stephanie
02-14-2008, 03:48 AM
35th Annual Conservative Political Action Conference
Washington D.C.
February 9, 2008
Click here to view video of the full speech
Click here to listen to an audio-only version
PODCAST version here
(Transcript made from speech as delivered.)
Thank you all for that remarkable welcome. I’m deeply, deeply grateful, and Callista and I are delighted to be back here once again at the most important single meeting of the conservative movement in a historic time. <Applause>
Many of you know that my background includes being a teacher, and I am going to try in the next few minutes to offer a little bit of a lesson. My Dad was a career soldier, served 27 years in the infantry, and when I was very young, he convinced me that leadership and courage and a willingness to think deeply are vital to the survival of a free country. <Applause>
Between my freshman and sophomore years in high school, when we were stationed first in Orleans, France, and then in Stuttgart, Germany, I concluded that what we are doing here today is really, really important. It’s part of the dialogue by which a free people govern themselves. My dad was reassigned to Fort Benning, Georgia, and in 1960, I was a volunteer as a high school student in the Nixon-Lodge campaign. So I want to talk to you this afternoon from having spent what will be this August, fifty years studying and thinking about what it takes for America to survive. In many ways, they’ve been remarkable years. The Georgia I arrived at in 1960, was legally segregated and a one-party Democratic state. Today it is legally integrated and a two-party state with a Republican governor, two Republican senators, and a Republican legislature.<Applause>
When I decided at the beginning of my sophomore year in high school that I would study national security and I would try to understand how we acquire the power legitimately from the people in order to implement the policies we need, the Soviet Empire was a real and a direct threat to the survival of freedom on this planet. Because of the courage persistence, clarity, and vision of one person, the Soviet Union does not exist today, and that person was Ronald Wilson Reagan. <Applause> Next month will be the 25th anniversary of two speeches: the speech in which he broke with the elite, morally neutral, real politik, accommodationist view, and described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire”, the beginning of the end of that evil…<Applause> and 13 days later, the speech in which he outlined a proposal for a science-and-technology-based, entrepreneurial approach to national security to develop a strategic defense initiative which would in effect bankrupt the Soviet Union and lead to its collapse. <Applause>
Those two speeches could have been given by no other leader in the last fifty years. He had the courage, he had the conviction, and from 1947 on, he had been systematically thinking about and studying communism and trying to find out how to defeat it. Now, he made the first CPAC conference really important, because he came here at a time when we were in despair, when the Republican Party was crumbling under the weight of Watergate, when the Left was on offense, when the counterculture was in full steam, and he said in [March of 1975] that we must have a flag of bold colors, no pale pastels. [“Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?”—Ronald Reagan] <Applause>
I tried in thinking through what I could say to you this afternoon to literally ask what would Ronald Reagan have said in this setting at this time, not to repeat what he said in other times, but to think about the clarity and the historic context. I went back and looked at what Barry Goldwater said in 1960 when there was a conservative eruption because Nixon was going too far to the left, and Goldwater’s name was put a nomination for vice-president, and he withdrew it and said he would support the ticket. Compared to the other party, there was no choice. I looked at what Ronald Reagan said in 1976, when having risen in rebellion against an incumbent Republican President and come within 70 votes of the nomination, he said that given a choice between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, there was no choice, because Jimmy Carter would be about as bad as he turned out to be. <Laughter & Applause>
So I want to say several things that are fairly complicated and I hope you will bare with me, because I think we are at a moment of historic choice for the conservative movement’s future. I want to give you four sets of numbers, those of you who are truly interested in this may want to write them down, we gave you a copy of the Platform of the American People which I’ll talk about in a minute, but feel free to write on the back of it. I think you’ll find this interesting as a lesson in history and as a thought process about where we are now. The first is the number 9 million. The second is two numbers: 1928 and 68. The third is 0 to 6, and the fourth is 14.6 to 8.3. I believe in these four sets of numbers, lies a diagnosis of where we are and where we must go.
The first number, 9 million, is the number of additional votes who came out to vote in 1994, the largest one-party increase in an off-year election in the history of the United States, brought out by a proud, positive, clear, and very, very bold Contract with America. <Applause> I cite it to point out that when we stand clearly, simply, and directly for large-scale change, that year it was welfare reform, the first tax cut in 16 years, a balanced federal budget, accountability for the Congress, stronger national defense and intelligence. The American people responded.
