Article on Newt's efforts to repeal Dodd-Frank

From MortgageOrb.com:

As part of his campaign to seek the Republican Party's presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich has made the repeal of the Dodd-Frank Act a key element of his proposed domestic policy. During the summer, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives hosted a number of meetings and telephone conference calls with mortgage bankers and business leaders to discuss the Dodd-Frank Act's effects on their operations and the economy.

Newt on why the act needs to be repealed:

Gingrich: Dodd-Frank is a regulatory Tower of Babel that is paralyzing the American economy and depressing home values. The legislation itself is over 2,300 pages in length and requires federal regulators to come up with more than 400 rules, which will expand the law by another 5,000 pages. It contains so much complexity and uncertainty as to how it will be applied that it is depressing normal lending and borrowing across the country, especially among small community banks and their small business borrowers.

We know from experience that a largely free economy is the best system to provide jobs and prosperity. We also know from experience, both here at home and abroad, that a command and control economic system run by bureaucrats of the central government is a recipe for economic decline.

They asked Newt what the most common comments from those affected by the act are:

Gingrich: The common theme of these comments is the sheer uncertainty of what the law requires and deep anxiety about the amount of arbitrary power that this bill invests in unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats. The uncertainty about what Dodd-Frank regulations will look like a month, a year, or five years from now makes decision-making impossible and freezes up even more investment.

Despite the fact that Dodd-Frank ended up being over 2,300 pages long, the most disturbing words and clauses may very well have yet to be written. This is a bill that allows bureaucrats to author 400 new regulations with little oversight, and also limits the extent to which we can predict damaging effects now.

There are obviously some aspects so devastating that they stand out: Lenders and Realtors have told us how disastrous the proposed Qualified Residential Mortgage (QRM) standards would be if they were to come into effect. They are sure that this rule will prevent hundreds of thousands of creditworthy Americans from accessing mortgages. Today's housing market, which is already mired in its worst slump since the Great Depression, will only get more miserable as fewer and fewer Americans are able to buy and sell their homes.

Community bankers are already bracing themselves for the cumbersome deluge of new regulations that will affect them disproportionally hard. Some community bankers have said that in order to afford the towering compliance costs, they may be put in a place where they will have no choice but to either merge with another institution or go out of business.

On Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac:

Addressing Fannie and Freddie should have been the first priority of any serious financial reform. The fact that these government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs), which played such a critical role in the financial crisis in 2008, escaped unscathed - some would say they escaped even stronger - is testament to how misguided and confused the authors of this bill were.

It is absolutely critical for the private sector to assume a larger role in the mortgage market. Our continued dependence on the GSEs is simply unsustainable. American taxpayers have already paid out about $150 billion in bailout funds, and are likely exposed to hundreds of billions more in liabilities. Dodd-Frank further harms private-sector lenders with new byzantine regulations and penalties, such as those surrounding the QRM rule. While that happens, Fannie and Freddie will only get bigger and continue to distort the housing market on the backs of the American taxpayer.

After we repeal Dodd-Frank, we must gradually scale down the role of the GSEs in the American housing market, eventually breaking them up and beginning the process of privatization.

On the "Consumer Financial Protection Bureau":

Dodd-Frank is an economically and constitutionally destructive piece of legislation, and the CFPB is its corrupted foundation. Only Congress could create an agency that invests all of its power in one single, unelected bureaucrat, and then claim that doing something like this could actually help "consumer protection."

Read the whole interview here.

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:

Another quote by Tony Lee of Human Events about Newt

Lee put out an article previewing Wednesday's GOP debate at the Reagan Library. He had this to say about Newt:

His summer was turbulent, but he is not that much worse off than he was when it started. Gingrich won the last debate and he performed the best out of all the candidates at the Palmetto Freedom Forum in South Carolina. He’s proposing ideas on getting rid of regulations such as Dodd-Frank and using social media, including Twitter, Facebook and Google+, effectively. He speaks of American exceptionalism in a way that resonates. Gingrich has a chance to keep the momentum going at a debate held at the library of a President (Reagan) he not only worked with, but whose life and ideas he has so richly chronicled.

Another quote from Will Wade

Follow him on Twitter @WmSWade.

As a career community banker since 1998 I have always been aware of regulation, the role of the Federal Government and the importance of being involved in the process.

After the Iowa debate, I am now purposely engaged. I spent the evening truly listening to each candidate trying to determine which candidate is focused and ready to lead on true job recovery, to lead on sound short-term and long-term economic policy which will allow small business to thrive again. I watched looking for the best candidate to lead with real ideas about giving back authority to the states and local government, to lead in giving back freedom to individuals and communities to thrive on their own, and to lead by intently working on removing bad legislation like Dodd-Frank and Obama Care.

