Newt.org, March 27, 2008: The Obama Challenge: What Is the Right Change to Help All Americans Pursue Happiness and Create Prosperity?
Presentation Speaker Newt Gingrich
Thank you very much, Steve. I thank all of you for being here today. I really do believe that we have a unique opportunity to think anew about the challenge of poverty, racism, and those Americans who have been left out of the pursuit of happiness as most of us know it. And I do think that the Lincoln quote actually that I would have used is not the temperance speech but from Lincoln۪s second annual message to Congress on December 1, 1862, when he said:
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.
I think that it is the opportunity which Senator Obama gave all of us in his speech in Philadelphia to reengage in a dialogue about poverty, race, and the future of those Americans who are currently unable to pursue happiness. That is something we should not casually set aside.
Senator Obama said, and I quote:
By investing in our schools and our communities . . . at this moment in this election, we can come together and say, Not this time. This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can۪t learn, that those kids who don۪t look like us are somebody else۪s problem. The children of America are not those kids; they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a twenty-first century economy. Not this time.
Let me suggest to all of you that if you set aside the normal partisanship and cynicism of politics, that that۪s a very powerful paragraph and a paragraph worthy of response at the same level, that in fact we should set aside the cynicism, and I am giving this speech today to take up this opportunity, both to reject cynicism, but also to suggest that we find real solutions. But to find real solutions, I would argue, we have to have real honesty and a serious dialogue in which unpleasant facts are put on the table and bold proposals are discussed.
Senator Obama gave us a very courageous speech. We owe it to him and to the topic to take it very seriously and respond to the level of eloquence and systematic explanation that he gave us. He asked historic questions, and that is appropriate. And I want to make quite clear, and this may well be a disappointment to the more partisan and the more ideological, my speech today is not an answer to Senator Obama. It is not a refutation. Hopefully, it is the beginning of a genuine dialogue in which people of all backgrounds can come together to have a serious conversation about America۪s future.
Let me start by talking about the concept of anger, because I do think there۪s an authenticity and legitimacy of anger by many groups in America. Senator Obama said in his speech:
That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white coworkers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician۪s own failings. . . . That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition.
I think that that۪s right, and I think that it۪s important to recognize that anger can be a source of energy to create a better futurein which case it۪s a very good thing. But if anger is a self-inflicted wound that limits us, it is a very bad and a very dangerous thing. And we have to be very careful about the role that anger plays in our culture. Tragically, what has happened is that cultural and political leaders have used anger as an excuse to avoid reality, as an excuse to avoid change, as an excuse to avoid accountability, because everything that is wrong is somehow somebody else۪s fault.
Now, Senator Obama is right about the destructive impact of historic injustices and the anger they cause in different groups of Americans. And as a historian, of course, I agree with [William] Faulkner, as quoted in Senator Obama۪s speech: “The past isn۪t dead and buried. In fact, it isn۪t even past.” In my own life, I was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I grew up in an integrated U.S. Army at Fort Riley, Kansas; in Orl̩ans, France; and in Stuttgart, Germany. I did not encounter legal segregation until I was a junior in high school at Columbus, Georgia. Segregation was a horrible institution imposed by force by the state. It ruined the lives of people, it crippled their futures, it was a terrible injustice, and it is totally authentic to be angry about it. As Senator Obama notes,
the legalized discriminationwhere blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departmentsmeant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations.
Anyone who thinks that there was not this destructive impact is simply not in touch with the reality of American history for African-Americans.
Other groups have reasons for anger. Native Americans have a claim probably at least as great if not greater than African-Americans. Japanese-Americans went through a period of internment in World War II. Jewish Americans have a history which includes the Holocaust but extends back before the Holocaust to pogroms in Russia; anti-Semitism in Poland; expulsion from Spain; and, in the last fifty years, an unrelenting and virtually hysterical effort by their Arab neighbors to exterminate them in a way which no other group has experienced.
So there are many groups that could find causes for anger. But I would go a step further. I would argue that as citizens of a country which asserted that we are all endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, every American has things to be angry about. Simply ask yourself, if it was your daughter or son, if it was your granddaughter or grandson, trapped in some of the disastrous conditions of the very poor and very dispossessed in America, how angry would you be?
Consider some examples: At the Rosebud Sioux reservation in 2007, a population of 13,000, 144 young Native Americans tried to commit suicidearguably the highest suicide rate in the United States.
In 2006, the poverty rate in America was 12.3 percent. For non-Hispanic whites, it was 8.2 percent, but for blacks, it was 24.3 percent.
