Newt Gingrich on building a new majority: Speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition

Excerpt...................

This is a country which has about 70% center right majority and if you’re gonna successfully govern America, you’re gonna find a way to have the center right program. And they made the case that even if the Democrats win a race, in the end they’ll be coerced back towards a center right majority because otherwise it will be so antithetical to the country that they’ll get beaten.

I have to think that’s true, but here’s the imagery I want to paint for you. Think of us as a sailboat, politics as a sailboat. ‘Cause it’s not a motorboat ‘cause there’s not enough power. You’re always subject to the wind and the sea, and underneath us in the ocean is the equivalent of the Gulf Stream, this enormous river of water which is so huge that it actually warms all of Europe. And the Gulf Stream is a center right Gulf Stream and so it’s natural pattern is to move the country towards the right.

But up on the surface where our sailboat is, all of the wind comes from the left. So all the news media gets up every morning and says, “How can I shove the sailboat to the left?” And unless you are really disciplined as Ronald Reagan was, you can’t remember that all you have to do is tack. You can sail into the wind as long as you tack, but also if you drop a sea anchor down to that huge river, the river will pull you to the right.

Now almost nobody in our party understand this so I try to be very clear and very candid about what we’re doing. Because I had three great failures as speaker. I failed to train a generation of leaders who understood what I was doing. I failed to create a second contract of sufficient power that it can keep change in Washington. And I failed to rouse the country to insist on the second contract so that we could impose it in Washington because you never voluntarily get change inside the capitol.

And so I spent over seven years thinking about what went wrong ‘cause I’m not happy with where we are and I want to fundamentally change where we are.

Full Speech here.....

Posted by Mark Johnson at 3:11 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)