realized, after we analyzed this, after the first year that we were in control, that we were running the House of Representatives at $200 million less than the Democrats had the day before or the year before.  So it also saved some taxpayer dollars.

Cut the number of House committees, that needed to be done.  They weren't responding to the modern-day.  Limit the terms of all committee chairs.  You will recall that there were people who had been committee chairs for 30 years in the Congress.  And they were building their own empires and staff often were leading these committee business.  And freshmen like me or my 103 other colleagues didn't have any hope ever of becoming committee chairmen.  So there was no incentive, even to go to meetings in those days.  And that was one of our proposals.

Proxy votes was very frustrating.  I was a member of the minority party at that time.  I recall, one day there was a ceremony in the Rose Garden when President Clinton was President.  And the Democrats all went to that ceremony.  And we still stayed in our committee meetings and took votes and we never won a vote, even though there was no Democrat present and we had all bothered to attend.

Committee meetings being open to the public, just a really, really important change in the Congress.  Many people forget this happened.  In my state of Washington, we had had open meetings for 20 years.  So that was the item I was able to manage on the floor.  And it was very exciting to see the committee that I began to serve on that year, the Ways and Means Committee, forced to open its doors to the public and to the press.  When, before, by a majority vote, which was always Democrat, they could lock those doors.  And nobody saw what was going on in that meeting.  I think that was terribly important.

Anyway, the list went on and on, took us 14 hours, we passe the whole thing.  When I look at what was accomplished by the Contract, I remember Newt's opening statement, he said this is a big country and when you're trying to make a mark in a big country, you have to repeat and repeat and repeat the same message over and over again.

The unity that the Contract brought to us, as freshmen who were fighting to be a majority was incredible.  But the focus that it provided for people in the United States who didn't necessarily know what politicians really were going to do, and, yet, were able to read this simple ten-point Contract that touched on all the issues and the values that all of us candidates had picked up in previous years of campaigning, it was an amazing focusing sort of event.  And I think it fulfilled Newt's desire to repeat message.  It was wonderful.

As others have already outlined, the scene at the time was a very bad scene for politicians, but, particularly for Democrats.  There had been a build-up of negative feelings against the Democrat Party.  We could feel it out there, '93, '94, during that time of campaigning.

The bank scandal had created a lot of retirements, a lot of defeats.  That happened, pretty much, in the '92 election, when I ran with the little, under my name and said Give Congress a good name, Jennifer Dunn.  And give Congress a good name, would never have occurred to us in a time of good feeling for politicians.

The national health care system; the tax increase that the President had led support for since he'd--President Clinton, as soon as he became elected, all of that was very important as we focused ideas on what we wanted to accomplish.

I believe the Contract, at that time, changed the foundation of debate.  And I think it's existed even to this time.  Tax relief.  that was a huge part of our set of values and tax relief continues to be, I think the chief value of the Republican Party, today.

It allowed us to align with the business community.  We had governors from all over the country come testify before us after won that election in '94 to talk about welfare reform, for example.  Something that had been in people's minds for decades and had been a huge negative; a very frustrating area for Republicans because people were relying on welfare.  And we knew that the incentive system is the best system to work.

And so, welfare reform became a huge issue that would not have been discussed, I believe, had Democrats stayed in control.  And the alliance with the business community, the welfare-to-work tax incentives, the work opportunity tax credits, made them very much a part of the system and our partners in all of this.

So, I think there were some minuses.  I think, after we did pass the Contract in 93 days, I guess it was.  We were all shell-shocked and everybody had to go on a vacation just to figure out, you know, who their spouses were and children were, because we were there constantly.

There were some bad things that happened in the way we used our rhetoric.  It was harsh and I hope that Armey will talk to you about that, because he's so good on this topic.  We frightened people.  We talked about getting rid of the Department of Education, for example, without an alternative--without the caring approach that many of us felt then and feel now, with a Republican President advocating help to education.

But the reason we didn't put it in was because the federal government was only 7 percent of the whole cost of education.  That was a local issue, we wanted to leave it to the states.

Ways and Means picked up a very heavy burden.  I loved it, I was newly appointed to Ways and Means.  So that was lots of fun, but it was a huge burden for us.

There were some things that happened on the Hill that were very personal to some of us.  We were there late at night.  I remember one evening, a young member of one of our staff in walking home was raped because it was dark.  And nobody was protecting her.  We were caught up in our enthusiasm and we didn't think about how it affected staff and people who had to exist while we were getting rid of our frustrations and doing really great things for the country.

And so, those were negative things.  the best thing that came out of the Contract With America for me, personally, was that instead of being the only member from the State of Washington, I was able to bring six new Republicans out of nine members of Congress back with me.  So, we completely turned around the focus of debate in the State of Washington, as we did all over the nation.

It was great fun to be part of it and it's fun to watch it's progress.  Now, I still think the foundation is there and we are criticizing ourselves for things that we established in the Contract as being Republic values.  One of which, now, of course, is the deficit.

MR. BLANKLEY:  Thank you.  Dick Armey.  Newt called him, at the time, I think correctly, the Chief Operating Officer.  That started before we took over when Mr. Armey and his staff turned the idea into specific legislation.

And let me add just one brief personal thought here, because it was the seamlessness of the operation that made it all possible.  And it was Dick and Carey Knott [ph] and Eddy Gillespie, top staffers, that allowed Newt and me and Joe and Arnie and the rest of us never to look over our shoulders.  Which is unusual, almost unprecedented on the Hill for the higher staff not to be looking a little nervously at the staff behind.

And the ability, not only to not look over our shoulders, but be fighting shoulder-to-shoulder complete seamless functioning.  And I always appreciated that I don't think we could have got the job done, even to a point of election, without that kind of a seamless team.

So, with that little thought, let me ask the Chief Operating Officer to give his thoughts.  Thank you.