In 2007, 46.8 percent of twelfth-graders admitted to taking some sort of illicit drug in their lifetime; 35.6 percent of tenth-graders made the same admission; and in 2006, 20.9 percent of eighth-graderslet me repeat this, among eighth-grade Americans, every fifth American child admitted to taking some sort of illicit drug.
1 percent of the American population3 million peopleare in prison. That is more than the entire population of Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Atlanta, Detroit, and Denver combined.
Now, how can you hear these things in a country that says we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights and not be angry? So I think anger can be, should be a universal American feeling about those things that dissatisfy us and about a culture and a government which is failing.
Consider homicides in our cities: in Philadelphia in 2006, there were 406 murders. To give you a sense of the scale of this, there۪s an article called “The War in West Philadelphia” written by Dr. John Pryor, who was an Iraq combat surgeon and an emergency room doctor in Philadelphia. This is what he said:
In the swirl of screams and moving figures, my mind drifted to my recent experience in Iraq as an Army surgeon. There we dealt regularly with “mascals,” or mass-casualty situations. In Iraq, ironically, I found myself drawing on my experience as a civilian trauma surgeon each time mascals would overrun the combat hospital. As nine or ten patients from a firefight rolled in, I sometimes caught myself saying “just like another Friday night in West Philadelphia.” The wounds and nationalities of the patients are different, but the feelings of helplessness, despair and loss are the same. In Iraq, soldiers die for freedom, for honor, for their country and for their buddies. Here in Philadelphia, they die without honor, without purpose, for no country, for no one.
Now how can you hear that about your country and a great city and young people being killed, and not have some sense of anger? You should have a sense of anger about problems not solved, conditions not improved, and people not helped. The question isand I think this is where Senator Obama began to get a little off the markwhat do you do with the anger? We have to move from anger to courage, from blaming to solving. But if we want to save lives instead of being angry about their loss, we have to have real courage. As Lincoln said, we have to think anew.
There are principles for thinking anew. Real change requires real change. More than a slogan, it has to be a program, and the program has to be implemented. Albert Einstein said, “doing more of what you۪re already doing and expecting a different result is a sign of insanity.” I would argue that most politics and most government in America in the last thirty years has fully fit the Einsteinian model. We talk about change, and then we do more of what we۪re already doing.
General Eisenhower said in World War II, “when I can۪t solve a problem, I always make it bigger. I can never solve a problem by trying to make it smaller, but if I can make it big enough, I can often find a solution.” And I۪m going to suggest some very big solutions in the next few minutes.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, speaking at the depths of the Depression, in his first inaugural in March 1933, said:
This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. . . . So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itselfnameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves which is essential to victory.
John F. Kennedy in his inaugural in 1961 pointed out why we should be concerned about the loss of any young American. He said that every single life is important, because we are all endowed by God.
He went on to say, “The same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globethe belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God.” And that۪s in part why Callista and I did the DVD Rediscovering God in America, which uses this very quote to remind us that before the counterculture, before secularism, before we had an elite dominating our system, even liberal Democrats like Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy understood if you don۪t believe you۪re endowed by God and if you don۪t act that way, you can hardly live out the American process.
Kennedy also had a sense of being fixed on solving things. He said, quote, “Our task is not to fix the blame for the past, but to fix the course for the future.” Now, I want to repeat this, because I think it۪s the greatest challenge that Senator Obama and his friends have. “Our task is not to fix the blame for the past, but to fix the course for the future.”
Now, in order to fix that course for the future, I am going to pick up on a specific phrase from Ronald Reagan۪s first great national speech in October of 1964, “A Time for Choosing.” He said, quote, “I am going to talk of controversial things.” Because while Senator Obama has done an important service to the country in raising the right issues, and I hope legitimizing a genuine dialogue, he now has to join a dialogue about new solutions. I am going to describe new solutions based on principles that have been politically incorrect in terms of the culture of the Left. But I want you to look at the real world. Look in your heart. Look at your own values. Isn۪t it time we started a totally new conversation about meeting the challenge that every American should actually live out their Creator-endowed right to pursue happiness.
Let me make the key case for boldness. I think this is a great national debate we need, and it۪s a debate which I would hope Senator Obama would be prepared to engage in. The greatest case for boldness and new solutions is that the current system is destroying people. This is not a choice between a productive, effective system and improvement. This is a choice between utter disaster with enormous, profound human consequence, and the need for new thinking, new ideas, and new solutions.
Our choice is: how many eighth graders will take up drugs instead of math and science? How many thirteen-year-olds in Dallas will become madames before they have an honest job? How many young African-Americans will be killed or sent to prison? So when we talk about bold ideas, it is in the context of human disasters right here in America reported in your news every day. And the next time you hear these disasters, ask yourself, “To what extent is this the cost of bad culture and bad government?”
