Tony Lee: Newt Gingrich Best Articulates American Exceptionalism

(I would have posted this Monday but with all the debate news did not want to deluge those who get the morning e-mail.)

Lee, who is covering the GOP Presidential nomination for the conservative weekly Human Events, wrote:

No current presidential candidate articulates what American exceptionalism is about more clearly and concisely than Newt Gingrich​. In addition, in an era where campaigns and candidates seem to have forgotten what a thesis statement that serves to tie together a campaign's message is, the former history professor also uses American exceptionalism to articulate not only what he is fighting against but what he is for.

...

To put it simply. More than anything else, what makes America exceptional (more than her geography and ability to historically assimilate different groups of people under a common culture and set of values) is that rights cannot be taken away from its citizens because they are granted to Americans by God and not a sovereign. According to Gingrich, this exceptionalism is under siege by liberals, led by Obama, who seek to slowly take away those rights. This framing allows Gingrich to use the Gibson Guitar incident, the Dodd-Frank legislation, and ObamaCare (in addition to a litany of other things) as supporting pieces of evidence to indict Obama and liberals as unexceptional. It is a powerful message that perfectly frames what election 2012 is really about.

Go read the rest of it; really an outstanding article.

Lee also includes the video of Newt's opening statement at the Palmetto Freedom Forum:

Human Events' Tony Lee on Newt at Palmetto Freedom Forum

The Chase 2012 reporter for the conservative weekly:

There is not a more exceptional person in the 2012 GOP presidential field than Herman Cain in terms of life experiences and private sector success. And there is not a person who is capable of explaining American exceptionalism better than Newt Gingrich.

...

To put it simply, American exceptionalism matters in Republican primaries. It is why immigration issues will matter in 2012 because it is a way for Republicans to speak about and discuss Americanism.

At the Forum, Gingrich stole the show by proposing ideas to eliminate the regulations such as Dodd-Frank that are screwing up the economy, reign in the federal judiciary and activist judges and even comparing himself to the University of South Carolina football team by saying that, like South Carolina did in their first game of the season last Saturday, his campaign has had some early fumbles but that he would prevail in the end.

But it was his discussion of "melting pot" Americanism that reverberated. Here's Gingrich's words:

When you have a country which is proud of its history, which is proud of its language, which is comfortable saying to people, come to America to be Americans, you can absorb more people than if you have a country whose elites are totally confused and are prepared to give up on being an American.

...if we're not going to be a melting pot, we can't afford to have very many people come here. When you realize that there are over 200 languages spoken in the Chicago school system, there are over 180 languages spoken at Miami-Dade Junior College, it's why I favor English as the official language of government.

We need a unifying system which says, yes, we are eager to have people come to America, as they always have, but we want you to come here to be American. We don't want you to come here to be confused about how this country operates.

It is hard to find a Republican who does not see the 2012 election as a pivotal election that will determine whether the country remains exceptional or begins an even more rapid descent to becoming an unexceptional version of Europe that is plagued by fiscal problems and multiculturalism.

Newt and Callista will be screening A City Upon a Hill in California Wednesday

Here is the link to the Gingrich Productions event page.

The movie explores American Exceptionalism.

Newt's "10 Steps to a Stable Governing Majority"

From his weekly newsletter:

1. Do not focus on November 2012. Instead, focus on January 2021. The goal between now and January 2021 should be to govern so well, communicate so clearly, and include Americans from all backgrounds so consistently that a second wave of House Republicans will be sworn into office in January 2021 to build a better future around our values and principles.

2. Fight for the values of the American people. Set up a series of choices in which you are defending the values and beliefs of the vast majority of American and the Democrats are defending those of the Washington establishment and left-wing elite.

3. American Exceptionalism Matters. Americans overwhelmingly believe America is an exceptional country. Yet President Obama and many Democrats seem intent on denying it. This has clear implications for policy debates, which can be framed around the historic American habits and principles that are the source of our exceptionalism.

4. Drill Here, Drill Now, Pay Less. Americans want an American energy policy (see our work at American Solutions) while Obama wants to borrow from the Chinese to buy oil from the Brazilians. An American energy plan from the House GOP would create a clear policy choice and put Republicans on the side of the American people.