MR. ARMEY:  I think, Arnie, you're here, you would agree that the reason our staff was so well integrated was, we all waited for those moments when we could get you and Eddy Gillespie here.  Because we knew that if, however tough the day was, if we could get Tony and Eddy Gillespie together, we would have a reprieve from all our worries, for a little while.

I'm going to lay claim to being the  first guy to predict the Republican majority and it's a fun story for me to tell.  But it's also reflective of the condition--the pre-condition that allowed the events of '94.

In '93, when Bob Michael announced his retirement, of course, Newt immediately let the world know he would be the new Republican leader.  And, as I recalled, Newt, nobody quarreled with you on that.

There, then, was, subsequent to that, a three-man race for Whip.  A lot of people, including Dick Gephardt, were a little surprised that I did not get in the Whip race.  Coming back from the White House in October of 1993, in the, then, Majority Leader Gephardt's car, he put the question to me:  Dick, why are you not running for Whip?  I said, well, Dick, it's because I'm running for Majority Leader.

[Laughter]

That was exactly his reaction.  And I think it's very telling that he found that amusing, rather than in any way threatening.  And, in fact, his line to me was, that's a good line, I'd stick with it if I were you.  And so, I did.

[Laughter.]

But, at any rate, that was really the condition of the Democrats.  It was inconceivable to them, even at a time when Dick Gephardt and Charlie Rose were campaigning for the Speaker's position.  While the then Speaker was seeking re-election in Washington State, it was still inconceivable to them that they might lose the majority.  They just simply didn't know what was going on in their world.

The setting, actually was set over a very, very long period of time.  I can take myself back to 1984, when I was campaigning for Congress and there were three young Turks in the House of Representatives known by Speaker O'Neil as the Three Stooges, who had recurring nightly, as special orders, in which they spelled out for the American people the heavy-handed undemocratic manner in which the Congress of the United States was being run.

We then went on and we found the revelations of such things as the House Bank, the House Restaurant and other what you must only be able to say, corruptions of the institution to the comfort and financial well-being of the members.

These things were things the public was not really willing to examine until after President Clinton was elected.  And if you take look at the first two years after his election, and watch the Democrats in the  House of Representatives, in particular; the Senate to a lesser degree, because Senators are always being senatorial, they're not quite as entertaining as the House is.

But between the White House and the House of Representatives in those first two years of the Clinton Administration, you saw a party that did not manage their enthusiasms well.  And it was all brought home to me in the only committee that marked up Hilary's health care plan.

Where George Miller turned to us, rather angrily said, we've been waiting 40 years to do this and you're going to get this whether you like it or not.

I think, also, there was a quote, I believe, from Senator Kerry to the effect that the American people were going to get this whether they liked it or not.  And that was translated as arrogance.

Arrogance in service to an extreme left-wing agenda that appeared to the American people to do disservice to the public interests and to be self-serving to the Democrats in the White House and in Congress.  So that was the setting of the stage.

The first thing you have to recognize about the Contract is that it was a contract.  It wasn't a platform; it wasn't a set of principles; it was a contract and it was spelled out very, very specifically.  Both with respect to content an to be.  That is to say, we have these ten bills, which anybody could read.  And they will be on the floor and voted in 100 days.

So that was very clear what everybody--that everyone could see what we were promising.  This was new, this was different.  This was a Contract for America, rather than what the public had begun to believe was the self-serving agenda for big government liberals in Washington.  This was something for America.

And it was very important that it be there.  Also, there was an enormous buy-in of all the people who ran for Congress as a Republican in 1994.  Virtually every candidate incumbent or challenger, had a hand in writing the Contract.

We divided up the ten projects into ten working groups.  We had chairpersons and we had cochairmens.  There was a chairman incumbent and a chairman challenger, so that the challenger felt they were part of the process.  You know, imagine what that means to somebody who's wanting to be a Congressman to feel like I'm a part of the legislative process, yet I'm not even elected to feel so included.

As a consequence of that, every candidate for the House, as a Republican, except one, signed that Contract ten years ago today on the steps of the Capitol.

That was an amazing buy-in for Republicans.  Not only did they do that, but they spoke with unison about the Contract.  And they were proud to speak about it.  The Democrats misjudged this from the git-go and, as a matter of fact, I think most of the press misjudged it.

Every item in the Contract had to fit two requirements:  One, it had to be very popular with the American people; and, two, it had to have been something that the Democrats refused to be taken to the floor.  Therefore, our promise was we'll take it to the floor.

I was amazed two or three weeks after the election was over the U.S. Today, still being shell-shocked about this marvelous event, went and did a poll and discovered that the Contract was very popular with the American people.  I could only look at the U.S.A. and say, duh, did you think we were going to write a contract that was unpopular with the American people?

But that's how little the press appreciated or understood or evaluated the Contract.  It was popular with the American people and that's why our candidates were quite willing to go out and run with great pride and allegiance to the Contract.

An the Democrats just simply didn't get it.  We had skeptics and doubters in the Republican Party.  Most of the Republican senators thought it was something quite undignified.  And they were not very supportive.

They got with the spirit of the matter as soon as those elections were over, I might mention, and I was amazed on the day after the election the number of senators that were very proud of their commitment to the Contract they had made a very early period of time.

We had our own skeptics in our own bodies, mostly, what you would have called in those days the Republican minority or bulls who, really, frankly, and I can tell you a couple of cases, because you just learn to read these things.  A couple of places where a couple of the older guys, frankly, just humored us.

And there  were a couple of interesting cases, because once we got into the 100 days, the bill had to be brought to the floor precisely the way it had been drafted for the Contract.  We had some very difficult times with some of our committees in not wanting to do that.

And one of my favorite responses that I got as I tried to enforce that discipline was, I didn't think I'd ever have to vote on it.

[Laughter.]

