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

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: Thank you, Governor. Speaker Gingrich, let me ask you about Iraq. You talked about real change means real change. What real change would you advise President Bush to bring to his Iraq policy tonight?

Newt Gingrich: Well, I testified before the Foreign Relations Committee about three weeks ago and said that I thought the surge in its current form had about one chance in five of succeeding, even as good as General Petrais is as a counter insurgency officer and a general of the OD analysts. I then listed 18 changes, which I won't go into here but I would recommend any of you who are really interested to go to Newt.org and they're all there.

But let me give you an example of why we're in such a difficult problem in terms of this Administration. The number one change this President should make in Iraq is to create a Deputy Chief of Staff for Iraq reporting directly to the President, who is a three or four-star officer, preferably four star and who gets up every morning, and immediately after the President's intelligence brief, walks in and says, the following nine things aren't working. Because you can't – I'm very deeply worried, and I agree that Afghanistan is presently going to be as troubling as Iraq. And we haven't come – it's ironic to be here where Lincoln spoke and to go back and study the Civil War and to realize how painful and how failure ridden the Civil War was and how difficult Lincoln's period was for Lincoln, and then to look at Iraq and Afghanistan.

I just want to start with this one item, because an Administration which – the term Commander in Chief was written for George Washington in a convention, a constitutional convention he presided over after he had led an Army in the field for eight years. And when they said Commander in Chief, they meant a serious person who issued orders, enforced his will, and replaced people who failed. The current system is broken, and whether you stay in Iraq or you stay in Afghanistan or you leave both places, if we don't fix this system we are going to continue to drift towards catastrophe. And you're never going to fix this system unless you have a very tough implementer at the very top who can look out over the entire Executive Branch and who can represent the direct instructions of the President. So that's the very first think I'd do.

The second thing we've got to do – and I suspect Governor Cuomo and I will deeply disagree on this – how can you have Iran listed as the largest funder of terrorism in the world by the State Department, have the intelligence director yesterday say in public in front of a congressional committee that the Iranians are actively killing Americans, and then say, but what we really need to do is get in a meeting with Iran to talk about how to run Iraq. The Iranians have a clear model of how to run Iraq, drive us out of there. The Iranians are directly competing with us. [Applause].

All I'm saying is there's something in my mind stunningly challenged. Also one last thing: Members of Congress who deeply disagree with this and who are prepared to accept the consequences of their vote have a simple definitive vote: cut off the money. If you cut off the money, there is no constitutional debate. The President cannot spend it, it doesn't go to the Supreme Court, there's no money. It's built in there. But this idea that they don't have the courage to cut off the money, they're not willing to support the current strategy, so what they're going to do is nickel and dime it to death is I think Stunningly bad for this country. I think we're far better off to say if the Democrats in Congress are prepared to take responsibility and prepared to say to the country, we think defeat is better than saying – which is an honorable position, fine. Then say, we're not going to fund the money, we're not going to move the appropriations bills, have the crisis.

Tim Russert: Governor, why won't the United States unite behind a policy of stopping the funding for the War?

Mario Cuomo: I think it wouldn’t work. I think obviously it wouldn't work. You are now running the biggest deficit in American history. What's to stop the President from simply running a continuing deficit to pay for the War? See, it's a trap for the Democrats. What you're saying is get up there and say you're going to cut off the money – incidentally, number one, depending on if you really did cut off the money, it would kill American soldiers, that's one very good reason for the Democrats not to do it, because you wouldn’t have any money to protect them, you wouldn’t have any money to use for them. But it's not real. The President wouldn’t stop sending soldiers. He'd do what the government is doing now, running a damn deficit, making it bigger and bigger and bigger. You don't need cash to run this government. You don't have to balance a budget like a state.

So that's just political talk. What you should – now, with Iran, there is some good news, too. They have found oil in the Sunni area. That's a very good thing, because the basic problem is the Sunni and the Shiites and the Kurds all hate one another for different reasons, and if there's any hope for bringing peace, you have to make them economically independent of one another, and you can do that if the Sunnis have oil. Two, they have made a deal on oil, it appears, or they're very close to apportioning equitably the resources for oil Three, the President has decided to talk to Iran and to talk to Syria, along with other people. I don't see anything wrong with that. The same people, Mr. Speaker, say that the Iranians are doing this, the Iranians – are the ones who said there were weapons of mass destruction, let's have a war, so why do you believe them? [Applause]

I think the intelligent thing is not to trust the Iranians, of course. They're threatening to blow up Israel, for God's sake. You can't. You have to be on guard. You have to prepare. You have to keep your carriers in that area, and we're doing that. You have to shake them up a little bit, and I think we've done that, enough so so that they've agreed to sit down and talk. You can't get hurt talking. You can get hurt if you get so soft that they get stronger. The key is allowing these people to live together in peace.