5. Focus on Communication. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had a rule: "First you win the argument then you win the vote." In the end, having the right policies won't matter if you fail to communicate them effectively. The budget debate will be an example of where this is essential.

6. Inclusion, not outreach. Outreach is when insiders make a decision and then start calling people to tell them what it is. Inclusion is when they are in the room to discuss the challenges and help reach the decisions. Inclusion will require deep changes in scheduling, staffing, internships, communications, and networking.

7. Be smart, not cheap. Get to a balanced budget by being smart rather than cheap. Cutting spending in areas that produce long term savings, such as the National Institutes of Health is destructive to the goal of a sustainable, balanced budget.

8. Boldness will be rewarded. House Republicans should consider it their duty to pass the changes America needs and rally the American people to put pressure on the 23 Democratic Senate seats and the Democratic president. The country will only understand the need to replace Democrats in the Senate and the White House if they see House Republicans offering bold solutions. House GOP timidity would lead the tea parties and activists (including talk radio) to focus their frustration on House Republicans. Boldness will convince them to focus on Democratic opposition to our solutions.

9. A Contract with America in 2012. Begin now to develop bold proposals for a 2012 Contract with America including a Tenth Amendment implementation bill and a job creation bill, featuring tax cuts, deregulation, litigation reform, and American energy development. The American people need to see what a Republican team would be like so they have a lot of reasons to give us 40 more House seats, a dozen Senate seats and the White House.

10. Cheerful persistence will be the key habit for success. There will inevitably be tension, arguments, frustrations and internal dissent and conflict. Working through issues with the leadership so a unified Republican team can be creative and effective will take enormous patience and persistence. It is best done cheerfully.

Newt also mentions that the Gingrich Foundation is honoring the Autism Society this month.

The Latest News: newtexplore2012.com to go live today and Georgia radio interview

The website that will be used to gauge support for a Gingrich run is newtexplore2012.com.

And here is a radio interview in which he mentions the website.

From ABC, here is the relevant section of the interview:

'Callista and I promised, as you know, for well over a year that we would make a decision in late February or early March and we have kept our promise,' Gingrich told [Martha] Zoller. 'We will have a Web site up later on today, people can go to it. It’s newtexplore2012.com and it’s an effort to reach out to folks and say if we really want to get back to being a country of American exceptionalism and we really want to create jobs competing with Germany and China and India and we really want to shrink government, get power out of Washington, balance the federal budget and we really want to have a stronger national and homeland security so we’re safer. Lots of folks are going to have to decide if that’s a project they want to be engaged in.'

Newt responds to CPAC critics

From his weekly newsletter:

During my speech to CPAC, I tried to lay out a substantive and compelling alternative to Obama and the Democrat's left wing governance, focusing on American energy and environmental policies. I proposed an aggressive, all-American energy strategy that would dramatically boost all sources of energy production in our country.

I also proposed replacing the Environmental Protection Agency with a new Environmental Solutions Agency which would focus on technological solutions to our environmental challenges and adopt a collaborative approach with business and local government, instead of the command and control regulatory model of the EPA.

...

The record crowd of over 11,000 attendees reacted strongly to this vision for lower energy prices, more jobs, better environmental outcomes and a safer America.

It was clear watching the crowd's reaction to my speech and the speeches of others that the conservative movement is energized by the possibility of winning an epic election in 2012. It's also clear they expect real conservative reform from a new conservative president and Congress.

Maybe that optimism and energy made some people nervous.

Before the event was even over, the mainstream media was hard at work trying to pour cold water on the fire that has been lit across this nation.

This article from the Associated Press sums up the doubt and skepticism that so many in our elite media seem intent on sewing amongst the American people.

The not-too-subtle message from these guardians against high expectations is crystal clear: Don't get your hopes up. Real change isn't possible in America. You might as well stay home.

In fact, this piece of conventional wisdom is both historically wrong and insidious.

History shows that real change is possible, but only if the American people are informed and engaged.

He then cites Ronald Reagan and the 1994 victory he led as "successful conservative reform[s]" that succeeded "because they understood that real power resides with the American people, not in Washington."

This rule was described to me by an associate of Reagan's as, 'I show the American people the light. They turn up the heat on Congress.'

Ronald Reagan was known as the Great Communicator, but he can better be understood as a great educator. He thought that if he could use his platform as a national figure to inform the American people, they would provide the pressure to implement conservative reform.