The second set of numbers, 1928 and 68. In 1928 was the last time a Republican Congress was reelected. We had held the House from 1946 for two years, we held the House in 1952 for two years, and when I became Speaker I felt the greatest challenge I had was to ensure that we would in fact keep a majority in 1996 for the first time in 68 years. Now, it was a doubly difficult problem because I had every expectation that President Clinton, as one of the smartest, most agile, and least inhibited by principle politicians in America, would flow magically to whatever he had to in order to get reelected. So my assumption all along was that come the presidential campaign, we would have an uphill fight. No Republican House had been reelected with a Democratic President winning. And I want to share three keys with you that people don’t understand to this day in this city:
The first key is, we kept our word on the Contract, and we voted on every single item in the first 93 days, and people began to believe we were serious. <Applause>
The second, is something that the news media and the elites and the Republican consultants got exactly backwards. We got into a struggle over balancing the budget with Bill Clinton and the federal government was closed. Everyone says, “What a huge mistake,” and I keep trying to say to them, “We were the first reelected majority in 68 years and you think it was a mistake?” If we had broken our word with fiscal conservatives, if we had rolled over and caved, if we had failed to fight, we would not have held the Congress in 1996. In fact, it was precisely because people suddenly looked up and said, “Wait a second. These guys actually believe it enough to lay their careers on the line and stand for something even when they’re being yelled at,” that led people to decide that we were real.<Applause>
And third, we voluntarily committed that we would balance the federal budget. We weren’t required to by the Contract. The Contract said we’d vote on a balanced budget amendment. But we said when the amendment passed the House and failed by one vote in the Senate, we would go ahead and behave as though it had passed. And we said by definition if we were going to pass the amendment we thought we could balance the budget in seven years because that’s what to amendment said. And so we held a meeting and I’ll never forget it. Dick Armey, Bob Walker, Bob Livingston, Bill Archer, John Kasich, Tom Delay. We all sat down and we looked at each other. And I said, “We have a chance to decisively make history if we have the courage to make history.” Now in order to do that, we had to reform Medicare in the middle of an election year with a liberal Democrat in the White House. And we had to do so, so carefully, and with such training that all of our members could go home and explain what we were doing. And we had to do so with such care that AARP would not attack us, because we couldn’t have withstood it if they had decided to tell every senior citizen that we were against them. When we finished keeping our word on the Contract, standing firm even if it had involved a real fight, and moving towards a balanced budget with an effective reform of Medicare that people agreed was needed and correct, we kept the U.S. House for the first time in 68 years. And there’s a big lesson there.
Now the third number, which I think should have led to a vastly bigger discussion in the Republican Party, is 0 to 6. That’s the track record of incumbent U.S. Senators in a close election in 2006. Now if your party loses every single close incumbent election despite having raised an immense amount of money, maybe there’s something wrong. I don’t want to be too bold, <Laughter> but I want to suggest that if I were a stockholder and we were 0 for 6, I would like to talk about what’s going on. And yet we sleepwalk through 2007.
Now, because we were sleepwalking through 2007, we get to the last set of numbers which should sober every person in this country who does not want to have a left wing president. On Super Tuesday, there were 14.6 million Democratic votes, and 8.3 million Republican votes. Now, I want to repeat this because I want it to sink it in here. There were 14.6 million Democrats who thought the presidential nomination was worth voting for, and there were 8.3 million Republicans on Super Tuesday. That is a warning of a catastrophic election. I was in Idaho this last week, and Barack Obama on last Saturday had 16,000 people in Boise. The idea that the most liberal Democratic Senator getting 16,000 people in Boise was inconceivable. And every person who cares about the conservative movement and every person who cares about the Republican Party had better stop and say to themselves, “There is something big happening in this country. We don’t understand it. We’re not responding to it. And we’re currently not competitive. And if we want to get to be competitive, we had better change and we had better change now.”
Let me tell you flatly. I said the week before Super Tuesday, actually a week before the Super Bowl, reporters asked me, I think it was on Hannity and Colmes, and they said, “What are the Republican chances this fall?” And I said, “Well, I think they’re about as good as the New York Giants beating the Patriots.” <Laughter>
Now, and this next comment comes with a little pain because I’m a Green Bay fan, and I learned a lot about the Giants when they played in Green Bay recently, but here’s the point I was making. People thought I was saying we didn’t have a chance to win. I was saying, the game hasn’t started, and if we field the right team with the right issues in the right way, we have fully was much chance to win as the Giants did, but I’ll tell you, we are currently no where near being ready to do this. This is not a comment–I want to make this clear for the news media–this is not a comment about any of the current candidates for president.