One of the provocations has been that when we came in, we misjudged entirely. We were told by people that they would throw roses at the feet of the solders. Once they took down Saddam, they were hated because then they became occupiers, and that makes us a provocation. If you take us away, you remove one of the provocations. If you replaced us by Arab soldiers and others from the area who can't come in as long as we're there but who might come in if we're not there and you have a deal on oil, then maybe you have a chance to make some peace, and that is the path you should pursue. Will we go to war if we have to go to war? We have gone to war when we didn't have to go to war, so yeah, we'll be ready to fight the Iranians if we have to. Would we drop bombs on their head? To do what? What would it get you? First of all, you can't get at all the nuclear positions they have.

The best idea is to avoid war if you can, and I don't see anything that the President is now doing that makes us more vulnerable than he would be if he just stopped talking to the Iranians. I don't think that's going to help us at all. We should talk to them, try to get some help from them. If they're not helpful, if they're belligerent, we can take care of them then.

Tim Russert: Should we say to the Iranians, you will not be able to develop a nuclear bomb, period?

Mario Cuomo: Absolutely, absolutely. Now, that's a ridiculous position to some people because we invented it, and they know we invented it. And we invented it saying we would control it, and they know we didn't control it. And they know we give it to our friends, so they know all of this. It's not as easy as we make it out to be. Our case is not a logical one. It is an imperialist strong one which we must take. There's no alternative. But it's not an easy sale, and so we have to say to them what we say to others who we think are dangerous: Chavez is never going to get a nuclear weapon. We can stop him and he's trying to get one, but as long as he talks crazy about the United States, you have to try to stop them. So yes, our position must be, you cannot have a nuclear bomb.

Incidentally, if we did nuclear energy big time, that in a way would allow us to deal with all of these nuclear people on a pacific basis. Instead of talking about nuclear energy destroying, we'd be talking about nuclear energy substituting for oil, not that Iran would be happy about that, but it's something we could talk to them about.

Tim Russert: Speaker, you talked about the North Koreans testing on the Fourth of July, talked about the Iranians in effect ignoring us, and you said quote, "We have to make them stop." How do you make them stop?

Newt Gingrich: I think this is a place of fundamental disagreement about the nature of reality at two levels. First of all, if a threat is a genuine threat, then I think you have to respond to it as a real threat, as opposed to saying, yes, that's a real – Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941 in September, after the U.S. submarine had sunk a German U-boat while we were at peace, did a nationwide radio broadcast in which he said, "If you're standing next to a rattlesnake, you do not have to wait until it bites you to decide that it's dangerous." And I want to say up front, this is amoral judgment. Governor Cuomo's right. I am asserting unequivocally that the Democratic People of the United States who have possessed nuclear weapons since 1945 and have as a result protected all of Western Europe, protected Japan, protected South Korea and enabled the world to be a much better place, are not morally the equivalent of Kim Jong Il. [Applause]

But you need to understand, in terms of legal and international terms what a decisive difference in the world that makes. So I don't feel any problem saying to Kim John Il, you're right, we have them; you don't. We're keeping them and you're not getting them. Now if you say that, the Governor, which I love and which I know Harold and others in the University love, is citing books, and I actually belong to that relatively rare breed of politicians who both think books are useful and you should read them and on occasion understand them. There are three books I cite to all of you, two by Peter Schweitzer, one called Victory, and the other called Reagan's War, and one which just came out by John O'Sullivan on The President, The Pope and the Prime Minister.

Ronald Reagan understood that his goal was to eliminate the Soviet Empire, not to have détente, not to negotiate, to eliminate. And he set out to do that. In Poland, in alliance with the Catholic Church, working with the trade unions, bringing to bear a wide range of economic and other pressures, they created a momentum which between 1981 and 1991 eliminated the largest geographic empire in the world.