So there were and I said, while there may have been those among our group that were not wildly enthusiastic, they conformed to the discipline of the Contract in the election cycle and it did become a national instrument.

When we took over the majority, quite frankly, and I came to study this.  We did not manage our enthusiasms very well.  But we were never as bad at it as the Democrats had been the two years before.  That's why we did not lose the majority in '96.

Had we been as bad as the Democrats between '92 and '94, I don't think we would have survived the '96 election.  But we did not manage our enthusiasms very well and it cost us in the '96 elections.  And, as Jennifer alluded to, we were a bit full of ourselves.  And, quite frankly, why not, we had just completed, successfully completed, the biggest hostile takeover in the history of the country, certainly in our lifetime.  So, yeah, we were a bit full of ourselves.  But I do think it drafted us into some ways of expressing ourselves and some demeanors that proved to be unattractive to the American people and it came back to haunt us in subsequent elections.

Democrats were worse, by the way, of mismanaging their disappointments than we were at mismanaging our enthusiasm.  You have to go back and take a look at that--and I give you, for example, Congressman Givens from Florida, had waited his entire career to be and was going to be the next chairman of the Ways and Means Committee.  He didn't handle the disappointment of that very well.  He committed on the floor of the House one of the most outrageous explosions of temper tantrum I've ever seen.  Almost completely unreported in the press.  I said, thank God, it wasn't me.  I'd have been smeared all over the press forever and ever and it had been rerun nightly for weeks.

But at any rate, I felt bad for Congressman Givens, because I had known him to be such a good fellow.  But he just couldn't take the heartbreak of it.

I remember the disappointments that other members had, as well, and the Democrats, frankly, did not--  We, I think, proceeded to learn the skills of the majority far more quickly than most people thought it would be possible.  And they are still struggling to learn these skills of the minority.

I, for one, am committed to give them as much time as they need.

[Laughter.]

But I remember, during the 100 days, I received a phone call from Jim Wright.  And Jim said, Dick, he says, you know, I don't agree with what you're doing.  But, he says, I got to tell you, I'm really amazed at what you guys are able to do to get these bills on the floor and so forth.  He says, we were all believing that you would not even be able to get the House up and operating.

The 100 days, managing the Contract was good to us in a lot of respects.  It helped us to learn our parliamentaries, our procedures, and our skills without really having to master the content at the same time, because the content was given.

Finally, you should recognize that for the first four years that we had the Contract, every chairman, every subcommittee chairman, knew that they had a position they never believed they would ever have and they only had it because of Newt and Dick.

And that made them far more compliant to what our desires and our wishes were.  What we would get, in many instances, when they didn't want to go along with us, was, you know, I wouldn't even be here if it weren't for those guys.  They believe that they owe their position to the Speaker and the Majority leader.  And, therefore, their willingness to be compliant to the wishes and the needs of the Speaker and the Majority leader is light-years less than it was for the Speaker and myself in those first four years.

We never had, if you take, just do an inventory of the personnel of Congress, we never had a small government conservative majority in Congress.  Not, in '95, not in '96, not any year since then.  But because of the conditions and the enthusiasm and, frankly, the appreciation for what we did for their ability to have their positions of high esteem and authority.  We were managed for about four years to get the House and, subsequently, to a large extent, compliance from the Senate, to a small government, conservative agenda.

But you really had, I think, you had to be naive to think that that discipline could have been held much longer than it was.  Quite frankly, it was very difficult for a lot of people to accept the discipline.  For the first three years, first three budget years, we brought appropriators in under their caps, each year for three years.  That's amazing.  That's amazing in light of Trent Lott's great observation there are really three parties:  the Republicans, the Democrats, and the appropriators.

So, we had a discipline that allowed us to get to the surplus budgets.  And the dissipation of that discipline through time and 9/11 and the difficult economies is why we are now in deficits.

But anybody that would try to attach the fault for these deficits to the current House leadership, I think would be one, unappreciative of the conditions under which they work; and, two, unappreciative of their commitment to the same principles that we had when we came there.

And we have now exactly what we had then:  a small government, conservative minority in the House and, even more so, in Congress.

So, quite frankly, despite a lot of the willingness to cast aspersions of disappointment on our current Republican leadership in the House, I think you have to put them within their context and appreciate they're doing a good job.  I think they are.

MR. BLANKLEY:  Thank you, Mr. Armey.  Before we get to our final speaker and then some questions and comments.  Let me add one little anniversary nugget anecdote.

Ten years ago today, of course, you know, of course we had the event.  And the networks covered it at the lead of the evening news.  And I can't take any responsibility for that.  I'd been begging the producers and correspondents for the week or two leading up to it to give us real coverage.  And they were all telling me, no, it's just a photo-op, we may give you a few seconds at the end of the evening news.

And then, a few days before, the Clinton Administration, I believe in the form of Alice Rivlin, if my memory serves, engaged our Contract substantively.  And started criticizing the items.  And, actually, it was a CBS producer who called me up and said, Tony, you've got your lead.  And as a result of the Clinton Administration engaging us substantively on the Contract, the networks considered it to be a substantive story and not a photo-op; led the evening news, which meant the next morning in papers all across the country was that little box of the ten Contract items.

I don't know whether--how the election would have gone, if we hadn't had that launch.  There were a lot of forces and, of course, Joe had put so many of them into motion, but, certainly, it gave us a real boost to start as the lead of the news, with all the networks and then on the front page of every paper the next day.  So, that's my anniversary anecdote.

And now I'll leave the floor to el boss Newt.

MR. GINGRICH:  Thank you Tony.  I want to build on all the comments that have been made so far, which I think are all very germane to thinking about the Contract.  I want to add to Michael's list, both Mongolia and Rumania, also developed Contract sites.  One of the high points of my speakership was having the Mongolians show up with  their Contract with Mongolia, which included a number of items we would not have thought of.

[Laughter.]

