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Remarks by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia)

Gingrich-Cuomo Cooper Union Debate Transcripts

- Introductions by Cooper Union President George Campbell and Harold Holzer

- Remarks by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia)

- Remarks by former New York Governor Mario Cuomo (D)

- Q&A with Gingrich and Cuomo moderated by NBC’s Tim Russert

Tim Russert: It is such an honor to be here. Ninety minutes. Thirty for Newt Gingrich, thirty for Mario Cuomo, and then 30 minutes of questions. When I took over Meet the Press some 15 years ago, a program of 60 minutes which is an eternity on network television, I went to see David Brinkley, who is an icon on Sunday morning, and I said David, how do you take everything you learn in the course of a week and distill it into just one hour on a Sunday morning? He said, it's next to impossible And those are the limits of network television, a medium that seems to gravitate to conflict rather than nuance, but it is an hour. Use it wisely, but always understand the limitations. Think of it this way. If Moses came down from the mountaintop with the Ten Commandments, how would television news cover that? [Laughing]. I said, tell me. He said, Moses came down from the mountaintop today with the Ten Commandments, here's same Donaldson with the three most important. [Laughing].

That will not be our dilemma tonight. Lincoln called for cold, calculating reason and that is the standard we have set. And again, to paraphrase our great president: "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here," but let's hope the 2008 presidential candidates will follow the example we set here tonight. [Applause].

And to provide as much time as possible, my introductions will be simple. The gentleman from Georgia. He served in the United States Congress for 20 years. In 1994 he led the Republican revolution based on the concept and idea of the Contract with America and became the Speaker of the House, the Honorable Newt Gingrich. [Applause]

Newt Gingrich: Thank you, Tim. It's very humbling to be here, and I want to thank everyone, Mr. President, associated with Cooper Union, who is allowing us to be in this remarkable setting and to have a chance to share the experience that Abraham Lincoln once had. It's a tremendous thing, and I hope that we can be of some use. And I hope that out of tonight, the concept that our friends in the media will pick up the concept of a Cooper Union dialogue, and that every presidential candidate will feel compelled to come here to have a serious conversation, whether individually or one or two at a time, hopefully not more than two at a time, because frankly, cattle calls of ten people offering 30-second solutions to Iraq demeans the entire process of self-government and makes an absurdity of running for office, but this could be real. [Applause].

I have to confess that when Harold Holzer said that Lincoln had been introduced by the editor of the Post, my heart rose a little bit. [Laughing]. And then I realized that I was at an event based on a book by Bella Abzug's pres secretary. [Laughing]. Now, I ask you, how likely is that? It's daring enough to be here with one of the great orators of the Democratic party and extraordinary governor, and a man who by the way, helped create the concept of workfare and helped develop a program in the state that led to America Works, probably the most successful program of transforming people who are very poor in the workforce.

So to be with Governor Cuomo is an intellectually stimulating and exciting thing, and it's an act of great citizenship on his part to come back here and to have this kind of dialogue. But Bella Abzug's press secretary? How do I go home to Atlanta and explain this? But Harold Holzer is a great scholar, and if you have not read Lincoln at Cooper Union, I commend it to you is one of the great books that explains how at a decisive moment in defining America, a politician who thought that language, ideas and reasoned thought mattered could make a decisive difference. Think about what happened on this stage. Lincoln spends three months preparing at the State Library in Springfield. He comes here with a written text of 7,300 words. He delivers it. He goes down to the papers to make sure they get it right, because back then they were rather more tolerant of people who actually knew what they were doing, looking over their shoulder while they covered it. He then goes on to Rhode Island, to Massachusetts, to New Hampshire, and gives it once each, visits his son who is in prep school in New Hampshire. Goes back home to Illinois, and that's it. When they write him a letter and say, what's your position? He says, read the speech. And he says very specifically, if I were to send you part of it, you would take it out of context and exaggerate it. Now, that took moral courage.

Tonight because of our format we're going to deal with it differently, and each of us, we've not coordinated. What we agreed in principle was we'd come here, we'd have an honest adult conversation, we'd have a great moderator, and we would all just chat. So we're not going to cover the depth that Lincoln did, and we didn't cover what topics each of us would talk about and I have a hunch Governor Cuomo may have a slightly different list than I do. But I think the principle of what Lincoln tried to do is really important, and I want to make a couple of core arguments for tonight and for the next two years. The first is actually totally based on Lincoln. I believe this country today faces more parallel challenges simultaneously than at any time since the 1850s, and I believe there is a grave danger that our political system will not be capable of solving these problems before they take our society apart in ways that are very destructive. And I'm going to talk about two or three of them tonight, but I think the larger principle is a principle of seriousness, and that's what I find so disheartening in watching the current political process.