This is a comment about the conservative movement, and it's a comment about the Republican Party, and all the candidates currently running fit within those two phrases. But it is about all of us. It is about our Congressman, our Senator, our governors, our county commissioners, our school board members.
And let me make this very clear, I believe we have to change or expect defeat.
And I believe that this is a time for the conservative movement, to issue a declaration of independence. And let me explain what I mean by issuing a declaration of independence.
First of all, I think we need to get independent from a Washington fixation. <Applause> There are 513,000 elected officials in the United States and the conservative movement should believe in a decentralized United States, where every elected official has real responsibility, and we should be developing a conservative action plan, at every level of this country, and not simply focused over and over again on arguments about the White House.
Second, I think we need to get independent from this leader fascination with the presidency. Remember Ronald Reagan rose in rebellion because Gerald Ford was negotiating the Panama Canal Treaty. I voted against two Reagan tax increases. I voted against George H. W. Bush’s 1990 tax increase. It is a totally honorable and legitimate thing to say I am going to support the candidate and oppose the policy. This idea [is] that I think we [did] President George W. Bush a grave disservice by not being dramatically more aggressive in criticizing when they were wrong, and being more open when they were making mistakes.
And I don’t think it helped them or the country. <Applause>
I also think that we need to declare our independence from trying to protect and defend failed bureaucracies that magically become our’s as soon as we are in charge of them. We appoint solid conservatives to a department and within three weeks they are defending and protecting the very department that they would have been attacking before they got appointed. And this is a fundamental problem and I think it comes from some very great challenges. And I want to suggest to you, and I spent a lot of time since 1999 thinking about this. That’s the part of why I wrote the book Real Change, and why I have tried to lay out at American Solutions a fundamentally different approach to how we think about solving our problems.
I think that there are two grave lessons for the conservative movement since 1980. The first, which we still haven’t come to grips with, is that governing is much harder than campaigning. Our consultants may be terrific at winning one election, they don’t know anything about governing. And unfortunately most of our candidates listen to our consultants. And so you end up with people who don’t understand briefing people who don’t know, and together they have no clue. <Laughter>
We win the election and then we lose the government. And this happens at every level. It happens in Sacramento, it happens in Tallahassee, it happens in Albany, it happens Trenton, and it happens in Washington D.C.
So the first lesson is that we are going to have to learn as a movement how to actually create conservative government, not just conservative politics. And that is a fundamentally harder thing. <Applause>
The second thing that I think has been a very sobering surprise to me, and it really started when we won in 1994, and I thought that the Democrats would stop and say “Wow we just lost power that we had for forty years, I guess maybe we did something wrong.”
They didn’t say that at all. They said, “Gingrich must have cheated.” And their most partisan members just hated me. They filed 83 ethic charges and they did all sorts of things because they just couldn’t stand it. They knew they were supposed to be chairman. In fact, the first couple of weeks, people would come in and sit in the chairman’s seat and we would have to say to them, you know, you’re the ranking member now, and they were just beside themselves because they can’t have been wrong. <laughter> And frankly this is why they hate George W. Bush so much. The notion that we might have actually been elected under the rules in 2000, the notion that we might actually be doing the right thing, just drives the Left crazy. <Applause>
But it is a deeper problem. I had no real understanding of how decisively and deeply entrenched our opponents are from every level. From the Marxist tenure faculty member running for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota, achieving the impossible, the only man in America who could be to the left of Al Franken, and a vivid reminder of how much our University campuses are filled with people who hate the very country that provides them their salary, that provides them their tenure, and provides them their freedom. <Applause>
To a Detroit school bureaucracy which is crippling the children of Detroit, which graduates only 25% of its entering freshman on time, which is one of the highest paid and most expensive programs in the country, and which, when a successful millionaire offered to give $200 million dollars, to help create charter schools to save the children of Detroit, promptly attacked him as a racist because no white man had the right to step in and save black children, and in fact drove him out of Detroit, because he was such a threat, by insisting that teachers actually be competent, and that the purpose of schools was actually to teach. <Applause>
But we have seen the same thing right here. Any of youo who have listened to Ambassador John Bolton knows that we have a vast portion of the State Department deeply committed to defeating the policies of President Bush. We have a large proportion of the Intelligence community deeply committed to defeating the policies of President Bush. The fact that he is the elected Commander in Chief of the American people, the fact that the laws have been passed by the elected legislators of the American people, seems to be no matter to this bureaucratic elite, which arrogates to itself the right to do things that are stunningly destructive.
