The conservative movement is at a crossroads, says former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, explaining that Republican success in winning elections has yet to translate into a confident governing style.
“We’re fighting as though we’re the minority,” Mr. Gingrich said at a recent American Enterprise Institute (AEI) forum.
Republicans in Washington are “stylistically out of sync with the country right now, because stylistically what the country wants is a governing majority that is comfortable, relaxed,” said Mr. Gingrich, who is credited with leading the 1994 “Republican revolution” that returned control of Congress to the GOP for the first time in 40 years.
“Governing is two orders of magnitude more complex than campaigning,” he said. “Campaigning is simple. … Governing is really hard. … And people want people who govern to feel different, because they should govern the whole country, because they are leading the entire system.”
One problem, Mr. Gingrich said, is an obsolete federal bureaucracy, which he described as “essentially an 1880 mail clerk with a quill pen, codified by the Civil Service Acts of the 1880s and mutated by 125 years of activity. That system is dead. It’s gone. It’s hopeless. It will not work.” He called for creating an “entrepreneurial public management.”
“We have inherited from the left a bureaucracy, regulations, culture, personnel that are antithetical to where we want to go,” Mr. Gingrich said. “But we now run them — or more accurately, we preside over them; we don’t run them. … Where you want to go is a very different world.”
Mr. Gingrich, an AEI senior fellow, appeared on a panel last month with AEI colleague David Frum and Rep. Mike Pence, Indiana Republican, to discuss the future of conservatism. Mr. Gingrich criticized some Bush administration measures, describing the president’s 2001 No Child Left Behind Act as an “expansion of the federal Department of Education,” which he called “inherently a mistake.”
“If you look at the percent of money now spent outside the classroom — and here we have the D.C. school system example — and look at how many millions of dollars are spent on bureaucracy, red tape, paperwork, it will never get to the kids,” Mr. Gingrich said.
The public school system is “a mess, and I think it’s got to be very profoundly changed, and I think some of the basic core ideas have to be changed.” He called for reforms that give “power back to the parents. I don’t want to return it just from the federal government to the state government.”
Mr. Gingrich commended President Bush’s effort toward changing Social Security policy, but said the debate needs to be more focused.
“You can’t simultaneously have a debate about benefit cuts, argue about solvency in 30 years and get personal Social Security [accounts]. It is more than the [political] system can bear,” Mr. Gingrich said. “Reagan couldn’t have done it, FDR couldn’t have done it, and they were the two greatest politicians of the 20th century.”
Mr. Gingrich cited public opinion polls, including one showing that 91 percent of Americans support the “one nation under God” phrasing of the Pledge of Allegiance, as evidence that conservatives have a “huge advantage” in contemporary political battles.
“It’s just really hard for the secular and atheist wings of American culture to win,” he said, citing the Supreme Court’s June 27 ruling banning the display of the Ten Commandments on some public property, which he called “hysterically schizophrenic and utterly indefensible.”
“You can’t find a single line in the Constitution on secularism,” Mr. Gingrich said. “There’s no place in the Constitution that says you should not allow religion to make people feel uncomfortable.” He said “the current legal structure of the United States is utterly incomprehensibly out of touch with America.”
“The judges today form a nine-person Constitutional Convention, in which any five judges … can rewrite the American Constitution without going through the amending process and without calling a convention.”
Mr. Gingrich said the key for Republicans in the 2008 presidential election will be to promote bigger and better ideas with stronger values, instead of focusing on attacking Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who many think could be the leading Democratic candidate if she ends up running for president.
“You will not beat Hillary with a negative personality campaign. The country’s already discounted all that. They know everything they want to know,” he said.
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