But, let me start by saying that I think there's a practical reason to do a contract in the way in which the modern world has emerged, if you want very large-scale change.

And that is, that a contract allows you to overwhelm the elites, at least for a little while.  And I agree with Dick, although I actually think the culminating point of the Contract cycle is the signing by Clinton of the Balanced Budget Act in August of 1997.  And that almost immediately, from that point on, the Senate reverted to being the Senate.  And by the end of '98, because of Lewinsky and everything else was going on, we had lost the underlying, psychological--and I think Dick was exactly right--the number of times members would do things, just because they were still part of that initial cycle of gratitude, is a very big thing.

So, the first thing you want--if you want really large-scale change, by definition, national capitols are not dedicated to large-scale change, because they're already winning in the game that exists.  This is true whether it's in Rome or it's in Paris or it's in Tokyo or it's here.

So the first virtue of a contract is it gives you, in a sense, a battering ram that allows you to organize the newcomers to briefly overwhelm the traditional establishment.

The second thing it does is it gives you fixed points for overwhelming the bureaucracy.  The number one characteristic of all bureaucracies on the planet is that they prefer to be who they already are.  And they are very, very good at survival.  And so, if you really want to change them, you have to have a sufficiently high level of energy that they can't  get out of the way.

And there, I give Bob Livingston a lot of credit.  In chairing the appropriations committee, there have only been two cuts in domestic discretionary spending since the Second World War.  Reagan's first year and our first year.  And it shook up the system because you were able to move in and say, we have not choice, we have to get this done.  And so, the bureaucracy couldn't slow you down.

The third reason for a contract is to break through the media clutter.  The problem with political news is not that there's too little of it, it's that there's too much of it.  And that's very hard for the average citizen to figure out which things should I learn?  I mean, you know, in the current campaign, am I really learning about National Guard memos, real or fraudulent?  Am I learning about veterans of Vietnam, real or fraudulent?  Am I learning about whatever?

The list gets so long that if you're a normal person with a normal life, and you're not totally engrossed in politics, it's hard to sift.

What the Contract allowed us to do was to focus both our candidates and through their focus, focus the media so that in October, you had a routine repetitive pattern.

Now, I want to make a couple of observations.  I think the contract is actually worth more studying than it's gotten.  Because it is the only time in American history that I know of--and Michael can correct me if I've got this wrong--other than the parallel with the war hawks of 1810 and the rise of Henry Clay--it is the only time we actually have a contract that says we will do these things, as opposed to a platform which says we support these things.

And it was in opposition--you have presidential-led movements, there's the Jackson, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson.  But to have a nonpresidential movement is a very rare thing in America.  The Progressives would be the only other parallel.

We understood early on that this was going to have to be fairly big.  It's important to remember that in 1978, in December when I was still a freshman, before I got sworn in, Guy Vanderjack, at the Congressional Campaign Committee, the congressman was the chair, appointed me in charge of a long-range planning committee.  And we then failed seven times.  And I just want to remind people, '94 was a great year, but you [unintelligible] the previous seven.

And the first time we did a Capitol steps event, was actually in September of 1980 with Ronald Reagan.  We then came back and did it a second time in 1994.

We used very heavily Neigh's "The Changing American Voter" and Remonies [ph] "The Election of 1828" because they explained between them, Remonies' book on the election of 1828 explained the scale of a national movement trying to seize power from an established majority.  And Neigh's book, "The Changing American Voter," explained how FDR, by being positive, had mobilized 7 million new voters in 1936.  And it is the dramatic increase in the size of the electorate that enables Roosevelt to defeat Alf Landon by such a big margin.  Because Landon, actually, got a million more votes than Hoover had in '32.

So, we started out with a very long view.  It was a long view at GoPac, it was a long view at the Congressional Campaign Committee.  And Dick is essentially right.  I mean, almost all the senior members put up with us, but didn't particularly support us and most of the time, didn't get in the way, but were quite happy to become chairmen, later on.

You had to have a long view, which meant most days you were doing things most of your colleagues and most of the media didn't understand; didn't care about; and often ridiculed.  It had to be a team effort.  I cannot overstate that without Dick Armey, without Tom DeLay, Bob Walker, Bill Paxon, we would not have been able to pull this off.  Without the hard work of Connie Mack and Vin Weber and Duncan Uhn [ph], and others, earlier in creating the Conservative Opportunity Society movement.  And then, without a staff that really did work as a team.  And Dan Meyer [ph], Arnie Christianson [ph], Carey Knot, Eddy Gillespie, Tony Blankley, there was a group that made an enormous difference.  And it was our ability with Joe working directly with Paxon to design a team effort and a team process that really mattered.

The contract itself had to have a set of characteristics.  It had to be positive.  We were trying to convince the Perot voters to turn out to vote.  We succeeded beyond almost anybody studying carefully, we had 9 million additional votes in 1994, over 1990.  The Democrats went down by a million.  The swing of 10 million is the largest two-party change in an off-year election in American history.

It had to be--it had to avoid splitting our own base.  So you had to get up every morning and say, okay, we can have anything in the Contract that is not going to cause a civil war inside the Republican Party.

It had to avoid giving the news media an easy way to mischaracterize the Contract.  I mean, the media would have loved nothing more than for us to have put something in there, which would let them say this is a crazed, right-wing, southern conservative model and we wouldn't have won a majority.  So we had to be consciously editing against the New York Times all the time, in recognizing how rapidly they would have distorted it.

It had to involve 70-percent-plus issues because your candidates were not going to be very well trained.  You had candidates out there who were running against incumbent Democrats and they had to have issues they could handle where even when they were on defense.  For example, welfare reform was a 92 percent issue.  Now, at 92 percent you can be describing welfare reform pretty badly and you're still going to have the average person in their car nodding, yes, as they listen to you driving to work.