I feel that each candidate provides many great qualities to the political process and no doubt will serve this nation much better than our current President. That being said, I must say that Newt Gingrich stood out as the strongest candidate on the most critical issues facing our country today! I know that he will be the most concise and articulate leader to debate Obama for the Presidency. His leadership on States Rights, repealing Dodd-Frank and "Obama-Care," and actual experience on balancing the federal budget are just a few of the reasons that I feel confident that the GOP can not only take back the executive branch but also work to continue the gains in both houses of our legislative branch.

Newt Gingrich has the experience, the knowledge and the willingness to not only include "We the People" but to be with "We the People!"

Sincerely,

William S. Wade

Dawsonville, Ga USA

(For those who just read the daily e-mail, I forgot to properly format a post from yesterday that had pictures from Newt campaigning. Here is the link to the post.)

Repeal Dodd-Frank -- now

There were two articles tweeted by the Newt 2012 Twitter account -- which you can follow it by clicking here -- about the damage Dodd-Frank is doing.

The first, posted on NationalReview.com, is titled: "Dodd-Frank: Wrong, Wrong, Wrong." With a subtitle of: How not to fix a problem.

The article reads:

[Dodd-Frank] doesn’t address at all the main discernible causes of the economic crisis of 2008, which have not gone away. The housing bubble and imprudent lending into it were the principal problem, and the principal culprit is the United States government, for legislating a substantial percentage of private-sector commercial mortgages to be on a non-commercial basis; for issuing executive orders to the giant, pseudo-private-sector Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to make the majority of their mortgage loans on that basis; and for keeping interest rates and mortgage equity requirements so low for so long.

Here is the link again.

The other article, by Jeffrey Carter of the blog Points and Figures, explains how the legislation will increase food prices.

Carter writes:

Not only is it proving to restrict access to money by poor people, it is imposing crushing costs on smaller banks-effectively putting them out of business. This makes access to capital even tougher, because instead of going to a small bank where you can develop a relationship, a businessman now needs to go to a large monolith bank where they are a number.

Oh wait, there’s more.

Because of how the bill changes the way futures and options are regulated; along with how grain elevators and Futures Commission Merchants are regulated, your food costs are going up.

After quoting from the Federal Register, Carter continues:

Assume that you wanted to stay in business and not simply fold up your shop. What’s that verbiage going to cost you? The CFTC estimates that it will be somewhere between $16,750-$61,750 initially, and $12,600 annually once every member has a recording system. That means a farmer in a tractor that is talking to their broker monitoring the market all the way up the food chain to the hot shot trader on a trading desk.

No doubt that the costs will be significantly higher than that. Purely altering your operations will cost you more than that.

What’s that mean to the market?

These extra layers of regulation mean that producers will have to charge a higher price for food. The price will be passed down from the field through the elevator, through the trading pits, through the food producers, and greet you at the checkout counter at the grocery.

He concludes:

Repeal Dodd-Frank. Now. I appreciate the sentiment of the bill and think we need to do something with regard to banking, but this was obviously the wrong approach. It is as damaging as Obamacare. It is an economy destroyer.

Hint: Markets price in the future....

(elipsis in the original)

When Dodd-Frank is driving up costs for everyone, discouraging investment, drowning small banks in paperwork while making big banks even bigger, and increasing food prices, why is Newt the only candidate seriously talking of repealing the bill?

Why is he the one candidate who is being called "the community banking candidate?"

A Recap of Newt's conference call on Dodd-Frank repeal

(I meant to have this up a few hours ago, but a computer error on my part delayed it.)

Wednesday, Newt was on a conference call concerning the repeal of Dodd-Frank, which he is saying is to finance what Obamacare is to health care. He wanted to hear from community bankers and realtors how the legislation -- whose stated purpose was to end "too big to fail" but is actually just making big banks bigger -- is hurting them. Newt said at the beginning of the call that he has been "very surprised how this has bubbled up the past two weeks."

He has mentioned repealing the bill that was passed last year about twenty times the last three weeks -- including on The O'Reilly Factor Monday, Sean Hannity's radio show, and CNBC's Squawk Box Wednesday -- and will give speeches on it in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Thursday and Des Moines Friday. "With a little bit of help" -- from everyone, not just community bankers and others in the business -- Newt believes the movement for repeal "could grow explosively."