Again, I've been active in politics since 1961, as an Army brat from Pennsylvania who arrived in Georgia. I was a volunteer on the Nixon Lodge Campaign in Columbus, Georgia, which was a very lonely process. So I've been at this business a long time, and I've raised money and I've campaigned and I've helped design national campaigns, but the process is decaying at a level that is bizarre, and it's a mutual synergistic decay between candidates, consultants and the news media. And it's fundamentally wrong for the survival of this country because the challenges we face are so great.

I believe the most important single phrase of the next 20 years is very simple, five words: Real change requires real change. So people say, well, my consultants want me to do something, and I say fine, fire them. But how can you expect me to take you seriously as a potential president if your consultants tell you what to do? Who's going to tell you in the White House what to do? So I think it's time for genuine adult conversation, and I have three specific process proposals and then I want to talk about substance.

The process proposals goes directly back to a Lincoln quote, December 1, 1862, annual message to Congress. You'll notice, by the way, both of us have independently concluded that rather than try to memorize 614 possible permutations of whatever our consultant said our focus groups had told them to do, we actually brought paper. We risked the prospect you could have political readers who could read. [Laughing]. I know it's bold, it's out on the edge, but I commend you, if you go to my website, Newt.org, I commend to you that 1996, 2000 and 2004 presidential debate agreements which run 53 pages a piece. They are bizarre examples of lunacy. No serious adult should agree to them. They're childish. You don't elect a president to memorize, you elect a president to have wisdom, to have serious thought, to reflect. Lincoln spent three months creating the speech at Cooper Union. [Applause].

So I want to base what I want to say about process on Lincoln's annual message to Congress on December 1, 1862, a terrible period, a period 50 times or 100 times worse than what we're going through in Baghdad, a period where the Union had lost battle after battle, where thousands had been killed, where the country was in danger of giving up and accepting the end of the United States. And Lincoln says the following, quote, "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."

Now let me apply that to the presidential campaign process, which in its current form is an absurdity. It's grossly ironic. We live in an age of Web casts, which we're doing tonight, we live in an age of television, 24-hour radio, dramatic ability to reach the country immediately, and the campaigns instead of getting shorter, are getting longer. And there's a practical reason. They're consultant, full-employment processes. [Applause].

The first delegates are filed at the end of November and chosen in January and February. There's no reason you have to be out doing all this junk, except candidates turn to consultants who say, hire me now, to hire me now you have to raise money, to raise money you have to hire a finance person, now you have to pay both me and the finance person, so you better spend all your time going out raising money, which is a totally banal process, the end of which means you have candidates who are totally exhausted, have no thoughts but know an awful lot of rich people well, all of in the name of populous.

So what are the three process changes? First, I really do believe a Cooper Union dialogue in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln would be enormously powerful. Second, I urge, and I hope the government will join me in urging, that the parties in the key primary states early on will come together to have bipartisan events. Nothing will take more poison out of the system than requiring the candidates to be in the same room with partisans from both sides, because you cannot biologically be as vicious and as nasty as the current system if you're face to face, and if you can be you're pathological and we should disqualify you for one. [Applause].

And third, I propose that we challenge every candidate in both parties to make a commitment before the nominating process begins, that if they become the nominee, they will agree from Labor Day to the election to nine, 90-minute dialogues, one a week for nine weeks on a place like this, one of them probably should be here, with a timekeeper and two adults having a conversation for 90 minutes in your living room and on the Web and with conversation afterwards that people can actually see, these are the two potential leaders who might get us out of the mess we're in, which one do I think has the maturity, the knowledge and the values I want to have there. And if we did that, those nine conversations would change the entire tenure. [Applause].

Now, because my time is limited, I want to focus on only three large ideas. We can get into many more, and I have a hunch that Governor Cuomo will pick different ones and by the time Tim is done, we'll be in lots of ideas, but let me just start with three that I want to focus on and emphasize. I'm going to talk first about the notion that we actually are in two different worlds, a world of stunningly rapid evolution in the private sector and a world of stunning decay in bureaucracy. I want to talk second about the great challenge we face with security, and I want to talk third about healthcare, which is the largest single sector of our economy and is an issue which should be at the very center of our campaign. There are many other topics I'd like to talk about, and if at some point in the distant future it's an appropriate thing for me to come back, I will be glad to talk about other topics, but for tonight, I want to talk about these three.