That's how Ronald Reagan was able to cut taxes, reduce spending, and reform burdensome regulations to revive the American economy despite having to deal with a Democratic Congress that was opposed to his agenda. Reagan understood that the American people would pressure the Congress into doing the right thing. All Reagan had to do was champion policies that reflect American values and treat the American people with respect by being honest and clear about the facts.

...

Similarly, when I was Speaker, the Republican Congress was able to achieve its principal goals despite having to work with a liberal Democratic President. We balanced the budget while cutting taxes and increasing military and defense spending. It is a historic fact that Clinton never proposed a balanced budget. It was the Republican House that made it happen.

...

All this was possible because we understood that President Clinton would eventually yield to the demands of the American people. That's why after twice vetoing another one of our principal goals, welfare reform, Clinton eventually signed it in 1996, before he ran for reelection. He knew he wouldn't be able to stand the heat from the American people if he didn't.

He then discusses the campaigns that preceded those two conservative reforms:

Ronald Reagan and the Republican Congress under my Speakership also delivered on our goals because the preceding election campaigns focused on the issues, not on personalities.

In 1980, Reagan offered a bold, competing vision for America's future that outshone the malaise and weakness of Jimmy Carter. He promised to cut taxes to boost economic growth, to renew America's strength in the world by standing up to the Soviet Union, and to restore America's civic confidence in its founding and unique purpose (American exceptionalism).

With a weak economy and the hostage crisis in Iran in 1980, Reagan could have simply run as 'not Carter' and emerged victorious. But then he would not have had a mandate to govern, and would never have been able to achieve his principal goals.

Similarly, in 1994, we explicitly crafted the Contract with America campaign around conservative reforms that we understood had overwhelming support in America (if not in the editorial pages of the NY Times) but had nonetheless been blocked by the Democratic House.

Consequently, despite having a liberal Democrat in the White House, we still managed to achieve a balanced budget, welfare reform, tax cuts, increased military and defense spending, and more.

Perhaps Republicans could have won control of the House in 1994 by simply running against Clinton. However, the Republican landslide would not have been as large, and we certainly would not have had the mandate necessary to enact real change.

As he has in the past, Gingrich criticized the 2004 Bush re-election effort for not engaging John Kerry on the issues:

I wrote a white paper in 2004 pointing out that on over 70 key issues, John Kerry was on the wrong side of public opinion by larger than a 70-30 margin. An election campaign run on these issues would put John Kerry at an impossible disadvantage and could have led to a landslide result with a true mandate for President Bush to govern.

However, the choice in the minds of most American voters in the fall of 2004 wasn't over two competing visions for America; it was between forged National Guard papers and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth commercials. Accordingly, more people turned out to vote against John Kerry than to vote against George W. Bush. With no mandate to govern, is it any wonder that Bush's subsequent attempt to reform social security was dead on arrival?

Newt similarly attacks the 2008 McCain team that did not show how radical then-candidate Obama was.

Looking forward:

We will need candidates that have a clear and substantive plan to govern and who can explain conservative solutions to the American people in a way that gets them excited and engaged.

We will need a new Contract with America in 2012.

A new Contract with America with specific, substantive, conservative solutions to the great challenges facing our nation is the only way to gain the mandate from the American people needed to bust through all the embedded interests in Washington and the state capitals that will oppose change.

If a new conservative President and Congress develop and win based off of a new Contract with America in 2012, there is nothing that can stand in the way of true conservative reforms that will create jobs, make America safer, and maximize individual freedom and dignity for all Americans.

The Americano

Last year, Newt Gingrich launched The Americano, a news site for Hispanic Americans. "[I]t is the bilingual brainchild of Sylvia Garcia, a longtime employee of Gingrich Communications, the former speaker's consulting business," wrote Michael Scherer on Time.com. "The idea came during the election," Garcia says. "There really isn't any media that is covering conservative values for Hispanics. Everything you see is very one-sided."

Today, the first annual Americano Forum will kick off in Washington, D.C. Three of the presentations:

• Why Hispanics are Natural Conservatives.
• Melting Pot or Salad Bowl?
• Hispanics and the American Experiment: The Greatness of Conservatism.