(Newt believes repealing it could happen with the current Senate and President, if done properly. He called for building the case over the next couple of months, have the House repeal it as a jobs issue, and then target those Democrat Senators up for re-election in 2012. He compared it to welfare reform, which President Clinton vetoed twice, and only signed when it was passed the third time on the eve of the election.)

If you go around the country and ask community bankers about the law, they will, Newt said, say that Dodd-Frank is driving down home prices, contributing to the lowest housing prices since the Great Depression. It is also burying the smaller banks under paperwork, killing them off. And Newt then made the Hayekian point that such a central plan is naturally rife for corruption.

The legislation creates, in Newt's words, "bureaucratic socialism," whereby the government leaves the impression that the bank or other entity is still privately owned but control every facet of its' operation through standards and other regulations.

Newt, as well as a couple of the other people on the call, pointed out the bureaucrats tasked with implementing the 2300 page bill are extremely risk-adverse -- to the point, said Newt, that they are threatening to kill the entrepreneurial spirit this country was founded on. The bill was almost doomed from the start because, as Gingrich pointed out, two of the men most responsible for the financial crisis -- Chris Dodd and Barney Frank -- were put in charge of reforming the system. They left Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- which were at the heart of the mortgage collapse -- untouched. Gingrich called for "very substantial reform," of them calling the two government-sponsored entities "too large" and "too cumbersome."

A few of the people on the call made the point that Newt is the only 2012 Presidential candidate actively pushing for the repeal of Dodd-Frank. As The American Banker said of Newt last week, "he sounded a lot like a community banker."

Newt: "I actually think ideas matter."

Newt sat down with the editorial board of the Marietta Daily-Journal last Thursday. It is too long to post even a majority of the interview, I will post quite a bit. Here is the full article.

On false, ugly rumors about him:

"I think you tell them the truth," Gingrich said. "And you say, 'I've done things in my life that I've had to reconcile with God and seek forgiveness for, and that's a fact. And I have a very strong marriage. I'm very close to both my daughters. I'm very close to both my grandchildren, close to my two son-in-laws.'"

Gingrich, who represented Georgia's Sixth District from 1979 to 1999 as a Republican U.S. congressman and served as House Speaker from 1995 to 1999, recalled a campaign he went through in Georgia.

"We had a candidate who was attacking me about family and my younger daughter did a commercial and just said, 'it's not true and it's not accurate.' I mean, the worst things said about me are simply not true, and I think both of my daughters are quite prepared to say those things are not true. Now, that means people attacking me aren't going to have a fight with me, they're now going to have to have a fight with Jackie and Kathy, and I think that becomes pretty convincing for people."

On his campaign:

Gingrich blamed the "elite media" for why his campaign had trouble getting traction.

"If you look at the news media coverage, the elite media went out of their way for seven or eight weeks to attack me," Gingrich said. "You had day after day people saying, 'well, his campaign's dead. He's gone. It's over.'"

He recalled a week where he campaigned at various town hall meetings in Iowa, each with a bigger crowd than expected.

"So I'm having a great time," Gingrich said. "Meanwhile, every night on every talk show various analysts, none of whom have been in Iowa, are all going, 'well, Gingrich is gone.' What that really did was is it affected our fundraising very dramatically, didn't affect voters, but it affected our fundraising very dramatically."

Gingrich referred to a news article that did an analysis of Twitter followers.

"And it says, 'now it's true that Gingrich has 1.3 million followers and (Michele) Bachmann only has 59,000, but she's getting more new people every week.' It turned out I have six times as many Twitter followers as all the other candidates combined, but it didn't count because if it counted I'd still be a candidate; since I can't be a candidate that can't count. So we've been a little bit like a sailing ship in the middle of a hurricane in which we are sailing straight into the teeth of the media, and that slowed us down."

Using political consultants, he said, was a mistake.

"And it was a serious mistake. Reagan did the same thing, and in 1980 in New Hampshire 13 senior staff resigned on the morning of the New Hampshire primary, including the manager and the top people. He brought in Bill Casey who was not a consultant; he was a top lawyer. Two weeks later Casey laid off 100 people. And I look back and in retrospect this was just a mistake on my part," he said.

In both the Reagan campaign and Gingrich's Contract with America, ideas were central but slow to mature. Reagan, for instance, didn't dramatically pull away from Jimmy Carter until the October debate, he said.