I think the most fascinating thing that I've learned – I served on the Defense Policy Board, the Transformation Advisory Group of the State Department, I do work with the intelligence community and the White House, and I try to understand national security, and then I spend about 40 percent of my time at the Center for Health Transformation trying to understand the health system, and what's fascinating is all of the parallel problems that are evolving. We have in the private sector a stunning rate of evolution. We will have in the next 25 years four to seven times as much new science as we had in the last 25 years, utterly explosive in how much new knowledge we have. We're working on a project at the Center for Health Transformation on the possibility of developing a vaccine for Alzheimer's. We're working on a project to have all 50 states compete to see which state becomes the first state in which every person survives cancer. We see things happening out there that are amazing. We believe that in energy, it's conceivable that we could get to a hydrogen economy, return petroleum to being a petrochemical feedstock, and wave good-bye to Venezuela, Iraq, Iran and Russia. [Applause].

In the private sector, we've had a resolution: Drucker, Deming, Duran, Six Sigma, lean manufacturing, Toyota production system. The productivity of the private sector has become extraordinary. It has had momentary breakthroughs. As I said, Governor Cuomo's efforts in developing an opportunity which led to the rise of America Works, which is an incentive-led, private sector operation that is stunning. What Mayor Giuliani did, with applying metrics, developing Compstat for computer statistics, and the impact between Mayor Giuliani and Mayor Bloomberg, this is a different city. And it's a different city not for partisan reasons, it's a different city because systematic, methodical management proved that in New York you could make government work if you were prepared to change things. But as Bill Bratton says in his book, Turnaround when he was the Commissioner: In the first year three out of every four New York City precinct captains was retired or replaced because they couldn’t change at the rate of the new system. Not that they were bad people, but that they were used to another style, another pattern.

The result in New York is astonishing. Those of you who live here know this, but the country doesn't know it. New York today has 75 percent less crime than in 1993. It is the safest large city in the United States. It is four times safer than Houston. And we know that it's a systems approach because Chief Bratton took that very model, went to Los Angeles, Los Angeles is today the second safest city in the United States. Now, if Los Angeles is safer than San Diego, it is a theoretically impossible position. No sociologist would have argued that a city as dynamic and as mixed in population as L.A. was going to be safer than San Diego. But it is, because the fact that that particular breakthrough worked and has changed lives. The Mayor is trying to bring the same pattern to the school system and is having some significant success despite enormous resistance.

But those aren't studied. Those aren't being applied. Nobody's come in here and said, how can I apply this to the federal government, how can I apply it? And let me give you the tale of two cities. I spent Monday in New Orleans, a city which I truly love. I spent three years in New Orleans. In fact, my daughter Jackie Cushman, who's here and who helped put together the Webcast, was born in New Orleans. I've been in New Orleans a number of times since Katrina. It's a tragedy, and it is largely a tragedy of government. The federal government failed, the state government failed, the city government failed, and citizenship failed in the Ninth Ward where people had not been educated, had not acquired the work ethic, had not gotten to be responsible and were incapable of getting out of the way of a hurricane.

Now, where have the hearings been? Where's the outrage? Where's the sense of fundamental change? It doesn't exist, and we are as vulnerable tonight to a disaster of that kind as we were in September of 2005, and frankly, if you look at what we've done in New Orleans, it is a disgrace to the country what has been left undone. [Applause].

The same thing's true in Baghdad. There was an article on Monday by Fareed Zakaria in which he outlines out of the great heroes of the Iraq effort, Paul Brinkley, who has been trying to reorganize the economy of a series of very large factories, and he needs $100 million to put some 40,000 to 100,000 Iraqis back to work. $100 million is 12 hours of the cost of the current war. We allocated $18 billion to help, and the system is so broken – and I use this word deliberately – broken that we cannot get a decision. And yet, where are the hearings? I'm not talking about the games being played in Congress back and forth between I hate Bush, let's vote not, I have to defend Bush, let's vote yes. That stuff is all undermining the historic reality of where we are. The machine doesn't work, and nobody's having hearings, whether it's in New Orleans or it's in Baghdad.