So I'd start with two simple observations. The United States right now should have a policy of assisting and paying every smuggler we can find who is willing to take good into North Korea with the deliberate goal of undermining and shattering the totalitarian nature of that society and creating an alternative mind. [Applause]

The notion that we're going to give food to the North Korean dictatorship to dole out through its military and Secret Police on behalf of a people who have literally shrunk in height. North Koreans have lost three inches of height from the last generation through malnutrition by a vicious, evil regime we are now subsidizing. That is just a stupid policy. Second, the case of Iran, it's very simple. They import 60 percent of their gasoline. They produce lots of oil. They have one refinery. That one refinery produces 40 percent of the gasoline. A clever, creative country which did not insist on putting its secrets on page one of the New York Times would in fact be able to suddenly have industrial sabotage since many of the people who operate in the oil refinery are Arabs who don't speak Farsi, would be able to have industrial sabotage with the only refinery and assigning a Navy Admiral to be head of Central Command as Admiral Fallon is, creates the – we're not overextended in the Navy. This notion that the United States can't cope with Iran is nonsense. I don't want to invade Iran. I don't want to occupy Iraq. I want to use military force decisively, immediately – and the Governor's right – and as indirectly as possible. You could have an Iranian economy which would disintegrate in a matter of weeks if they had no gasoline. This is a fairly commonly needed tool of every society currently existing on the planet.

Tim Russert: Let me turn to a domestic issue. Governor Cuomo, you mentioned entitlements. Social Security. We have 40 million people on Social Security and in the next 15 years it's going to double to 80 million. When Franklin Roosevelt started Social Security there were 35 workers for every retiree; soon to be two workers per retiree. Roosevelt was genius, he set the age of eligibility at 65 because life expectancy was 62. You were on the program for a month or two and that was about it. [Laughing]

We now have life expectancy, 78, 79, 80. Does the Democratic party have the will to say to the American people, we are doubling the number of people on this system, we are having much fewer workers, and people are living longer, we have to make some fundamental changes in the way the system is set up?

Mario Cuomo: I think the answer has to be yes, but let me say first, I want to be absolutely clear on Iran. I agree that there is no dubious quality to our decision to stop Iran from having an Atom Bomb or nuclear weapon, so that we have to make very clear.

Now, with respect to Social Security, God bless him, Pat Moynihan, if we had him around, it would be easier to answer this question because he understood this subject I think better than anybody. It's not an immediate problem. That's no reason to duck it, but it's 2042 before it becomes a problem, and by 2042 if things remain the same in terms of the numbers, then you'd have only 74 or so percent of the benefits that you have to pay. So we have a little time to work this out.

What has to be done? Well, what has to be done now, the Social Security system, the way it operates is very, very – only a government could get away with it. What they do is the federal government is using the money and the fund and leaves behind a piece of paper that says, when you need it, we'll pay you. So it's another game that's basically working a deficit, and it's a con game in a way, because the American people don't understand this. They think the money is in the fund. It is not in the fund. It's there in a lot of paper, which you have to make good.

Well, how do you fill up that fund? Well, there are a couple of ways. There's a private sector way that Ryan-Sununu tried a way back that the Speaker is very familiar with, but President Clinton had the best way of all. President Clinton left us with a $5.4 trillion surplus, and part of that money, I think John Kasich had something to do with this. John Kasich, and so that meant the Speaker as well – John Kasich and Clinton were talking about taking some of that money and putting it into the Social Security fund. You've got a surplus? Terrific. Let's put it into the fund. One hopes that once we get out of Iraq with the hundreds of billions of dollars we're spending there, once we avoid some of the other huge payments we're making now that no civilized country should put itself in the position of having to do, that we may be able to work toward a surplus, and that surplus should go in part at least into the Social Security fund between now and 2042.

Another think you have to do is make your workforce more productive. Our workforce now has only one out of four people high skilled. That's a travesty. This is a high-skilled economy. A couple of hundred years ago, 170 years ago we said you need an 8th grade education because that's what the economy needed. What we should have done a long time ago is to say, now you need a college education, and we're going to make that free, public education the way we made 8th grade. We haven't done that. We have to make ourselves more productive so that we can keep more of our money in this country. You keep more of your money in this country, you do more business here, we tax that, it gives you more money, you put some of it into the Social Security fund.

Now, the Speaker had, and Ryan-Sununu had, and Ferraro and Reagan had the same thing. They thought up a way that you can have a private investment account and take that money out of the Social Security tax, put it into the private account and invest it in the market. Well, if you read the papers this morning, you know what's wrong with investing it in the market. And I think in the end that's why that idea has never gone anywhere. They called it a free lunch idea and they gave all kinds of astonishing numbers in analyzing it. They said for example, to do this Ryan-Sununu bill, you would have to give 8.5 trillion dollars into the fund to make up for the money you took out of the fund to invest. The answer from Ryan-Sununu was, oh, no – and this is a form of the supply-side box that Reagan got himself into – they're saying, oh, no, if you set up the private funds, we're going to make so much money in the economy as a result of that that we'll get everything back. That's the magic of supply-side. I have a great name for that: economic voodoo.