The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran can only be understood as a bureaucratic coup d’état, deliberately designed to undermine the policies of the United States, on behalf of some weird goal. <Applause>
There is one other declaration of independence we need and this will startle some of you. And remember I say this from a background of having been active in the Georgia Republican Party since 1960. In a fundamental way, the conservative movement has to declare itself independent from the Republican Party. <Applause>
Let me make very clear what I'm saying here. I am not saying there should be a third party – I think a third party is a dumb idea, will not get anywhere, and in the end will achieve nothing. <Applause>
I actually believe that any reasonable conservative will, in the end, find that they have an absolute requirement to support the Republican nominee for president this fall. <Applause>
And let me remind you, I say that in the context of personally believing that the McCain-Feingold Act is unconstitutional and a threat to our civil liberties. <Applause>
And I say that in the context of believing that the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill was a disaster and was correctly stopped by the American people. <Applause>
But I would rather, as a citizen, and I say this with Callista and I have two wonderful grandchildren. Maggie who is 8 and Robert who is 6. We think about their future. As a citizen, I would rather have a President McCain that we fight with 20% of the time, than a President Clinton or a President Obama that we fight with 90% of the time. <Applause>
Let me, if I might, carry this a step further so that you understand where I am coming from. I believe the conservative movement has to think about reaching out to every American of every background. I think we have to decide that in 2010, we are going to recruit and support conservative candidates in Democratic districts, because the right answer to gerrymandering is to beat them in the primary. <Applause>
read the rest..
http://newt.org/tabid/102/articleType/ArticleView/articleId/3173/Default.aspx
Washington D.C.
February 9, 2008
Click here to view video of the full speech
Click here to listen to an audio-only version
PODCAST version here
(Transcript made from speech as delivered.)
Thank you all for that remarkable welcome. I’m deeply, deeply grateful, and Callista and I are delighted to be back here once again at the most important single meeting of the conservative movement in a historic time. <Applause>
Many of you know that my background includes being a teacher, and I am going to try in the next few minutes to offer a little bit of a lesson. My Dad was a career soldier, served 27 years in the infantry, and when I was very young, he convinced me that leadership and courage and a willingness to think deeply are vital to the survival of a free country. <Applause>
Between my freshman and sophomore years in high school, when we were stationed first in Orleans, France, and then in Stuttgart, Germany, I concluded that what we are doing here today is really, really important. It’s part of the dialogue by which a free people govern themselves. My dad was reassigned to Fort Benning, Georgia, and in 1960, I was a volunteer as a high school student in the Nixon-Lodge campaign. So I want to talk to you this afternoon from having spent what will be this August, fifty years studying and thinking about what it takes for America to survive. In many ways, they’ve been remarkable years. The Georgia I arrived at in 1960, was legally segregated and a one-party Democratic state. Today it is legally integrated and a two-party state with a Republican governor, two Republican senators, and a Republican legislature.<Applause>
When I decided at the beginning of my sophomore year in high school that I would study national security and I would try to understand how we acquire the power legitimately from the people in order to implement the policies we need, the Soviet Empire was a real and a direct threat to the survival of freedom on this planet. Because of the courage persistence, clarity, and vision of one person, the Soviet Union does not exist today, and that person was Ronald Wilson Reagan. <Applause> Next month will be the 25th anniversary of two speeches: the speech in which he broke with the elite, morally neutral, real politik, accommodationist view, and described the Soviet Union as an “evil empire”, the beginning of the end of that evil…<Applause> and 13 days later, the speech in which he outlined a proposal for a science-and-technology-based, entrepreneurial approach to national security to develop a strategic defense initiative which would in effect bankrupt the Soviet Union and lead to its collapse. <Applause>
Those two speeches could have been given by no other leader in the last fifty years. He had the courage, he had the conviction, and from 1947 on, he had been systematically thinking about and studying communism and trying to find out how to defeat it. Now, he made the first CPAC conference really important, because he came here at a time when we were in despair, when the Republican Party was crumbling under the weight of Watergate, when the Left was on offense, when the counterculture was in full steam, and he said in [March of 1975] that we must have a flag of bold colors, no pale pastels. [“Our people look for a cause to believe in. Is it a third party we need, or is it a new and revitalized second party, raising a banner of no pale pastels, but bold colors which make it unmistakably clear where we stand on all of the issues troubling the people?”—Ronald Reagan] <Applause>
