Past, Present, and Future: Newt Gingrich Reflects on the Republican Party

Newt Gingrich is the former Speaker of the US House of Representatives and former Representative of Georgia’s 6^th Congressional District. He helped draft the “Contract with America,” which led the Republican Party to gain control of the House after four decades, and earned him the honor of Time Magazine’s Person of the Year. He was recently a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012.

You were a major contender in the Republican primaries last year. What would you say was the biggest lesson you learned from that experience?

I think there were three really big lessons. One is that money matters on a scale I had underestimated. The second is that it was much, much harder to take new ideas and move them into the political process than I thought it would be. And the third is that it is a much bigger organizational problem than I realized.

I had helped in the Contract with America, and we had candidates in 430-some congressional districts, and I had run ’94, ’96 and ’98 national campaigns. These were totally different experiences – congressional races are like franchises. Presidential campaigns are single hierarchical systems. We screwed up in Virginia, for example, and didn’t get on the ballot. Totally stupid. And it just turned out it was a much bigger challenge organizationally than we expected. I also found out why most successful candidates run twice. The first time around you go, “Wow, this is a really big system,” and you learn a lot of lessons.

As Speaker of the House you were a major political force responsible for bringing the Republican Party together to accomplish many things. Today’s Republican party seems fractured. Is this ideological divide bridgeable and if so, what should the party do to come together to accomplish its policy goals?

I actually believe that you bring people together by momentum not by mediation. If they’re going somewhere they’ll all fall into a general direction, if they’re sitting and doing nothing they’ll start fighting each other.

I think one of the great challenges – and I failed at this in the presidential primary last year – I think we’re on the edge of an extraordinary breakthrough in new public policies and in things that are so exciting it is almost impossible to discuss them in the news media, because nobody knows how to write about it. I think you could have a very dynamic Republican Party in another few years, offering an extraordinary range of innovations that will change things.

If you look at Udacity for example, which Sebastian Thrun has created, it’s stated public goal is to reduce tuition by 90%. Now when you’re trying to talk about student loan problems, if you could reduce tuition – let’s assume he’s off by half and he only reduces it by 50% – a 50% reduction in tuition would lead to an extraordinarily different student loan environment. And there are all sorts of things being developed right now that are comparable to that, that will, I think, lead to a new generation of ideas and a new generation of policies. But, it is extraordinarily hard to get them into the political process and into the news media process because they don’t fit what people think they should be covering.

There has been a lot of discussion surrounding stringent immigration policies favored by Republicans. What direction do you see the party moving on the issue of immigration, and do you think this is actually one of the primary issues concerning the Latino voter?

I think Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus had it right when he said that immigration is never the number one issue unless the issue’s immigration. So if you say to the average Latino American, “What do you care about?” they’re going to say, “Jobs, education, and healthcare.” On the other hand, if you say, “We’re going to deport your grandmother,” then it’s the number one issue.

I felt very strongly last year that we had to have a rational policy and a humane policy towards the people who are already here. That doesn’t mean you have to ignore the fact that they broke the law to get here. But to pretend that we’re going to wave a magic wand and 11 million people or more are going to disappear is dishonest, and it’s both bad public policy and bad politics.

I’m encouraged by Jeb Bush, and I’m encouraged by people that are moving in the right direction – Marco Rubio, for example. I know that the house Republicans have reached out and have a bipartisan working group on immigration that is working with a number of Democrats. The interesting question will be whether the president will accept a bill or whether he wants the issue for 2014.

I think the real break points are going to be: can we find a path to legality that is distinct from a path to citizenship? Do we draw a difference between people who came here as minors? If you were brought here at three years of age, you probably ought to be eligible for citizenship faster than if you came knowingly as an adult and deliberately broke the law. Do we find a technique for having a guest worker program, which the unions deeply oppose? Should we have, as the Canadians do, a bias in favor of high-tech and entrepreneurial personalities? I do think you have a growing part of the Republican Party willing to find a solution, and I think the odds are that in the next two years we’ll actually get to something.

You wrote an Op-Ed for the Chicago Tribune about gun versus gang violence. What work have you done in violence prevention and why should the city take your advice?

The great case study is Bill Bratton’s “Turnaround.” Bratton was the police chief in New York City with Giuliani, and then he went on to Los Angeles. Giuliani’s book “Leadership” captures a good bit of this and there’s a guy named Dennis Smith, at NYU who has studied the application of metrics to public policy.

