Universal Change

Newt Gingrich inspires reform on a broad scale

By Yiren Lu

When former House Speaker Newt Gingrich addressed the IOP on October 8, his audience was suspended in uncertainty. Would he sacrifice his high-paying consulting practice for a return to public service? Would he follow through with a much-anticipated presidential campaign? What exactly did he mean by the title of his address, “A Tri-Partisan Majority for Real Change”?

He never did answer questions one and two. A couple of students raised partisan issues during Q&A, asking how the Republican Party could reestablish itself, to which Gingrich gave appropriately perfunctory responses about the importance of action and involvement. Of course, he would have pleased many in the audience had he said the best way the GOP could rebound was to nominate him for president in 2012. Instead, we got a bunch of potshots at Lou Dobbs and MSNBC, which, honestly, is beating a dead horse.

But counterfactuals and bad jokes aside, it was an excellent event. Blessed with a natural, unaffected speaking style almost Clintonian in its intonations, Gingrich, perhaps more than any congressman serving today, brings to bear a wealth of knowledge. Before moving to the Hill in 1978, he taught history at West Georgia University. His ability to recall conversations, dates, names, and the minutiae of a public life speaks to this earlier training. He also possesses the historian’s perspective: no doubt he sees himself to some degree as the right man with the right ideas at the right time, and hopes that his contribution will positively impact the country’s direction.

All of which makes him a captivating lecturer, though not a particularly focused one. His speeches tend to be excessively broad in scope, so that “a tri-partisan majority for real change” becomes more like “a tri-part method for real change,” in which none of the three parts have any obvious relation to each other. Within twenty minutes he spoke of the impending rise of science and technology, the economic strength of India and China, and the imminent doom of the American political system. These heavy burdens of change he placed on our shoulders.
But somehow, despite their breadth, they resonated.

The power of Gingrich’s speaking lies not in the creativity of his ideas: to assert that the Internet will be a hallmark of the 21st century, or that we need to move past partisanship, is hardly groundbreaking. In some cases, the very accuracy of his claims should be called into question. Fresh from a trip to Beijing, Gingrich praised the government’s all-business attitude, quoting Deng XiaoPing’s “black cat white cat” aphorism. My own trip to China this summer revealed a country far closer to the brink than he suggested, with deficiencies that extend beyond the moral and into the societal. A robust GDP does not necessarily affirm the Chinese economic system, or the attitudes underlying it.

No, Gingrich’s speech suffers from lapses of truth and originality, yet it inspires precisely because it is far-reaching. Many politicians today are timid in what they ask of us, undaring in their idea of what should and could be. Unlike them, Gingrich has the temerity to address the whole landscape—infrastructure, regulation, education, immigration, social service, and foreign policy—and to insist we reform everything immediately. Though his rhetoric smacks of unwarranted optimism, there is something heady and glorious about his demand.

Perhaps Gingrich’s removal from the lawmaking scene in Washington allows him to posit these comprehensive judgments. He is no longer mired in the nitty-gritty, the dirty work of passing bills and packing amendments that narrows one’s perspective. Though Congress’s work is important, it is part of a whole that is easily forgotten in the small-minded universe of Capitol Hill.

Walking away from the IOP, there were still many things I didn’t know about Newt Gingrich. But the one thing I knew for sure was that he was a visionary.