I tried in thinking through what I could say to you this afternoon to literally ask what would Ronald Reagan have said in this setting at this time, not to repeat what he said in other times, but to think about the clarity and the historic context. I went back and looked at what Barry Goldwater said in 1960 when there was a conservative eruption because Nixon was going too far to the left, and Goldwater’s name was put a nomination for vice-president, and he withdrew it and said he would support the ticket. Compared to the other party, there was no choice. I looked at what Ronald Reagan said in 1976, when having risen in rebellion against an incumbent Republican President and come within 70 votes of the nomination, he said that given a choice between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, there was no choice, because Jimmy Carter would be about as bad as he turned out to be. <Laughter & Applause>
So I want to say several things that are fairly complicated and I hope you will bare with me, because I think we are at a moment of historic choice for the conservative movement’s future. I want to give you four sets of numbers, those of you who are truly interested in this may want to write them down, we gave you a copy of the Platform of the American People which I’ll talk about in a minute, but feel free to write on the back of it. I think you’ll find this interesting as a lesson in history and as a thought process about where we are now. The first is the number 9 million. The second is two numbers: 1928 and 68. The third is 0 to 6, and the fourth is 14.6 to 8.3. I believe in these four sets of numbers, lies a diagnosis of where we are and where we must go.
The first number, 9 million, is the number of additional votes who came out to vote in 1994, the largest one-party increase in an off-year election in the history of the United States, brought out by a proud, positive, clear, and very, very bold Contract with America. <Applause> I cite it to point out that when we stand clearly, simply, and directly for large-scale change, that year it was welfare reform, the first tax cut in 16 years, a balanced federal budget, accountability for the Congress, stronger national defense and intelligence. The American people responded.
The second set of numbers, 1928 and 68. In 1928 was the last time a Republican Congress was reelected. We had held the House from 1946 for two years, we held the House in 1952 for two years, and when I became Speaker I felt the greatest challenge I had was to ensure that we would in fact keep a majority in 1996 for the first time in 68 years. Now, it was a doubly difficult problem because I had every expectation that President Clinton, as one of the smartest, most agile, and least inhibited by principle politicians in America, would flow magically to whatever he had to in order to get reelected. So my assumption all along was that come the presidential campaign, we would have an uphill fight. No Republican House had been reelected with a Democratic President winning. And I want to share three keys with you that people don’t understand to this day in this city:
The first key is, we kept our word on the Contract, and we voted on every single item in the first 93 days, and people began to believe we were serious. <Applause>
The second, is something that the news media and the elites and the Republican consultants got exactly backwards. We got into a struggle over balancing the budget with Bill Clinton and the federal government was closed. Everyone says, “What a huge mistake,” and I keep trying to say to them, “We were the first reelected majority in 68 years and you think it was a mistake?” If we had broken our word with fiscal conservatives, if we had rolled over and caved, if we had failed to fight, we would not have held the Congress in 1996. In fact, it was precisely because people suddenly looked up and said, “Wait a second. These guys actually believe it enough to lay their careers on the line and stand for something even when they’re being yelled at,” that led people to decide that we were real.<Applause>
And third, we voluntarily committed that we would balance the federal budget. We weren’t required to by the Contract. The Contract said we’d vote on a balanced budget amendment. But we said when the amendment passed the House and failed by one vote in the Senate, we would go ahead and behave as though it had passed. And we said by definition if we were going to pass the amendment we thought we could balance the budget in seven years because that’s what to amendment said. And so we held a meeting and I’ll never forget it. Dick Armey, Bob Walker, Bob Livingston, Bill Archer, John Kasich, Tom Delay. We all sat down and we looked at each other. And I said, “We have a chance to decisively make history if we have the courage to make history.” Now in order to do that, we had to reform Medicare in the middle of an election year with a liberal Democrat in the White House. And we had to do so, so carefully, and with such training that all of our members could go home and explain what we were doing. And we had to do so with such care that AARP would not attack us, because we couldn’t have withstood it if they had decided to tell every senior citizen that we were against them. When we finished keeping our word on the Contract, standing firm even if it had involved a real fight, and moving towards a balanced budget with an effective reform of Medicare that people agreed was needed and correct, we kept the U.S. House for the first time in 68 years. And there’s a big lesson there.