This was a very conscious design.  It had to have an overwhelming support by virtually all of our candidates.  And here, I cannot sing Dick Armey and Carey Knots praises too highly.  Remember, nobody thought we could do this.  So the amount of effort you had to put into getting people to participate in a percent they didn't actually believe in--in order to produce a document they would sign, when you had no clout over them, because they never thought you were going to be in the majority.

This was one of the great entrepreneurial efforts in American political history and Dick and Carey deserve almost all of the credit for having pulled it off.

You had to have a seminal event.  This had to become a thing.  And here's Tony Blankley's story, which I never heard before, is exactly on target.  You had to have a moment.  Now, I give Halley Barber, the Governor of Mississippi a lot of credit for this because, as RNC chairman, meeting in Annapolis with the Republican senators, they invited me to come up to talk about how to beat the Clinton health plan.  And him and I got together that evening and this was in April of 1994.  And we talked through what we would put in the Contract.

The Contract, this was vital.  This contract was the most expensive political ad up to that time.  It was a two-page ad in TV Guide, deliberately picked to be outside of politics.  It wasn't in The Wall Street Journal, it wasn't in any publication, political people looked at.  It was designed to reach the average American.

And it says, a campaign promise is one thing.  A signed contract is quite another.  It then said, Republican House candidates have signed a Contract with America, if we break this contract, throw us out.  We mean it.

We then followed that--this is one of the handouts that was used, if we break this contract throw us out, we mean it.  And the purpose was to break from platforms.  Platforms say I'm for something.  We're going to say, no, no.  And we worded it very carefully.  We would vote on these things, we didn't say we could pass them.  We did pass all but one, we didn't have a constitutional majority for one and we didn't say they would get to be law because they had to go through the Senate and be signed by a liberal Democrat in the White House.

But we could keep our word that we would vote on them.  And when Halley agreed that he would pay for this, it all became then Dick and I could go back to the House members and say, look, we can only do this if we have a contract.  So, if you want to have this contract paid for by the RNC, we gotta have a contract.  And then members would say, all right, I guess I'll have to go along with it.  And, as Dick said, a number of them were in shock later on to discover that we're actually going to vote on the things we said we'd vote on.

I give John Baynor [ph] and Barry Jackson a lot of credit because they actually organized the event on the 27th ten years ago on the Capitol steps, using the work that Dick Armey and Carey Knot had done to get us to that point.

I'll just close with three quick observations.  You had to have, I think, something of this scale to break the Democratic Party in the House.  I mean, I think Mike was right, you could imagine a different model in which we got 20/25 seats, Clinton continued to be really bad and maybe we would have beaten him in '96 and gone on.  But it's also conceivable that because he's a very smart politician, that we would, in fact, done exactly what we had done three times before, get up to about 192 and then start sliding again.

So, because there is a countervailing force when the other side--the other side does have an interest in learning what you're doing and modifying.  I think Dick is exactly right, it was the shattering effect of going from permanent majority to being a ranking member in a Congress in which we were cutting the staffs.  So they were both losing their majority staff and the new minority staff was so much smaller than they're used to, I think the energy in Congress when from 108 Democratic staffers to 27.

The psychological shock of that level of change stopped them from responding to us.  And I think, frankly, only with Pelosi have they begun to get a leader who's beginning to think about so what would it take to get back into a majority?

The second point I'd make is that what probably made us truly different was the we actually believed this and we were prepared to live it out.  And I would extend beyond Dick and me and Tom DeLay and Bob Walker and Bill Paxon, I would extend it to John Kasich, Bill Archer, Tom Livingston, Tom Bliley.  There was a core group that was prepared to gamble on history and to say it was much less important to us that we fit the Washington establishment model of the Congress or that we fit the news media's model of acceptability.  And what mattered to us was to actually drive through a balanced budget; to drive through welfare reform; to drive through tax cuts and I'm very proud of the fact that the 9/11 Commission noted that the only increase in intelligence funding in the '90s came from us and that we insisted on it.

I mean, so there were things that we were doing that were outside the pattern.

The last comment that I'd make and I'm writing a book on this for January on "The 21st Century Contract with America."  I think it's very hard to get dramatic change inside Washington.  I think all the countervailing interest groups; all the patterns of the committees and subcommittees, all the nature of the Executive Branch bureaucracy minimize the amount you can break out.

And I think that when you're talking about really large-scale change, one of the genius of the American system, unlike the European system where the parties are much more structured, in America, you can actually reach out and we have again and again.  I mean, the Jeffersonians did against the Federalists; the Jacksonians did against the establishment; the rise of Lincoln and the Republicans; the rise of the Progressives.  You have these waives, in a sense, the rise of Reagan and the Conservative Movement.

And that would be my last observation:  We stood on Ronald Reagan's shoulders.  You go down that list, there's not a single major item in our contract Ronald Reagan hadn't given speeches on.  He had educated a generation into understanding where  I wanted to go.

I was with Marty Connors [ph] in Birmingham on Friday and Marty being a big activist in the '80s and '90s and we were doing a fund-raiser for the Alabama Party Friday morning and he actually gave out a CD of a speech I gave at Harvard in 1993 for a class he was teaching.  It was eerie, I was listening to it this weekend in preparation.  It's eerie to go back and realize, really big changes are long-form events.  They're not one night on cable news.  They're not a week on talk radio.  They're not three magazine covers.  They are very long-form events and they take an enormous amount of work.  And Rachel Robinson [ph] is here, probably should be up here because she was one of the people who put in an immense amount of time and energy.  And it's only if you're committed to an idea big enough to be worth a decade of your life, that you can then mobilize a country of this size to be able to actually have profound change.

And I think in 1994 that all came together.

MR. BLANKLEY:  Thank you Newt.  Let's now look for comments and questions.  The only requirement being, try to keep it relatively short.  Any questions?  Yes sir.  Please wait for the microphone.

