E-mail a friendNewt Gingrich
airdate December 5, 2007
Newt Gingrich has been busy since leaving his post as U.S. House Speaker. He founded the Center for Health Transformation and chairs the nonpartisan American Solutions. He's also a Fox News Channel analyst and best-selling author. Gingrich's books include Real Change and Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less. Long involved in various environmental initiatives, he co-wrote A Contract with the Earth. Gingrich has a Ph.D. in history and taught environmental studies before his election to Congress.
Newt Gingrich
Tavis: Pleased to welcome Newt Gingrich back to this program. The former House speaker and bestselling author is chair of the nonpartisan group American Solutions for Winning the Future. His latest book is called "A Contract with the Earth," which is in stores now, and he joins us tonight from Washington. Mr. Speaker, as always, glad to have you on this program, sir.
Newt Gingrich: Well, it's great to be with you.
Tavis: Let me start by saying thank you to you. You were out front along with Jack Kemp and a few others, but certainly you, given your authority and credibility in positions of the past, including, of course, speaker. When you say something, people listen, and you jumped out front, talking about the fact that Republicans needed to show up at our debate earlier this year in September.
The four frontrunners did not come, but it became a huge media story and now they're all going, as you know, to the Univision debate because they couldn't say no to Black folk and Brown folk. So Univision is going to get what I couldn't get, but you made that a national news story, and I want to thank you for raising your voice about why they should have been there. So thank you, first of all.
Gingrich: Well, Ken Mehlman and I both felt very deeply that what you were doing, that you have a reputation for fairness, you were putting together an honest evening, and we did everything we could to convince those guys to come and be part of it.
The great irony is that the four guys who were too busy to show up have all had a bad couple weeks, and Mike Huckabee, the governor of Arkansas who did show up, is suddenly surging in a poll this morning. He's a close second to Mayor Giuliani, he's in first place in Iowa, he's in second place in New Hampshire.
And I don't know to what extent you may have anointed him, that's a big jump, but it is amazing to me that he showed up, he did his job, he's an attractive guy. And I think the fact that he came and others didn't was one of the things that contributed to this last month being very good for Mike Huckabee.
Tavis: Let me ask you then about Mike Huckabee, given all that you've just said, why he has not been embraced. He's a Baptist minister, former minister himself, affable, and surging, as you lay out now. Why is it that the Christian right has not embraced him in ways that some of us thought they would? And I'm trying to juxtapose that with Pat Robertson endorsing Giuliani.
Gingrich: I can't quite tell. I have always thought that Governor Huckabee had a great deal more potential than some of the Washington insiders thought, and I don't know why they didn't see that early on. But you know, in a funny way, it may have actually been to his advantage because instead of being the candidate of the religious right, which he would have become if they'd all surrounded him, he just became a good old boy from Arkansas who makes a lot of sense, has a good personality, has a great personal story to tell about diabetes and losing weight, has his own little rock band.
He's a very complex, interesting guy, and so without having become the Christian right candidate he's emerged on the scene, and it turns out that there are an awful lot of folks who really like him. And I think now in Iowa he has a formidable lead and may well come in first in the Iowa caucus.
Tavis: Well, the last guy to run for president from Hope (laughs), it worked out for him. I just find it funny that both he and Clinton are both from this little place called Hope, Arkansas.
Gingrich: Look, there's something about America that you've got to say - as you can tell, I'm shaking my head because what are the mathematical odds -
Tavis: Exactly.
Gingrich: - that Hope, Arkansas could produce two candidates, a Democratic nominee and a Republican? Of course in some way, Mike Huckabee would make the argument that he's the best guy to run against Hillary because he has spent his entire career wrestling with the Clinton machine in Arkansas, although I must say I'm not quite as confident tonight that Senator Clinton is going to get to be the nominee as I would have been six weeks ago.
Tavis: Well, let me explore that. I'm going to get to the book, I promise, in just a second, but since you went there, one more question about politics, I guess. You, as much as anybody in the Republican party, have said for quite some time and in one way or another that she is the candidate to beat. This is her race to lose. Did I just hear you say you're not as confident now about her being the nominee?
Gingrich: Well, I'm not. It's her race to lose, and she's in the early stages of losing it. She's still the frontrunner, she still should win, she still has the resources, but Obama has had a terrific run. I think Senator Obama's going to get a huge boost from Oprah Winfrey campaigning for him.
Senator John Edwards is actually the second choice of a lot of people in Iowa, and they have a very peculiar factor in Iowa. If you're a candidate and the caucus comes in less than 15 percent of the vote, you get to vote a second time. And when you ask people who are for Senator Dodd or Senator Biden or Governor Richardson who their second choice is, it turns out that John Edwards is the second choice of an amazing number of people.
So you could see Senator Clinton going into the caucus that night slightly ahead and coming out substantially behind if, in fact, Senator Edwards picks up all the second choices.
Tavis: And yet Hillary Clinton is still running ahead in the national polls, and that would be her argument, were she here debating you right now.
Gingrich: Look, I have great respect for her, she's a terrific professional. As you know, I've consistently said I think that she is very well prepared, has a big machine, and is married to the smartest politician in our generation. So you have to give her a lot of advantages. She still is probably going to be the nominee, but I will say that Senator Obama has made it a much closer race than I would have guessed if you'd asked me two months ago.
Tavis: So this new book is called "A Contract with the Earth." The last time you wrote a book that was called "A Contract" it revolutionized the country, it put your party back in power after 50 years. Might "A Contract with the Earth" finally get us in a real conversation about these issues?