Tim Russert: Mr. Speaker, does the political system have the will and ability to fix Social Security, and should we look at increasing retirement age, means testing, reducing or fixing the cost of the increase? How do you get at it?

Newt Gingrich: The political system doesn't have the will to do anything. [Applause]. And again, the Governor probably would agree with this, two things can happen. You can have terrific leadership, in which case will becomes a lot easier, or you can have such pressure from the grass roots that will becomes easier, but the political system itself, it's a non-concept. People don't get up in Congress every morning and think, gosh, what really daring, dangerous and possibly career ending thing could I do today? [Laughing]. They just don't quite get there. It's a very tiny number. Those of us who do it are referred to as suicidal, like guys in your profession.

But let me start, because this is one of the fascinating areas where I think we could have frankly almost an evening of fundamental difference in our view of the world. The stock market, it is true, went down yesterday. This was probably an enormous shock to people who believe that things that go up have to always go up. And this is one of the great problems of dealing frankly with the left on the issue of free markets, because free markets have the stability of bicycles. If you're not moving they fall over. And so you're always measuring in motion.

But notice, Governor Cuomo and many people worry about inequality. What's one of the major factors of inequality? It's that the wealthy invest. What would a program like Ryan-Sununu do? It would mean that every single American, the poorest American, the poorest person in New York, when they went to work at 14, 15, 16, 17 at a part-time job, instead of transferring the money to politicians through a Social Security tax, would transfer the money to a personal account they own, which would be invested. What happens to investments historically in America? They aggregate over 100 years' time at better than 7 percent compounded annually. I mentioned earlier my two grandchildren, Maggie and Robert. If Maggie and Robert stay in the current system and we do not fix it, they will end up with working longer while paying high taxes to get fewer benefits.

I just want you to think through this model. Only government could offer you a deal like this. You got to work longer while paying high taxes for smaller benefit. That is the formula. That's what you'd show in the charts. At a restaurant I did this one time from Las Vegas at like 5:00 in the morning, and he's got this chart and I'm standing there trying to look through the camera, and he's going, come on, Newt, why don't you be honest here? You know that Part 7? [Laughing].

So Washington will give you a chart that is exactly right if you accept the model. Now, there are two key things to this that are very controversial. The first is you either believe in the power of compound interest over time – and again, we're not talking about running out and investing wildly in venture capital or going off and loaning your brother-in-law money to start his new company – but if you take high-grade stocks and high-grade bonds, they have consistently returned better and would consistently return better.

There's a second difference in this model. You can't get there in five years scoring. So when the President was off on this complex, difficult, the kind of speech that even Reagan could not have delivered effectively, and he's trying to explain all this stuff, two things were happening. First of all, you talk about we have this problem that will be out 2042. Well, my personal attitude about, can you imagine getting a phone call from a company that says, your roof will start leaking in 2042? Would you like to sign the contract tomorrow, or should we visit you next week? You're going, are you nuts? What are you talking to me about?

But there's a second part to it. They had this five-year scoring fetish. It made no sense at all. So I would ask audiences a radical, bold question I'll try out on all of you. Have you ever heard of a 30-year mortgage? It's bold, it's daring, it's out on the cutting edge. Now, if you have a 30-year financing mechanism, you can make a transition, pay everybody who's currently on Social Security, make it possible for everybody under 40 to have a choice; not a requirement, but a choice, and over time as they saw the build-up, the first people, the first pioneers would suddenly have a lot better income future and would have a lot bigger retirement future, and then you'd say to them, by the way, we're not going to force you to retire.

Notice the difference. Not a compulsory age increase. We're not going to force them to retire, and the truth is, knowledge workers – and the three of us are in this group – people who like to work with their heads and have managed to avoid getting too tired working with their bodies, end up loving to work. I studied under Edwards Deming at 90, I asked for advice from Peter Drucker at 89. I suspect you go up to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you'll see artists. I think Picasso was painting at 93. Under the current model we'd say to them, are you nuts? You're 65, quit painting, go home, become old. [Laughing].

Tim Russert: Before we go, I want to ask a political question. I'm not asking you for an endorsement, but if you could envision the race in 2008, which Democrat, which Republican do you think would make the most interesting and worthwhile campaign and debate?

Mario Cuomo: Campaign and debate, but not President. [Applause].

Tim Russert: You anticipated my follow-up, very good. Let's try them both.

Mario Cuomo: I was going to say I wouldn't try either. I really don't know. There's a reason I really don't know, because I don't know who all the candidates are going to be. [Moan].

Do you want to restate the question?