PARTICIPANT:  Could Mr. Armey or the Speaker elaborate on efforts to recruit Republican Senators.  You alluded to the Senate--recruit them to the cause of the Contract with America.  They were conspicuously absent.  And, of course, parts of the Contract not favorable attention, when they eventually got to the Senate.

MR. GINGRICH:  I don't know.

MR. ARMEY:  I don't know, Newt, if you remember.  I don't recall any senators that were particularly enthusiastic about what we were doing.  I think they might have thought it was a bit of a hokey think and i'm not sure they ever really understood the scale of the Contract.

I don't, Newt, maybe you do, but I don't recall any senator saying anything as exuberant as attaboy.

MR. GINGRICH:  No, my memory's actually a lot more positive, but first of all, well we had been sending a generation of younger senators over there.  I mean, if you look at it, John Kyle, Rick Santorum or Connie Mack.  I mean there were a lot of senators over there, or they were senators like Mike Enzi who had come up through the GoPac system and who, as state legislators, were listening to GoPac tapes.  So, I would say, Arnie Christianson is here was my Chief of Staff for part of this odyssey and it worked in the Senate which we all found to be an amazing thing.

You might have a better sense of it.  My sense was that probably over half of the Republican Senators actually favored what we were doing, but were relatively junior.  I mean, Trent Lott would, again, be an example of somebody who was rising at the time.

We had three big advantages:  when you pick 70- to 90-percent issues, it is relatively easier in a free society to decide to go along with you.  So, we did have some momentum.  The people got up and said, okay, you're picking things we can agree on.

Second, you had, I think the same sense of shock in the Senate, I mean, I had very good friends, Pete Domenici, would be a good example, who would openly say, we're a majority because of the House Republicans.  And so we had a period there and which I think ended in the signing ceremony of the Balanced Budget Act in 1997.

But we had a period there when on-balance, most days they would give us the benefit of the doubt for about two and a half, almost three years, which is a long time in the history of American legislative government.

The third point I'd make is that Bob Dole wanted to run for President.  And this, again, goes back to Michael's point about alternative paths.  Dole wanted to run for President.  Dole understood that to get to be the Republican nominee, you had to come from the conservative wing of the Party.  So, there were no circumstances where Dole was going to pick a fight with us.  Because it was to his maximum disadvantage to be seen as taking on the new House Republican majority.

And I would say that those things all flowed together, so that if you look at our track record with the singular exception of the Balanced Budget Constitutional Amendment, which got to within one vote of passing in the Senate.  On most things we got fairly good cooperation out of the Senate up through August of '97.  And then, as I said, I think, for a lot of different reasons.

The American system is centrifugal.  It is not designed to have a single dominating force at the center of it.  And, certainly, in the Legislative Branch.  And I think, by the end of '97, we'd sort of worn that out.

MR. BLANKLEY:  Peter.

PARTICIPANT:  Two-part question:  Number one, compare and contrast the Contract with Nancy Pelosi's partnership that they unveiled two weeks ago; and, second, if you were going to do the Contract today, what are the ten issues you'd pick and what are the ten things that you would commit to do on day one?

MR. BLANKLEY:  Jennifer?

MS. DUNN:  I don't know, what I was thinking was that nobody knows what Pelosi's what is it called an agreement, what it even says?  I mean, our whole point in doing our Contract with America was to let people out there know exactly what we stood for and I think what they've put together is very, very weak and not observed outside and it's not going to go anyplace.  I think that the numbers of elements that you've heard from all of us today that were working on behalf of putting the Republican Party in control are very different from the status of things today.

And I would just add on the second part of your question, I'd like to see Social Security on that list.  I think health care needs to go back on that list.

MR. ARMEY:  I should say, my heart goes out to Nancy because she's trying to save the Democratic Party--have the Democratic Party in the House say, we're like them, without being like us.  And it's a difficult situation.  One, remember the Contract was ten things that they would not put on the floor that were also popular with the American people.  I don't think Nancy can put together a list of ten things.  I'm not sure she could put together a list of five things that were popular with the American people and not allowed on the floor by the Republicans.

The Social Security reform featuring personal retirement accounts, right now, I think is the biggest, greatest political gold mine unattended to in America today.  The first politician that has enough sense to understand this is the first plank in my platform will be the first one to win with the biggest margin.  The American people need this change because they're facing a system that will grow insolvent and that's the only solution.

Of course, I mean, I can pick up the old standby the flat tax.  And, but you see, right now, I think you really, if you were going to rewrite a contract, you would have to really go to big ideas, really, really big ideas, there probably have to be fewer of them and you wouldn't be putting ideas on that are belligerently withheld from public vote, but ideas that have probably not been brought to a vote more because of, I would say, the complexity of the issues.  Then a senator would say some ideologically defined roadblock that we could bounce of.

MR. BLANKLEY:  Michael, do you want to comment on that.

MR. BARONE:  George W. Bush did provide something of that nature in his acceptance speech where he talked about personal retirement accounts; and Social Security; health savings accounts;, tax-free spending vehicles;, tax reform; and an ownership society.  There is a sort of a platform.

Having said that, this was exceedingly vague and it's sort of like the Medicare Bill, okay, Bill Thomas will do the details; we'll jam it through with a three-hour delay in the roll-call if necessary; and Conference Committee with the Senate.  I mean, you guys that drafted the Contract had--were in opposition status as you said--and you could write up specific legislation that would address each of these points.

The Bush Administration, the Republican Party are very far from being able to draw up specific legislation on these lines.  And it remains unclear, I mean, whether or not they're putting enough political umph behind these issues.  So that if they are successful, they could pass through Congress in some form in the next two years.

And the House Republican leadership tends to think of Social Security retirement issues as preferably an '07/'08 issue than an '05/'06 issue.

MR. BLANKLEY:  Newt?