We speak here after twenty-five years of failure to fix the problems. April 26 will be the twenty-fifth anniversary of “A Nation at Risk,” a report on education in the United States. Here۪s what that report said. Quote,
If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have in effect been committing an act of unthinking unilateral educational disarmament.
And I would argue with every conservative: education in the United States is a national security issue and the secretary of defense should give an education speech every year reminding us that we are not going to be the leading power in the world if we don۪t have fundamental, deep rethinking of our education programs.
A few years later, I was honored to help create the Hart-Rudman Commission on National Security for the Twenty-first Century when I was speaker, and when I stepped down I served on it. The bipartisan commission reported in March 2001. It said the greatest threat to the United States was a weapon of mass destruction going off in an American city, probably from a terrorist. It did not get much attention in March, but by September 2001, people thought we were fairly prescient. But it said that the second greatest threat to the United States is, quote, “inadequacies of our systems of research and education which pose a greater threat to U.S. national security over the next quarter century than any potential conventional war that we might imagine.” Let me repeat this, because I think to have a national security group come back and tell you that you are in greater danger from the collapse of education than you are from any possible conventional war should have been a very startling thing, and should have led to very fundamental questions about how badly the system is failing and what the replacement has to look like.
Now, let me say, the rest of what I۪m going to say todayif you think the current system is working, what I۪m going to say is far too bold and far to willing to change what۪s happening. But is anybody really prepared to defend the current system? And I think it will be very hard to go around this country and find anyone willing to stand up and suggest that the current system is working, particularly for the poorest and weakest of Americans.
The tragic truth is that the current system is not working because of two topics we don۪t like to talk about: bad culture and bad government.
And bad culture and bad government intersect to reinforce each other, to create human and financial cost beyond anything we could have imagined a quarter century ago. The tragic truth is that at the end of segregation, the great moment of opportunity for Afircan-Americans, we had a failure of government and a failure of culture. The rise of big bureaucracy in the Great Society starting in 1965 combined with the rise of a counterculture which despised middle class values and which taught the poor patterns and habits of destructionand those two patterns of bad bureaucracy reinforcing bad culture have led to a disaster. Charles Murray captured part of this in an extraordinary book in the mid-1980s called Losing Ground, which was the seminal work in being able to pass welfare reform, in which he demonstrated that the patterns we were building were actively destructive of the poor.
Marvin Olasky extended that critique in a brilliant book written in 1994 called The Tragedy of American Compassion. Olasky outlined the values and principles of the great nineteenth century social reformers who all believed that helping people out of poverty required tough love and work requirements. He cited reformer after reformer who condemned the compassionate wealthy who wanted to give people something for nothing. These people were convinced that giving away moneythe reformers of the nineteenth century were convinced that giving away money subsidized bad behavior and encouraged people to remain dependent, and in many cases, to remain addicted to drugs and to alcohol. The modern redistributionist model of bureaucratic welfare was an outgrowth of a leftist social critique of society, according to Olasky. He documented the leftist desire to create a right to money without effort. He cited advocate after advocate on the twentieth century Left who insisted that a large underclass of permanently poor people was acceptable, and that it was cultural imperialism to insist that they acquire habits of discipline and self-management in order to lead full lives as independently productive citizens. The Tragedy of American Compassion made clear that the fight over welfare reform was at its heart a cultural and moral fight over the nature of being American and the requirements of a full and healthy citizenship. Understood on those terms, the existing welfare system was indefensible as bad government and bad culture. It was bad government and bad culture combined in a way that crippled the lives of people.
In 1996, we reformed the welfare system, but we did not change the cultural values which were destroying opportunities and crippling lives, nor did we uproot the destructive institutions of bad government in education, urban bureaucracy, and tax policy.
The bad cultural signals are routine, they۪re pervasive in the mass media. They surround us. They۪re in songs, they۪re on television, they۪re in radio, and they are really destructive of sound behavior and of the opportunity to get out of poverty. You don۪t have a community that creates wealth that ends up prosperous and safe and gives kids a better future if everyone is taught to stand around demanding that somebody else pay for everything. And this is a core challenge. Should this be a country in which every person learns to work, every person learns to save, every person learns to have a better future, and, by the way, is therefore responsible for working, saving, and creating a better future? Or is this a country where you shouldn۪t have to do all those things because it۪s too hard, and someone should take care of you? In which case, the question becomes: who۪s the someone, and why do you think they۪ll stay here? It۪s a fundamental question, and you۪ll see in just a moment the scale of the disaster.