Let me ask you a simple question to give you a sense of these two worlds. How many of you have ever gone online to follow a package on UPS or Fed Ex, raise your hand? Two-thirds of the audience. This is not a theory, right? You can do this. I just want to make sure I'm not out of touch with reality. [Laughing]. Now, let me pose a simple mind thought, not as a serious proposal, but as just a way of thinking. We have somewhere between 11 and 13 million illegal immigrants nit he United States, plus or minus. The current government clearly can't find any of them. [Laughing] I think we should just mail them all a package. [Applause]. UPS and Fed Ex would find them, you'd know where they were. The whole issue of border security, illegal immigration, citizenship, guest workers is vastly more important – and I don't mean to trivialize it, but I mean to make an example. Why is it we don't have a program where you could swipe a card and know whether or not the person who applied for a job was legal? And by the way, I'm absolutely opposed to federal government trying to develop it. I think it should be outsourced to Visa, Master Card or American Express, because they know how to run programs like that against fraud.

To give you an example of how bad it is, we have been told in effect with Visas that we have two choices. We can have security and make it really painful to come to America, or we can have efficient processing of visitors and business people and students, but then we won't have security. Only bureaucracy would accept that choice. The rest of America would say, wait a second, I want it to be efficient, easy, friendly, accurate, secure, simultaneously, and if you don't do that I won't pay you. That's what we expect everywhere in the private sector. If we had Sarbanes-Oxley for the public sector, half the bureaucracies couldn’t sign any reports because they'd go to jail. [Laughing]. Just take the difference in attitude psychologically. [Applause].

My only point is rethinking and restructuring the great bureaucracies we've inherited, creating a 21st century system of intelligent effective, agile government – I am pro-government; I'm not anti-government. I come out of a background – I would have been a Federalist; I want a government strong enough to have hard currency, I want a government strong enough to control the borders, I want a government which makes sure that if I go to McDonald's anywhere in America, the water is drinkable. These are not small things, but I want the government to work. We've been caught in a false contest between those who say, I'm against government so I don't have to think about it, even when I'm in charge and those who are for government who say, I'm for government and I refuse to think about it while I'm in charge. [Laughing].

The second point I want to make is security, and I say this in part a deeply and directly as I can. My dad was a career solider. He spent 27 years in the U.S. Army serving this country in the infantry. We are 1.8 miles from the World Trade Center. If on September 11, instead of being two civilian airliners, it had been one nuclear weapon, virtually every building from here to there would have been destroyed. We just don't take this seriously. We would prefer to argue about American Idol or to watch Survivor, or to talk about David Giffen or do almost anything rather than take this seriously. The North Koreans said last summer, we're going to fire missiles. We said to the North Koreans, it is unacceptable to fire missiles. So they picked our Fourth of July to fire seven missiles, to say, we have such total contempt for you, and then it turned out we accepted it.

Then they said, we're going to test a nuclear weapon. Now, that nuclear weapon wouldn’t have taken out all the buildings from here to there; that nuclear weapon was about a 1.6 kiloton yield. It would only have taken out about 40 blocks. They set off the nuclear weapon after we said it was unacceptable, so now we've accepted it. The Iranians have told the United Nations they're going to build nuclear weapons and they're not going to make an agreement and they're not going to be inspected. They don't care what the sanctions are. That's as recently as last week. The Iranians three days ago fired a missile as the next step towards putting a satellite in space, and the result is we announced yesterday we're going to deal with the Iranians. In an earlier and simpler world, this was called appeasement, recognizing that you don't have the nerve to try to deal with their government to make them stop; you start trying to find ways to co-op them. And one morning we've run a real risk of losing two or three cities to nuclear or biological attack.

We're not having a discussion about this. When have we seen any serious hearings on the danger of a North Korean nuclear weapon? When have we seen the Department of Homeland Security test itself against a bomb going off in Manhattan or Seattle or San Francisco or Atlanta? Because they know the system would collapse, much worse than Katrina. And so rather than deal with that, our bureaucracies in Washington would rather fail than change, because change is painful and failure is business as usual. And so they just shrug it off. And the news media shrugs it off. How many specials have you seen on the implications of North Korean bomb? But we spent hours last week on a left-wing billionaire being unhappy because his former friends didn't do what he what they would do when he bribed them, and then they didn't stay bribed so now it's really terrible because he's really unhappy because they lied to him because he thought surely they would actually do what he wanted when he bribed them. [Applause]. The news media loved that topic. It was simple, it avoided ideas, it was negative and it was gossip. What more could you ask for? But it didn't contribute one inch to saving this country, and in fact it made it worse.