MR. GINGRICH:  First of all, I think that the Pelosi effort is off on two grounds.  In a presidential election year, the presidential candidate has to define what the deal is.  It is impossible for the legislative party to over shadow the presidential candidate unless things are so hopeless that there's no point in worrying about it because you're going to get crushed anyway.

I mean, so it's a commentary, I think on the Kerry campaign that, instead of having a Capitol steps event which is what Reagan did in 1980 and what Broader--David Broader wrote a very good column praising Reagan for the courage to do it.  It had never been done before 1980.

Instead of doing that, which is the logical thing in a presidential year, they tried to do something on their own.  But they're then trapped, both, the point Michael made which is, this is not really a contract-like document because there's no clarity to it, no detail.

But in addition, they have two other huge challenges.  One is that in a time when we have to really change things dramatically, which is why you can have wrong-track dominating and Bush getting re-elected because people don't assign wrong-track to Bush.

There are a lot of things they think are wrong-track if you ask them in detail why are you saying that you're on the wrong track, but not the right track.

The left is peculiarly out of sync both on values grounds, and there I would modestly suggest that if you go to newt.org, you can download a paper I did this summer called "What's at Stake," which shows 34 issues in which the left is in a 73 to 17 minority, over and over.  And it's amazing what the margins are like.[

And, secondly, reactionary liberalism is dominated by trial lawyers; labor unions; and its groups that make it very hard to change.  And a contract, to matter, has to be about change.  It has to be about what are you going to do different.  Which is why I go with both Dick and Jennifer.

In the book that I'm writing for January, I both pick up on economic competitiveness with China and India; talk about Social Security personal accounts, which I agree with Dick on; talk about transforming health; talk about the need for very dramatic litigation reform and tax reform.  But I also talk about the need to profoundly rethink math and science education in this country and to rethink the concept of patriotic education and patriotic immigration.

And to give you an example:  the Pledge of Allegiance is a 91 to 8 issue.  In the sense that 91 percent of the country believes they have the right to say "one nation under God."  The House Democrats last week, overwhelmingly voted against a bill to block the federal courts from defining one nation under God out of the system.

Now, you can't go to the country when you're on the 8 percent side of a 91 to 8 issue and think you're going to become a majority.  And these are very difficult challenges for them.

The last point I'd make is that I think that any future conservative movement has to have a clear coherent plan for getting back to a balanced budget.  And the reason's not economic, so I'm going to say to all my economist friends here at AEI, the reason is more.  People understand that there is some virtue to forcing choices and setting priorities.  And people instinctively government to somehow set that pattern.  And, by the way, it's the only way you can learn to say no.  If you have a balanced budget requirement, you can say no to virtually every interest group.  If you don't have a balanced budget requirement, why not pay off the next one.

And, so, I think you're going to see, after this election, balancing the federal budget becoming--but balancing it with tax cuts, not balancing with tax increases, becoming a battle cry.  And remember, our balanced budget in the '94 contract, came with the first tax cut in 16 years.  It didn't come with tax increases.

MR. BLANKLEY:  Yes, you, right.

MR. MITCHELL:  Gary Mitchell from "The Mitchell Report."  I want to ask a question in two parts and it really comes off two observations, the first by Speaker Gingrich and the other by Majority Leader Armey.  You said that the Contract really stood on the shoulders of Ronald Reagan and you talked about it being a hostile takeover.  And it seems to me therein lies one of the questions that I want to ask.  The first of which is:  Having looked at the success of the Contract, on sort of quantitative terms--how many items got through?  You can ask the Ronald Reagan question to anyone who wants to respond, which is:  As a country, are we better off today than we were ten years ago?  And if the answer is, as I suspect, yes.  I'd be interested to know specifically how you think that's the case.

The second deals with the hostile takeover question.  I think it's fair to say that there has certainly been a lot of press to the effect that the era of leadership of Gingrich, Armey, and Delay added to creating a more hostile political atmosphere in D.C. than before.  And A) I'm interested to know whether you think that's a fair characterization; and B) if it isn't, where do you think it comes from?

MR. ARMEY:  Let me take and talk about the difficulty we all have in managing our enthusiasms and, on the other hand, our disappointments.

This is a difficult thing for the House.  We changed the rules of the House to make it a more fair and more inclusive institution.  We reached out to the Democrats.  They were, in the vernacular, the playground poor losers.  And they've not gotten over that.

If you just catalog the nasty language and expressions that are used, I would argue that at least 60 percent of the nasty language; the sneering, comes from the Democrats.  But heres's the dilemma.  You say the House is more confrontational and less civil, under the Republicans.  That's right.  Because the Democrats have not yet learned how to be a docile compliant minority.  They're very feisty.  And, Jennifer, you've seen it in your committee.  Very rough in the language that they use.

So, the fact of the matter is, it is a tougher place to work than it had been.  But I will not accept that it is to the fault of the Republicans.

Same thing applies to President Bush.  President Bush reached across the aisle to the Democrats to the point that he had a lot of Republicans mad at him for arguing with Tom Daschle in public after the State of the Union message.

He doesn't get credit for that, he reached out, he reached out, he reached out, he got rebuffed by the Democrats.  And he said he was going to try to make it a more-civil place.  Did he do that?  Yes, he did.  Was it well received by the Democrats?  No, it was not.

So, I feel very strongly about this.  This is--the contention that the Republicans have made Washington a less-civil place is what I call a bum rap.  And it's simply not true.  Ronald Reagan gave us, I think, a renewed ability, you asked if we are better off?  Yes, we are morally, intellectually and spiritually better off than we were before Reagan and we are light-years ahead of the '60s.

MR. BLANKLEY:  Other questions?  Yeah.

MS. DUNN:  Could I just make a comment?  Because I think we shouldn't forget what has changed, and especially since the time that the Contract put us in the majority.  Dick was talking about how the other side hasn't learned to be a complacent minority.  And we certainly were that.  And I was there for two years.  And I didn't like being a complacent minority.  And I'd rather have it be a little bit more hard-edged than to have, you know, to have no debate at all.  And people weren't used to that.