"What I say to conservatives is very simple. The first is it's October of 2012. Obama has a billion dollars to spend on lies designed to destroy the Republican candidate. The key is going to be the debates. Because the whole country will watch. And they'll either conclude as they did in 1980, remember, 'there you go again,' and they said, 'yep, got it,' and Ronald Reagan carried more states than FDR did in 1932. So who do you want to have on the platform with Obama? Who do you think can look him in the eye and have both the skill and the nerve for example to say, 'Mr. Obama, you have been terrific with food stamps, but that's not good enough for America.' Because if you don't have the nerve to say that you're not going to cut through the billion dollars of advertising."

On polling and the ability of the Internet:

Gingrich cited a Gallup poll that placed him fourth.

"And nobody is first by any big margin," he said. "The front runner who has the most money after five years of campaigning is at I think 19 percent and the 19 percent's not hard. When they did a poll recently in New Hampshire, and they said, 'Are you certain who you're going to vote for?' ten percent of the people said 'yes.' I mean, 90 percent of the people said, 'well, I'm not really sure,' so I start with the idea that this is a much more open race than people think it is, and it's a long way until the first delegates are picked in January. ... I believe if this was not a serious time I would have no hope. I believe this is such a serious time and Americans know it's such a serious time that they're going to look for a serious leader, so I think the talking points and the clever ads and the gimmicks are all going to disappear in the next five months."

The former speaker predicted he could win the nomination for under $20 million. The other day someone reminded him that former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue won the primary for under $250,000.

"People overvalue money and undervalue ideas. That's part of the core gamble of this campaign. I actually think ideas matter. I also think the Internet is such a collapser of cost. I mean, it's actually pretty ironic; one of the complaints the consultant said was that we were spending too much money. The day they left our budget collapsed dramatically, and we've actually raised more than we've spent every single week since they left ..."

Gingrich said he's running for president because the country is faced with three catastrophes coming down the road, one involving China, one involving the loss of American identity and one involving the Middle East.

If the U.S. doesn't fix its manufacturing, science and technological pattern the Chinese will be the leading country in the world, he said.

"And if they both own trillions of dollars of our debt, and they have a superior manufacturing system and a superior military, then our range of independence will be within the framework the Chinese tolerate," Gingrich said. "Now, I don't find that to be a very acceptable future. So I think you've got to rebuild our science, technology and manufacturing base in order to be able to rebuild our military with the recapitalization, and I think if you don't do that we will cease to be the most significant country on the planet, and it will literally dramatically limit our freedom."

Regarding the Middle East, Gingrich referenced a conference Iran held on terrorism.

"Now this is the leading state sponsor of terrorism in the world holding a conference on terrorism," Gingrich said. "Sixty countries went to the conference. The Secretary General sent a special envoy. Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan were at the conference. Now this means that after thousands of dead Americans, billions of American dollars, the two countries we've tried to help both thought it was better to irritate us than to irritate the Iranians. Now I don't think anybody in the Obama White House has a clue what that meant or how dangerous that is."

The first step is to recognize that radical Islam is real, large and sincere, he said. Moreover, a large part of the Pakistani government was protecting Osama bin Laden.

"If you had asked me - and I have a fair amount of knowledge about intelligence. I have fairly good ties to the Agency and the NSA - if you had asked me up until the week before we went in, I would have said to you, 'he's in a cave in Waziristan.' And if you had said to me, 'oh no, he is in a military city one mile from the national defense university, I would have said to you, 'that means a big chunk of the Pakistani government is protecting him. And that's a problem on a grand scale."

The problem is made all the more complicated with Pakistan harboring perhaps a hundred nuclear weapons, a few of which could be leaked to terrorists, he said.

What is needed is a fundamental overhaul of the U.S. intelligence laws to allow U.S. intelligence agencies to go back to spy work, he said.

"Because we today are so crippled by these various so-called reforms that we don't do spying. We rely on the Pakistanis to give us intelligence. Well, you just learned that the Pakistani intelligence system is on the other team."

On the home front, Gingrich called on the repeal of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, which "is to financial services what Obamacare is to health."

He called on reforming the Food and Drug Administration to move new knowledge from the laboratory to the patient as rapidly as possible.

"Today you have an adversarial FDA which is killing the American health industry and driving jobs offshore, while killing patients by slowing down moving new things," he said.

He wants to replace the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency with an agency that values economics and cooperates with rather than dictates to local communities.

"You got to replace it because the current bureaucrats at EPA hate business, hate local communities and are destructive of the American future," he said.

Gingrich ripped Obama's energy policy.

"We're the third largest oil producing country in the world," he said. "We have more hydro-carbon than any country in the world. Do you know how bad your government has to be to artificially create these shortages? It's maniacal. So one of the ads we're going to use next year is Obama in Brazil saying, 'I'm glad you're drilling offshore. We'd like to be your best customer.' And I'm going to say, 'there's a simple choice: everybody who thinks the American president should be a purchasing agent for foreigners, you want Obama. Everybody who thinks we ought to be salesmen for Americans, you're for me.'"