It’s an objective fact that New York City is radically safer today than New York City was 25 years ago. It’s a pretty clear fact that there’s a pattern that works. It’s essentially policing to preempt rather than policing to follow up. Why hasn’t Chicago simply brought in someone like Bratton as an advisor? He took the same model and applied it in Los Angeles. I think you would reduce the number of murders dramatically. I think murder is down over 75 percent in New York from the pre-Giuliani era. Bloomberg told me one time that Staten Island is so safe, that it is statistically off the charts for communities its size. There are almost no murders.

Your previous views on climate change were once at odds with those of the Republican majority. Climate change has become such a politically charged issue, what path, if any, should be taken going forward?

My view is that we actually don’t know. The so-called scientific consensus is comparable to the consensus that the sun goes around the Earth, which disappeared with Copernicus. I am a student of paleontology, and what we do know is that the Earth’s temperature has changed very dramatically over time – even in the last 11,000 years.

My instinct is to say two things to people who are fanatics over climate change. The first is: tell me what the right climate is. What should the correct temperature be? Because, the fact is they don’t have a correct temperature, they just know that now is the correct temperature. For example, there are people who talk about the “great storm in the northeast” this year; well, the greatest blizzard in Northeastern history is 1888. Now it was almost certainly not caused by carbon. It was just an enormous blizzard. So you start with, how certain are you that you know a pattern? The very same scientists told you in the ’70s that we’re on the edge of a real ice age. Second, the odds are pretty good that we are on the edge of a real ice age, but it’s probably 1,000 years off. But we’re clearly at the late phase of the interglacial if you just look at the numbers. Somebody once pointed out, global warming may slow down the ice age by about a century, but it won’t slow it down more than that if there’s an ice age coming. And ice ages come really fast and are much more terrifying than warming, because this all ends up covered by a glacier.

The other point I’d make to people is, if you thought it was a serious problem, why is no one willing to talk about adaptation rather than prevention? Prevention is extraordinarily expensive and requires enormous government-centered decisions. Adaptation is dramatically cheaper. The example I’ll give is, to the best of my knowledge, when the Dutch began building breaks there was no Al Gore available to say, “What you need to do is lower the ocean.” But prevention of Dutch flooding by lowering the ocean would be the equivalent of the current talk.

I find this is a topic about which it is almost impossible to have a rational conversation. The deniers won’t be rational, and the people who believe it won’t be rational, they both just stand there chanting their slogans.

Is there a Cap and Trade policy that could get a political foothold?

I’d be very surprised. Part of the reason is – it’s truly ironic – nobody in the wealthy liberal wing is willing to look at the cost to the very poor and policies that inherently make energy more expensive. Which is why I think adaptation is probably a dramatically easier, more humane strategy. And to say okay, let’s assume a worst case: what would you actually have to do? What would it cost to build better sea walls in New York?

Can you talk a little bit about how academia – how the literature – should fit into those discussions, and into the formation of public policy?

It requires people who are ready to break with the norm. Einstein said quite explicitly, that if he had gotten a job, he would’ve never developed the theory of relativity because the social pressure of being normal would have cut off that avenue of thinking. Because he was so isolated as a patent clerk, he really couldn’t get hired, he had the luxury of thinking, with no one to correct him. One of our challenges is going to be, how do you knit together deviant personalities who are prepared to stand up and say, “I have a new idea and I’m willing to approach this in a new way”?

If you were in the Speaker’s chair today, how would you manage the dynamics between the two parties? How would you approach policy in the chambers right now?

I would do four things. I would reach out to House Democrats. Something I’ve actually helped launch was with the black caucus agreeing to swap districts with the Republicans and spend time with each other in their districts, which I think could be very helpful.

Second, I would look for Democratic bills that shared our values and I’d pass them. So we’d have a deliberate passing of bipartisan bills.

Third, I would go through, for example – and we’re doing this for one of my newsletters – I’d go through the State of the Union and I would pick all the things Obama said that we could agree on enough to start down that road. There are a lot of things ­– at least seven or eight things out of the State of the Union – that begin to be a conversation.

And fourth, I would slow the dialogue with the administration down and make it quietly very painful for them. And say look, if you want to deal with us as a serious part of the constitutional process, fine. We’ll sit and talk. I went 35 days negotiating with Clinton. But we did that after we closed the government twice, because then we had his attention. No Speaker of the House can match a President in a one-on-one fight in the media. But what you do have is the enormous power of the purse, to not give him money. And you can say, “Look, you’re not going to have any money. If you want some money, let’s talk. Call when you need money.” That’s what the Magna Carta was all about.

Predictions for 2016?

No idea.

Feature Photo & Headshot: Harris School of Public Policy Communications Office