This failure to take into account the realities of economics and to focus on creating a culture of productivity and prosperity can have devastating results. Paul Johnson, in his great history of the twentieth century, Modern Times, said the great tragedy of postcolonial Africa is that the activists brought socialism to Africa, and it has failed totally. And this is one the great tragedies. When people talk about helping Africa they don۪t want to talk about the cultural reality that really bad values combined with really bad government destroy things. Zimbabwe is not collapsing because of racism. Zimbabwe is collapsing because a kleptocraticdictator is destroying the potential for wealth and destroying the potential for investment and destroying the potential for jobs, and in the process he is ruining the lives of people. This is a core challenge about the modern world. Are these problems caused by the failure of culture and the failure of government, or are they caused by somebody else doing bad things to us? And this is a fundamental analytical question with virtually every element of poverty across the entire planet.
There are two things profoundly wrong with the Left۪s approach to culture and prosperitywhich is to raise taxes, increase government, and essentially allow people to avoid effort by insisting that they be taken care of. The first is: if your ethnic group is poor, the number one thing you want them to do is to go into business because that۪s where they۪ll create wealth. And when they create wealth they۪ll hire their relatives, and they۪ll hire their neighbors. And a generation of entrepreneurs can mop up poverty at a rate no bureaucracy can imagine. And yet, nowhere among current left-wing critiques of America, and nowhere among those who most publicly spend time worrying about the poor, do you hear a constant drumbeat that says: Let۪s try to turn every young person into an entrepreneur. Let۪s try to teach them how to create a business. Let۪s try to help them grow as rapidly as possible. Let۪s see if they can۪t bring wealth into the community by earning it, and in the process they will mop up the poverty by the act of hiring everybody they went to school with. This has worked for every ethnic group that has risen in American history, including, by the way, genuine African-Americans who come from Africa, or Caribbean-Americans who come from the Caribbean. As long as you focus on earning a living in America, and you focus on being prudent, you rise. People have risen whether they were Jewish, Irish, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Indian, Pakistani. It۪s astonishing in America how many groups rise. But they rise by learning the rules of rising. And the first rule is to make business and the development of wealth and the creation of economic opportunity more important than politics and to focus resources on encouraging people to go into business, not bureaucracy.
The second great ground rule is simple. In a healthy society, you want the smallest possible tax rate because you want the maximum resources with people who know how to create jobs. And the choice is simple: do you make the politician or the bureaucrat more powerful by giving them more money, or do you make the job creator more effective by letting them have the money. But does anyone seriously want to argue that the bureaucrat is more likely to create the next million jobs than the entrepreneur? Very few Americans believe this. And yet it۪s the base of much of our current politics.
So this question about the critique is important. And I would suggest to you, by the way, that there are plenty of factual bases for this. If you go back and look, in 1960, South Korea and Ghana had the same per capita income. Today, South Korea is the eleventh wealthiest nation in the world, with a high tech base of its industrial sector in the world market. Forty years ago, the leading export of Ireland was its children because they had no jobs. Ireland adopted a low tax 12 and a half percent corporate rate, very rigorous rule of law, investment in education and infrastructure, and today Ireland has a higher per capita income than Germany, although they۪re in danger of messing it up by raising taxes and creating new work rules. But today, they are 50,000 guest workers from Eastern Europe working Ireland because they have a labor shortage. Something that was literally inconceivable, yet who on the Left is prepared to study South Korea and Ireland? Who is prepared to study success?
It۪s as though, if politics were sports, the primary pattern of the Left would be to study the losing team. And ask whether they had psychological anguish at coming in last for the thirteenth straight year. And you would only want coaches who were compassionate in defeat because you۪d expect them to be defeated every game and therefore you۪d want to make sure they felt with their players during the long ride home. You۪ll notice that in sports we don۪t have this model. Or at least no one will go to the games that are played by the teams who have that model.
But that۪s the heart of the American political structure today.
Now, because the Left cannot deal with the cost of bad culture and the cost of bad government, they are constantly trying to find a scapegoat for the failures of their own institutions and the failures of their own bureaucracies.
Consider two quotes from Senator Obama۪s recent speech in Philadelphia.
Senator Obama asserted:
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven۪t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today۪s white and black students.
I۪m going to repeat the closing part of this. “. . . helps explain the pervasive achievement gap. . .” That is simply factually false. The Detroit schools are the third or fourth most expensive schools in America. They۪re a disaster. The District of Columbia schools are not bad because of racism. The District of Columbia schools are bad because it has an incompetent bureaucracy, a failed model of education, a unionized tenured system. It is utterly resistant to improvement. That has nothing to do with racism.
And if Senator Obama is serious about helping children in urban America, he will have to question whether or not in fact he۪s prepared to automatically reinforce the lockstep power of the National Education Association, w