Gingrich: I hope it will, I hope it'll allow people like Al Gore and me to have a dialogue rather than yelling at each other in a debate, but actually talk about how we can solve problems. Terry Maple, who's the director of the Palm Beach Zoo and a professor at Georgia Tech, great guy - I first met him when he was head of Zoo Atlanta - Terry and I wanted to write a book about mainstream environmentalism showing how you could use science and incentives in the marketplace to really dramatically improve the environment.
I think the book does very, very well at explaining that kind of approach. The American people, if you go to AmericanSolutions.com, we have some $428,000 of polling research there, some six national polls available for free. One of the interesting things is that about 79 percent of the American people favor the idea of prizes for getting breakthroughs in environment problems, on energy, on cars that can go 100 miles or more per gallon of gasoline.
And I think that there's a chance here to have a science and technology-based approach that applies real common sense, uses entrepreneurship, and actually solves environment problems.
Tavis: And yet there are a lot of folk in this country, many of them on the right, many of them on talk radio, who are arguing vociferously against the science, many of them saying that global warming is not a problem, and if it is a problem, not one that we control. There are a lot of folk in your party, in fact, who are fighting the science on this.
Gingrich: Yeah, and our point to them is that it's much better, we think, to show how you can have dramatic, common-sense breakthroughs. If we get to a hydrogen car, the fact is it produces no carbon at all; you dramatically change the whole pattern of carbon dioxide in the world. If we produced as much electricity out of nuclear power as the French, we would take two billion, two hundred million tons of carbon out of the atmosphere every single year - that's 15 percent better than the Kyoto goals.
There are practical, common sense ways to have a better economy, a better environment, and to reduce American dependency on foreign dictators. And I think that kind of strategy is worth talking about, and that's why in "Contract with the Earth" we wrote about it.
Tavis: Let me ask you how - and if anybody could answer this question, you can; again, it's what made the "Contract with America" work so well over 10 years ago. Even if you are right on these issues or if Al Gore is right on these issues, how does one get traction on this with the American public? These issues are so heady.
We can break it down to high gasoline prices, and people can understand that conversation, but how do we get traction on doing something about these issues that are pretty big?
Gingrich: Well, I think you've got to have specific common sense solutions that you rally people around, just as we did with Welfare reform in the past, as we did with other kind of big breakthroughs. In Iowa this week, I'm outlining the concept of a platform for the American people, and that platform comes straight out of the research at AmericanSolutions.com that anybody can go look at, and the platform basically has only issues that have a majority of Democrats, Republicans, and Independents all agreeing it should be done.
And so we're making the argument and the platform for the American people that you could actually get both major parties to agree to a joint platform of positive things, work on those for the first 90 days, and then after that argue over the things on the rest of the platform they might disagree on.
And I think you'd find, on things like for example having prizes to get environmental solutions and prizes for cars that would run a lot further per gallon of gasoline, I think you'd find there are a lot of things the American people are prepared to agree on and you could have a red, white, and blue approach rather than the red versus blue that we seem to be tied up in right now.
Tavis: Let me ask you a question, and I've had the occasion to have any number of private conversations with you, I confess that on national television and I'm unapologetic about that. We've had some great private conversations, and many of these on television and radio, and yet I've never asked you this question. Is it just my ears, my eyes, or has something happened in your political life that's made your approach to issues more bipartisan as you get older?
Gingrich: Yeah, I think part of it is I'm now a grandfather and I've got two grandchildren - Maggie, who's eight, and Robert, who's six. And my whole goal, the rest of my active citizenship is to help them get the kind of America that I want my grandchildren and I suspect everybody watching this would want their children and grandchildren to have.
I think that's made me a little more bipartisan. Part of it is I've watched this red versus blue partisanship get so bitter, so negative, so destructive that it's not a way to run America. We have got to get back to a red, white, and blue dialogue, and so when we began designing American Solutions, we really went out of our way to try to create a focus on issues that would bring us together.
It doesn't mean that it wouldn't be controversial, but they'd be issues where the overwhelming majority of Americans would agree to them, and where you could build a really big national consensus. And by the way, I have shared the polling data that I mentioned that said AmericanSolutions.com. We shared it with Senator Schumer for the Democratic Senate committee; we've shared it with Congressman Rahm Emmanuel, who was the chair of the Democratic caucus in the House.
I had the privilege of calling Howard Dean and telling him I was going to turn over $400,000 in polling data to the Democratic National Committee. So we really want to share this with everybody in the country because we think it's very important for America to get beyond pure partisanship. Not that there aren't good times to be partisan, but that we also need to move beyond that to a problem-solving orientation.
Tavis: Let me close with this, then that my comment last notwithstanding, you are still a proud member of the Republican Party and you spoke to the Republican governors last week and made some news. What are we to take out of what you said to the governors last week?
Gingrich: Well, we outlined, and it's all available - you can see the entire two-hour briefing at AmericanSolutions.com. We outlined very dramatic ways to modernize government, to solve problems, to help people in the inner city, to work on very fundamental issues in America. We outlined 10 major ways to think about solving big problems for America, and I must say that about 15 governors there at the meeting, it was a very positive meeting, and I felt very good about the possibility that we could develop new solutions.
Tavis: His new book is "A Contract with the Earth," available in bookstores now. He is, of course, the former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich. Mr. Gingrich, as always, sir, an honor to have you on the program, nice talking to you.
Gingrich: Great to be with you. Thank you.
Tavis: Take care.
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