Now, tonight some very dear friends of ours, Edra and Kevin Matthews, are having a baby named Dean. Kevin Matthews was a Special Forces soldier in Afghanistan. I have to tell you, I worry about Dean's future. Right in this city, we have a niece, Mike and Holly Blair, and they have a brand new son, Dylan Jessie, just a few weeks old, and I worry very much about Dylan Jessie's future. My daughter, who's here, has two children, Maggie, seven, she's of course, as says her grandfather, a princess, and Robert's five. He is sort of a prince, but pretty aggressive energetic. I worry very much because I think they are in greater danger than I ever was in the Cold War. And I think that ought to be the beginning of our security discussion.

The last thing I want to talk about very briefly is health care, and I simply want to tell you a couple of very quick stories, courtesy of Mike Leavitt. Mike Leavitt is the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and when he was Governor of Utah and got the call from President Bush and was told he was going to come to Washington to be the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, he called his insurance company and he said, I have sleep apnea and I've been using a machine for the last six years to take care of my ability to sleep at night,. It's pretty well worn out. I need to buy a new machine, but I'd like to buy two of them because I'm going to travel a lot in my new job and I'd like one to stay in my suitcase. And the clerk said promptly, well, we don't actually sell you the machine for the first three months; you have to rent it to prove you'll use it. He said, wait a second, I just told you I've been using one for six years. I'm not renting one. They said, okay, but we're not selling you two. We'll sell you one, and it cost $950. Your co-pay is 20 percent, you'll pay $190. You have to go buy the second one yourself. So Leavitt, who's a pretty smart guy, goes on-line, finds exactly the same company with exactly the some machine for $375. He calls back, he said, great news. We can buy two of these machines for $750. My co-pay is $150, you save money, I save money. He said nope, can't do it. It's $950, you pay $190 and you buy the second one yourself.

The next thing Leavitt did is send a letter to the CEO of the company saying, I would like you to understand why I have dropped your insurance and go into a health saving account, because this is a level of stupidity I don't want to pay for. That's the story he told me when he first became Secretary of Health and Human Services. I was with him two weeks ago in Georgia with the Government of Purdue, and Leavitt was announcing a project of values-based competition and requiring the right to now price and quality and giving people knowledge about what's going on. He told them this new story. He and his wife just turned 60, and he decided as a precautionary step that he would get a colonoscopy and she would get a colonoscopy. So he decided he would try to do what citizens should do, and he began to call around for an episode of care. And he found out in a particular Washington hospital that if you went in with Doctor A, you could get a colonoscopy for $6,700, but if you went into the same hospital to the same room with the same machinery, you could get a colonoscopy for $5,700. Then he thought, I'm from Utah, and Lindbergh and Dartmouth has said that the least expensive high-class hospital in American is Intermountain Health, so I'll call there. So he calls Salt Lake City. He said, oh, I understand your price is $3,700.

So Leavitt and his wife can fly home to see the grandchildren, have the procedure, and save $2,000 each. Now, let me go a step further. Congressman Paul Ryan, who's one of the brightest younger members of the House, announced in Milwaukee at a hearing last year that for one particular procedure in Milwaukee inside the metropolitan area the difference in price was from $46,000 to $123,000 for thee same procedure, almost three times as much. There's a chart that's produced in the Journal of American Medical Association that the cost of Medicare, what you're paying for as taxpayers, all this talk about the future crisis of Medicare, how much it costs baby boomers, the chart shows if you're at the top of the chart you have high quality, if you're over on the right you're very expensive, if you're over on the left you're very inexpensive, and here's what jumps out at you when you see these 50 dots, one for every state. The most expensive Medicare program in America was Louisiana, over $8,000 per person – not per sick person, per person. And the worst outcomes in America were Louisiana. The five best outcomes cost less than $5,000 per person, were built around Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota, the upper Midwest. So in effect what you're being told as citizens is in order to fix this system, you should pay 60 percent more to kill senior citizens earlier, because we're too stupid to find a way to get to a values and price-based model where we surface inefficiencies and we surface incompetence and we allow people to have the best care at the lowest cost.

I helped found the Center for Health Transformation because I believe we can get to 100 percent insurance coverage, a 300 million payer system, much better preventive care with much less cost and produce a system that probably 20 years from now will cost 40 percent less than current projections, but it will be real change, and to get there will require real change. And the question is whether or not we're prepared to have a discussion about that scale of change.