I think when it comes to whether there as been positive change.  And I'm a great Reaganite.  I'm named after Reagan and so I was a great follower of his long before I came to the Congress.  But some of the things that we've done that related directly to the Contract, welfare reform, alone, has changed the country and it has decreased the number of people on welfare by over 50 percent.  And there are children now in households around this country who are proud of their parents because they went out and go jobs.  And I think that is a hugely important change, maybe the most important thing I've been involved in since the Contract.

MR. BARONE [?]:  One sentence, there's nothing in the Constitution that says serving in Congress is supposed to be a pleasant life-time occupation.

MR. GAYLORD [?]:  Well, to follow-up on what Congressman Armey said about the atmosphere because he used the word arrogant in describing the Democratic leadership in his early years in  Congress and I think no one would dispute some of that.

The critics and from the Democratic side, say that we now  have an arrogant Republican leadership that, you know, keeps roads open, as Michael mentioned for three hours and denies members the right to speak in committee.  Is that a fair characterization?

MR. ARMEY:  Well, first of all, I've been in Congress, I was there for 18 years.  There are going to be those moments.  I remember the marvelous gymnastics of Jim Wright creating two legislative days in one.  And I recall sitting with votes open when the Democrats were in majority.  I also recall, probably more frequently, sitting with bluescreeen while they had caucuses to resolve and which they did pretty well.

Those things happen.  You can really only point to one high drama moment where the vote would say, clearly was held open for an extraordinary period of time, as I recall.  But I don't think you can make the case, yet, by the behavior that I've observed in our leadership that they're anywhere near where the Democrats were during the ten years I was there.

And, of course, you have to start with Denny Hastert.  I mean if there's a kinder, gentler, sweeter, more, what should I say, inclusive person in this town than Denny Hastert, I don't know who it is.

MR. BLANKLEY:  Let me, before we go to the last question, just follow briefly and I'll come back to you,just one second.  On Jennifer's point about welfare, because you talked about standing on the shoulders of Reagan.  And we have in the front row, Bud Carlson, who is the father of welfare reform in the Reagan term in California and so it's a connective moment, I just wanted to point out.  Newt?

MR. GINGRICH:  Yeah, I was going to say, first of all, and Bob knows full well how long a fight this was.  Welfare reform has changed life dramatically and I think what Jennifer said cannot be overstated.

When you go out and talk to people who have been told it was okay to sit and wait for the next check, their children were living in a world where no adult went to work; where nobody had any habits of being productive.  And you talk to those very same people today.  The degree to which welfare reform morally changed their lives, financially changed their lives, was better both for the individuals and the country.  It was an astonishing achievement.  That one victory would have justified everything we did in developing the Contract because it was such an extraordinary change from the assumptions of the world before that.

But I want to just take one second to talk about this whole issue of arrogance and suggest to all of you a terrific little book called "Kings of the Hill."  By Dick and Lynn Cheney, who later on became famous in other ways.

"Kings of the Hill," is a study of various people who have dominated the House.  It's a House/Senate book, which all of us as  House members appreciated on the part of the current Vice President and President of the Senate.

Because what they emphasize and it's the key difference between the House and the Senate.  The House has to work.  It has to functionally be effective.  The Senate doesn't have to work.  It is, in the Adams phrase, the cooling saucer to a hot cup of coffee from the House.

And whoever is speaker, ultimately has to be able to get things through.  They have to have a functional majority.  And the rules of the House are designed so that 218 actually lets you be functional as long--if you're certain of those 218, you can go a long way and get things done.

There are two parts to this that I think that people don't look at carefully.  The first is, the country is fine with you running the House in a tight ship.  As long as you're doing what the country wants.

The Democrats were not only arrogant, they were doing the things the country didn't want and the combination was questioned.

The second is, I find it fascinating that for a decade, all the switching I know of has been from Democrat to Republican.  And it's totally uncovered by the press. I mean, it was again this year.  You've had two Democratic House members switch parties to the Republicans.  You had a Democratic Senator deliver the keynote speech at the Republican Convention.  And [unintelligible] is an aberration.  Jeffords is the one that went the other way.  And Jeffords, you're exactly right that wasn't in the House, he was in the House.  You're exactly right, Jeffords, of course, only went to become an Independent.

But it was instantly shown in the media.  If you go back and look at the language describing Jeffords and compare the language Jeffords a man of conscience, deeply committed to principle, forced to this difficult decision.  But the language used to describe Zell Miller, you will know almost everything you need to know about the modern media, but my point is, consistently in the House the Republican Party has been able to continue to grow by attracting people who decided that, in fact, they were quite comfortable being Republican.  You do not find, to the best of my knowledge in the House, anybody in 20 years who went the other way.

And there was somebody I though in New York state, Ford, Michael Ford was the one other person who.

MR. BLANKLEY:  Let me make one civility point.  I want to take a Bill Matcher [ph] here.  One of the things that I observe is we don't have people in the House as universally and as fully appreciative of the protocols of the House.  It is very difficult to say the Honorable Gentleman from Missouri is an SOB.  And I see this in committees and Jennifer, I see it on the floor too often.

Members addressing each other even by first name.  Now, it seems a hokey thing to a lot of people.  When you observe the traditions and the protocols of the House, it will give you a greater sense of demeanor and civility and I believe that's probably why those protocols were instituted in the first place, because I think it was a fairly colorful place in days when they were caning one another and so forth.

So, I would encourage members of Congress to review the history of the institution, begin to love it as people like a Bill Matcher did and as Senator Byrd does.  And observe those protocols.  It takes a little discipline, but I do believe it'll increase the civility enormously.  And with those comments, we close our conference on the Contract With America.

Thank you very much for coming.

[End of conference.]