Tim Russert: Let me try Newt. Which candidates would be most interesting to –

Mario Cuomo: Ask me about the Republicans, and I'll give you an answer.

Tim Russert: All right, all right.

Mario Cuomo: I think Newt would make a terrific candidate. [Applause]. I think there is not a whole lot of people in the Republican party I can think of who are better equipped than he is. We all know Rudy, he's been our mayor, we're very proud of him, et cetera, et cetera, and he's a New Yorker and you'd have to be proud if he became a candidate; certainly if he became a winner. McCain appears to be sliding, and I'm not surprised because he's not the McCain of four years. He's a different kind of person. He's made a lot of deals, et cetera, et cetera.

And beyond that, Romney, I don't see anything spectacular about him either. I mean, if you look at Newt's credentials, why couldn’t he be the candidate on that side? The conservatives, his position on religion and God and the Creator, et cetera, et cetera, they're very comfortable with that. His ability to debate is obvious, his ability to speak, to think clear.

Tim Russert: Take me to the Democrats.

Mario Cuomo: Well, you want great debaters. I'm disappointed with the Democrats because they are saying now they want to do fewer debates, and we spoke about this earlier. They're not eager to debate? Why? Because they operate – and I guess the Republicans – I can't speak for the Republicans. I will speak for the Democrats. A lot of them operate on the theory, this is the way it works. Mario, you have a tendency to put it all out there, like this thing about tax cuts, okay? That's wrong, because you can't win that way and if you don't win then you can't do the good things. So don't say anything about that issue until you win, and then when you win, you go to that issue.

That's ridiculous, because if you don't say anything about it before you win, you can't do it after you win. [Applause]. So I think they don't want a debate because they don't want to be in a position to answer some of the hard questions, like the questions you would ask them about Social Security and everything else. And I regret that.

So I don't think any of them – until one steps forward and says, I'll do what Gingrich said, I'll do what Cuomo said, I'll do all the debating you want to do and I'll do it – until somebody like that steps forward, I'm not going to be able to say, that's the kind of person I would see. [Applause.]

Tim Russert: Mr. Speaker, before you leave, could you assess the candidates and the race?

Newt Gingrich: Well, let me start by saying that if anyone in the audience was interested – two things about New York – if you have not read Senator Schumer's new book, I recommend it very highly. It is a smart, tough, painful book for Republicans to read, it is vivid about what they did in 2006 and why, I think it's absolutely worth reading and I think it's a serious book that frankly made me think a lot more fundamentally about how to try to be Chuck in the future because he's really a dangerous guy. [Laughing].

But seriously –

Tim Russert: And it's critical to the Democrats.

Newt Gingrich: It's critical to the Democrats. Seriously, it's well worth your reading and I think is the most insightful explanation of how we wrote the Contract for America, very interesting book.

Second New York observation. If you're taking the polls as of this morning in the Washington Post – just to make that example. This will be the first time – you'll love this – this will be the first time since 1944 that both parties will nominate a New Yorker. Now, it's true that one of the New Yorkers is kind of a Chicago-born, Arkansas, loves the Yankees, but in all fairness, Senator Clinton has twice earned the right and done so by very impressive ____. [Applause]. So if you were asking me tonight the most likely campaign next year, you have to say in all honesty, it's going to be two New Yorkers, one of whom sounds like a New Yorker. [Laughing]. And part of the question Rudy's got to deal with is can you really sound that much like a New Yorker all the way through Iowa and New Hampshire and get the nomination?

One other thing, I actually literally ran into Rudy this afternoon walking on the street, and he asked for my autograph, which I thought was quite flattering. [Laughing]. And he asked me to pay his respects to the Governor, but he said he was very interested in what we were doing here tonight. He would come to Cooper Union and he would stipulate that he would accept the challenge of nine 90-minute dialogues after Labor Day next year. [Applause].

Tim Russert: That's the challenge. And that is a question I'm going to ask each and every presidential candidate, I can assure you. You know, it's remarkable this evening, this course level of civility. I've told the Governor, I've told the Speaker, back in 1963 before the tragic day in Dallas November 22, Barry Goldwater went to see President Kennedy, and he said, in all likelihood, Mr. President, I'm going to be the Republican nominee in 1964 and you'll be running for re-election. Why don't we travel around the country on the same airplane and stop city by city, debate each other vigorously, robust, ideological philosophical political discussions, but in the end shake hands and go back on that train together so people understand the uniqueness of our system. It never happened because of the tragic death of President Kennedy.

That was where we were in 1963, as opposed to some of the poison we now have to deal and cope with as we approach 2008, but not tonight.