Now the third number, which I think should have led to a vastly bigger discussion in the Republican Party, is 0 to 6. That’s the track record of incumbent U.S. Senators in a close election in 2006. Now if your party loses every single close incumbent election despite having raised an immense amount of money, maybe there’s something wrong. I don’t want to be too bold, <Laughter> but I want to suggest that if I were a stockholder and we were 0 for 6, I would like to talk about what’s going on. And yet we sleepwalk through 2007.
Now, because we were sleepwalking through 2007, we get to the last set of numbers which should sober every person in this country who does not want to have a left wing president. On Super Tuesday, there were 14.6 million Democratic votes, and 8.3 million Republican votes. Now, I want to repeat this because I want it to sink it in here. There were 14.6 million Democrats who thought the presidential nomination was worth voting for, and there were 8.3 million Republicans on Super Tuesday. That is a warning of a catastrophic election. I was in Idaho this last week, and Barack Obama on last Saturday had 16,000 people in Boise. The idea that the most liberal Democratic Senator getting 16,000 people in Boise was inconceivable. And every person who cares about the conservative movement and every person who cares about the Republican Party had better stop and say to themselves, “There is something big happening in this country. We don’t understand it. We’re not responding to it. And we’re currently not competitive. And if we want to get to be competitive, we had better change and we had better change now.”
Let me tell you flatly. I said the week before Super Tuesday, actually a week before the Super Bowl, reporters asked me, I think it was on Hannity and Colmes, and they said, “What are the Republican chances this fall?” And I said, “Well, I think they’re about as good as the New York Giants beating the Patriots.” <Laughter>
Now, and this next comment comes with a little pain because I’m a Green Bay fan, and I learned a lot about the Giants when they played in Green Bay recently, but here’s the point I was making. People thought I was saying we didn’t have a chance to win. I was saying, the game hasn’t started, and if we field the right team with the right issues in the right way, we have fully was much chance to win as the Giants did, but I’ll tell you, we are currently no where near being ready to do this. This is not a comment–I want to make this clear for the news media–this is not a comment about any of the current candidates for president.
This is a comment about the conservative movement, and it's a comment about the Republican Party, and all the candidates currently running fit within those two phrases. But it is about all of us. It is about our Congressman, our Senator, our governors, our county commissioners, our school board members.
And let me make this very clear, I believe we have to change or expect defeat.
And I believe that this is a time for the conservative movement, to issue a declaration of independence. And let me explain what I mean by issuing a declaration of independence.
First of all, I think we need to get independent from a Washington fixation. <Applause> There are 513,000 elected officials in the United States and the conservative movement should believe in a decentralized United States, where every elected official has real responsibility, and we should be developing a conservative action plan, at every level of this country, and not simply focused over and over again on arguments about the White House.
Second, I think we need to get independent from this leader fascination with the presidency. Remember Ronald Reagan rose in rebellion because Gerald Ford was negotiating the Panama Canal Treaty. I voted against two Reagan tax increases. I voted against George H. W. Bush’s 1990 tax increase. It is a totally honorable and legitimate thing to say I am going to support the candidate and oppose the policy. This idea [is] that I think we [did] President George W. Bush a grave disservice by not being dramatically more aggressive in criticizing when they were wrong, and being more open when they were making mistakes.
And I don’t think it helped them or the country. <Applause>
I also think that we need to declare our independence from trying to protect and defend failed bureaucracies that magically become our’s as soon as we are in charge of them. We appoint solid conservatives to a department and within three weeks they are defending and protecting the very department that they would have been attacking before they got appointed. And this is a fundamental problem and I think it comes from some very great challenges. And I want to suggest to you, and I spent a lot of time since 1999 thinking about this. That’s the part of why I wrote the book Real Change, and why I have tried to lay out at American Solutions a fundamentally different approach to how we think about solving our problems.