Some of the guests include Jeb Bush, Jr., former Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutierrez, former Prime Minister of Spain José María Aznar, and Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan.

The Washington Post notes that Fox News launched a Latino website, latino.foxnews.com, in October and that the Heritage Foundation will soon have Libertad.org. But "Gingrich's efforts are drawing the most attention," writes David Montgomery.

Montgomery quotes Lionel Sosa, "who pioneered GOP outreach to Lationos on behalf of Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes": "This is the first time that planning for the Latino vote and getting together all the conservative Latinos in a major effort has been done outside of a campaign.

Juan Hernandez told Montgomery, "Newt is setting a table that had not been set before."

Univision anchor Jorge Ramos: "It's a matter of respect. Newt Gingrich understands that." Part of that respect is that Gingrich has been studying Spanish an hour a week lately.

Gingrich told the Post:

My firm defense of American exceptionalism gets its strongest endorsement from first-generation immigrants, who walk up with tears in their eyes and say, 'This is why we came to America.' On one hand, they want to know that I'm sensitive to, and care about, their historical background; on the other hand, they really want me to be aggressively for America. It's the integrating of that balance that's so important.

The Essential (and Exceptional) American

In his weekly e-mail newsletter, this one entitled "The Essential (and Exceptional) American," Newt lays out why the concept of American Exceptionalism is so important and why the left gets it wrong.

Asserting American Exceptionalism is not a vain exercise in building our national self-esteem by boasting about our country's great wealth and military capability.

It is also not an argument that says America can 'go it alone' on the world stage.

Nor is it a belief that America's success is pre-ordained by the Almighty, no matter what we do (which is not to say that the hand of Providence cannot be seen during key points in American history.)

Instead, American Exceptional ism is an idea as old as our country itself. The Founding Fathers understood that the vast resources at our fledgling country's disposal coupled with our puritan roots and lack of a feudal past meant that the United States was uniquely positioned to thrive as an exception to the corruption and poverty of other countries.

More importantly, they understood that the new nation was the first to be founded on the self-evident truth that individual rights come directly from God, not the church or a King, and that citizens loan that power to the state. In America, the individual is sovereign, not the government, which was a revolutionary break with previous forms of government in the world.

This relationship was expressed in our founding political document, the Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Having defined it, Newt goes after liberal critics of it:

The Left routinely mocks the idea of American Exceptionalism, with one liberal writer recently dismissing it as an exercise in 'toasting our fabulousness.'...But what the Left fails to understand is that the relationship between God, the citizen, and the state, understood by our founding fathers and expressed in the Declaration, shaped the Constitution (which identifies the source of the new government's power as "We the people..."), our subsequent national policies, and our enduring understanding of American Exceptionalism.
America developed a free market economic system not based on some academic analysis that it is more efficient at creating wealth, but because if the individual is sovereign, the idea of the state trying to organize human activity is abhorrent, a violation of the individual's right to pursue happiness.

Instead, our country believes the proper role of government in the economic sphere is to create a framework that maximizes the ability of citizens to engage in free exchange, such as putting the weight of law behind the enforcement of contracts and by prosecuting fraud. It is not the role of government to try and redistribute wealth, create new entitlements or bail out politically connected special interests.

Similarly, America's great freedom of religious practice did not evolve based on a simple desire to create social harmony. It is a direct consequence of this historic understanding of the relationship between God, the citizen and the state. If "our Creator" is the source of our unalienable rights – including the right to know and worship God – then it is illicit for government to get between the citizen and the worship of God.

The modern distortion of the establishment clause of the First Amendment, which has been used to justify the tearing down of crosses on public land and the harassment of civic organizations like the Boy Scouts of America, is an explicit violation of this natural order.

The Left hates the idea of American Exceptionalism because it sets boundaries on the power of the state. The Left's desire for ever bigger government clashes with the core principles of America's exceptional founding.

That's why the Left is engaged in an unending war in academia and Hollywood to reduce the exceptional nature of America's founding by trashing the integrity of our founding fathers and trying to paint our country's enormous and rapid rise in wealth and power as due to almost anything other than the freedoms we enjoy.

Newt's daughter, Jackie, has a book out, titled The Essential American: 25 Documents and Speeches Every American Should Own.

You can sign up for Newt's weekly newsletter here.