Probably the most substantive exchange of the Presidential
campaign took place within the past two weeks. But it wasn’t
between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, or between John McCain
and either of those two. It was between Barack Obama and Newt
Gingrich.
In an address in Philadelphia on March 18, just across from
Independence Hall, Obama said,
By investing in our schools and our communities…at
this moment in this election, we can come together and say [to
those who would distract us from real issues], Not this time. This
time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing
the future of black children and white children and Asian children
and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we
want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t
learn, that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s
problem. The children of America are not those kids; they are our
kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a twenty first
century economy. Not this time.
Gingrich interpreted these words, and the rest of the speech, as
calling for a real dialogue, not a political debate, about what
real change would seriously address these and similar problems
throughout modern American society. So that is what he offered in a
speech at the American Enterprise Institute on March 28.
Gingrich began effectively saying to Obama, I know exactly what
you mean, quoting Lincoln:
“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.”
But then Gingrich put his finger on the real problem with Obama’s
thinking, saying, “We talk about change, and then we do more of
what we are already doing.” Throughout this campaign, and his
entire political career, Obama has never, and will never, say or do
anything to challenge any of the verities of the Left. In the end,
his supposed change always seems to hearken back to the tried and
failed, Big Government policies of the 1960s, or even the 1930s.
Gingrich pointed out the disastrous failure of these policies
with the example of Detroit, where the Left has been in total
control for half a century now:
Detroit in 1950 had 1,800,000. Last year, it dropped
below 900,000…It dropped from being the number one per capita
income city in the United States to ranking number
sixty-second…[I]n the past three years, Detroit had three times
the outmigration rate of any other city in the United
States.
Obama said in his March 18 speech:
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we
still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of
Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and
now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s
black and white students.
Obama’s speech suggested as a solution only even more funding for
inner city schools, following the left-wing union playbook
precisely. But Gingrich countered:
The Detroit schools are the third or fourth most
expensive schools in the country. They’re a disaster….The best
estimate of the Gates Foundation was that a freshman entering the
Detroit school system had one chance in four of graduating on time.
Three out of four children in Detroit are being cheated by one of
the most expensive school bureaucracies in America….An
entrepreneur offered $200 million to develop charter schools in
Detroit and was rejected on the grounds that he was obviously a
white racist attempting to overturn the black power
structure.
The fact is all across the country the government is spending more
on failing inner city schools than on suburban schools. More money
is not the answer.
Gingrich explained what would be necessary if Obama wanted to
bring about real change in the nation’s schools:
And if Senator Obama is serious about helping children
in urban America, he will have to question whether or not in fact
he’s prepared to automatically reinforce the lockstep power of the
National Education Association, which is the largest single
provider of delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Now if
we’re going to have an honest conversation about poverty in
America, then let’s have an honest conversation about poverty in
America. The number one problem with expensive large urban schools
is they are failed bureaucracies protected by political unions that
refuse to change.
But based on Obama’s speech he is not preparing to take on anything
like this battle.
Gingrich identified as the root cause of these disastrous policy
failures of the Left as “bad culture and bad government.” Gingrich
said:
The tragic truth is that at the end of segregation, the
great moment of opportunity for African-Americans, we had a failure
of government and a failure of culture. The rise of big bureaucracy
in the Great Society starting in 1965 combined with the rise of a
counterculture which despised middle class values and which taught
the poor patterns and habits of destruction — and those two
patterns of bad bureaucracy reinforcing bad culture have led to a
disaster.
Gingrich offered as a successful example of real change the 1996
reforms of the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children program
(AFDC), which he led the Republican Congress to enact. Those
reforms sent the program back to the states with block grants of
the Federal funds, under a requirement that welfare be provided in
return for work by the able bodied.
With the states keeping the savings from finding jobs for the
poor, but paying for any higher expenses, they dramatically reduced
the old AFDC rolls by close to 60% nationwide, a bigger success
than even the reform advocates, going back to Ronald Reagan, would
dare to predict. After the reform:
[E]mployment of never married mothers increased by
nearly 50%, of single mothers who are high school dropouts by 66%,
and of young single mothers ages 18 to 24 by nearly 100%. The child
poverty rate fell from 20.8% to in 1995 to 17.8% in 2004, lifting
1.6 million children out of poverty. The poverty rate among black
children fell from 41.5% in 1995 to 32,9% in 2004. The poverty rate
also fell from 53.1% to 39.8% for children from single-mother
families.
These same reforms should now be extended to the other major
federal welfare programs, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and federal
housing programs, as well as the dozens of smaller federal welfare
programs. Send them back to the states where they can be reformed
from the bottom up with an expanded focus on work, private health
insurance, even home ownership, creating a new modern welfare
program to achieve middle class prosperity for the previously poor.
To create jobs, Gingrich emphasized:
In a healthy society, you want the smallest possible
tax rate because you want the maximum resources with people who
know how to create jobs. And the choice is simple, do you make the
politician or the bureaucrat more powerful by giving them more
money, or do you make the job creator more effective by letting
them keep their money. But does anyone seriously want to argue that
the bureaucrat is more likely to create the next million jobs than
the entrepreneur?
Gingrich also argued for a cultural change encouraging more African
Americans and other minorities to go into business because, “a
generation of entrepreneurs can mop up poverty at a rate no
bureaucracy can imagine.”
In his latest book, Real Change, Gingrich also argues
extensively for personal accounts for Social Security, which would
provide an historic breakthrough in personal prosperity for working
people. Between that book and this speech, it looks like Gingrich
is really the one who has the audacity of hope to argue for
sweeping real change for America.
Peter Ferrara is director of entitlement and budget
policy for the Institute for Policy Innovation, and general counsel
for the American Civil Rights Union.