I think that there are two grave lessons for the conservative movement since 1980. The first, which we still haven’t come to grips with, is that governing is much harder than campaigning. Our consultants may be terrific at winning one election, they don’t know anything about governing. And unfortunately most of our candidates listen to our consultants. And so you end up with people who don’t understand briefing people who don’t know, and together they have no clue. <Laughter>
We win the election and then we lose the government. And this happens at every level. It happens in Sacramento, it happens in Tallahassee, it happens in Albany, it happens Trenton, and it happens in Washington D.C.
So the first lesson is that we are going to have to learn as a movement how to actually create conservative government, not just conservative politics. And that is a fundamentally harder thing. <Applause>
The second thing that I think has been a very sobering surprise to me, and it really started when we won in 1994, and I thought that the Democrats would stop and say “Wow we just lost power that we had for forty years, I guess maybe we did something wrong.”
They didn’t say that at all. They said, “Gingrich must have cheated.” And their most partisan members just hated me. They filed 83 ethic charges and they did all sorts of things because they just couldn’t stand it. They knew they were supposed to be chairman. In fact, the first couple of weeks, people would come in and sit in the chairman’s seat and we would have to say to them, you know, you’re the ranking member now, and they were just beside themselves because they can’t have been wrong. <laughter> And frankly this is why they hate George W. Bush so much. The notion that we might have actually been elected under the rules in 2000, the notion that we might actually be doing the right thing, just drives the Left crazy. <Applause>
But it is a deeper problem. I had no real understanding of how decisively and deeply entrenched our opponents are from every level. From the Marxist tenure faculty member running for the U.S. Senate in Minnesota, achieving the impossible, the only man in America who could be to the left of Al Franken, and a vivid reminder of how much our University campuses are filled with people who hate the very country that provides them their salary, that provides them their tenure, and provides them their freedom. <Applause>
To a Detroit school bureaucracy which is crippling the children of Detroit, which graduates only 25% of its entering freshman on time, which is one of the highest paid and most expensive programs in the country, and which, when a successful millionaire offered to give $200 million dollars, to help create charter schools to save the children of Detroit, promptly attacked him as a racist because no white man had the right to step in and save black children, and in fact drove him out of Detroit, because he was such a threat, by insisting that teachers actually be competent, and that the purpose of schools was actually to teach. <Applause>
But we have seen the same thing right here. Any of youo who have listened to Ambassador John Bolton knows that we have a vast portion of the State Department deeply committed to defeating the policies of President Bush. We have a large proportion of the Intelligence community deeply committed to defeating the policies of President Bush. The fact that he is the elected Commander in Chief of the American people, the fact that the laws have been passed by the elected legislators of the American people, seems to be no matter to this bureaucratic elite, which arrogates to itself the right to do things that are stunningly destructive.
The National Intelligence Estimate on Iran can only be understood as a bureaucratic coup d’état, deliberately designed to undermine the policies of the United States, on behalf of some weird goal. <Applause>
There is one other declaration of independence we need and this will startle some of you. And remember I say this from a background of having been active in the Georgia Republican Party since 1960. In a fundamental way, the conservative movement has to declare itself independent from the Republican Party. <Applause>
Let me make very clear what I'm saying here. I am not saying there should be a third party – I think a third party is a dumb idea, will not get anywhere, and in the end will achieve nothing. <Applause>
I actually believe that any reasonable conservative will, in the end, find that they have an absolute requirement to support the Republican nominee for president this fall. <Applause>
And let me remind you, I say that in the context of personally believing that the McCain-Feingold Act is unconstitutional and a threat to our civil liberties. <Applause>
And I say that in the context of believing that the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill was a disaster and was correctly stopped by the American people. <Applause>
But I would rather, as a citizen, and I say this with Callista and I have two wonderful grandchildren. Maggie who is 8 and Robert who is 6. We think about their future. As a citizen, I would rather have a President McCain that we fight with 20% of the time, than a President Clinton or a President Obama that we fight with 90% of the time. <Applause>
Let me, if I might, carry this a step further so that you understand where I am coming from. I believe the conservative movement has to think about reaching out to every American of every background. I think we have to decide that in 2010, we are going to recruit and support conservative candidates in Democratic districts, because the right answer to gerrymandering is to beat them in the primary. <Applause>
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