Newt actively calling for the repeal of Dodd-Frank

The two worst pieces of legislation passed during the first two years of President Obama's administration -- and what a long list of bad bills that is -- were Obamacare and Dodd-Frank. While every Republican running for President is calling for the repeal of Obamacare, only Newt is out there insisting on the same fate for Dodd-Frank.

Dodd-Frank, whose stated purpose was to end the idea of "too big to fail," has actually just led to the big banks being bigger while killing small, community banks and reducing investment. (But who needs capital in this economy?)

The Huffington Post even said Newt is the only candidate "actually saying anything of substance about it....Gingrich stands alone as the sole 2012 hopeful to level specific criticisms at the law on a regular basis. He published a 924-word broadside against the bill on Wednesday morning for Human Events, a conservative publication."

Jon Ward continues by quoting Newt: "Dodd-Frank is crippling any recovery in the housing market with overly strict requirements on lenders combined with uncertainty for community banks," Gingrich wrote on the Human Events website. "By cementing the two main roadblocks to recovery, uncertainty and low consumer spending, Dodd-Frank has done exactly what Republicans predicted it would."

Yesterday, an article was put out by American Banker in which the author writes:

In fact, in a sit-down interview Friday, [Gingrich] sounded a lot like a community banker.

"The game is rigged against small banks at two levels," Gingrich said in an interview at his Washington office. "One is that the aggregated marginal advantage of borrowing money that is set up here by the Fed is profitable if you are a very, very large bank. It's not nearly as profitable if you are a small bank. You have that disadvantage."

The other problem comes from what he sees as the massive new regulatory burden spurred by the year-old law.

"The regulatory burden can be handled by a large multinational bank as part of their general management process. It kills a small bank," he said.

...

Although many politicians like to praise community banks in general, it’s unclear how much their fate truly bothers them. For Gingrich, it’s hard to escape the sense that the issue is a core part of his conservative philosophy.

"I have a particular passion for getting back to a community-based, small-business based, local entrepreneurial system," he said. "The whole base of the American model is local citizens with local resources providing local leadership. When you get to huge bureaucratic institutions, so you are branch #643, you have no capacity to provide local leadership anymore."

The former Speaker of the House also shared many small bankers’ distrust for, and distaste of , government interference. In his view, the government’s response to the financial crisis just made the situation worse.

...

Like Tom Hoenig, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, Gingrich said that Dodd-Frank solidified, rather than eliminated, the concept of too big to fail.

...

"You already have a whole series of agencies that if they had done their job, it would have worked," he said. "We are now going to add more layers of agencies on top of the agencies we already have with the premise that the next one is going to be smarter and better."

A better strategy would have been to pursue -- and criminally prosecute -- bad actors during the financial crisis, including companies like Goldman Sachs & Co. that sold products that they themselves were betting against.

...

"You know what capitalism is? Taking risk," Gingrich said. "You know what all those guys who are rich and made all that money and had all those neat places out in the Hamptons? That’s what you get for taking risk. You know what happens when the risk fails? You lose the plane, you lose the mansion. That’s what capitalism is. What we’ve invented is socialism on the way down and capitalism on the way up."

There are some other good quotes, and I recommend going to Newt.org and read the rest.

Today, Newt sent out an e-mail touting his call for the repeal of the law. He writes:

The mainstream media’s coverage of our campaign has paid little attention to substance and focused far too much attention on trivia and gossip. However, articles such as this one show there is a hunger for leaders with real experience who can offer real solutions.

This campaign is based on the idea that at a time of such significant challenges for America, substance will matter more than smears.

Thank you for your continued support. Please share this article with your family and friends.

Read "Meet Newt Gingrich: The Community Banking Candidate" here.

He also asked everyone to "consider a donation of $10, $25, $50 or more to help continue our campaign of substance over smears."

Newt campaigning in New Hampshire

Newt was in New Hampshire today and said he will "doing a lot of grassroots things and developing a lot of ideas" over the next few months.

From The Boston Globe:

Gingrich is spending today and tomorrow in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, and has six radio show appearances lined up. His only publicized New Hampshire campaign stop with any voter contact was a tour of Spectrum Marketing Companies, a direct mail and marketing company whose clients include numerous Republican politicians.

Spokesman R.C. Hammond said Gingrich may do another business visit tomorrow. Otherwise, Gingrich is meeting privately with activists and business leaders. He said he met voters at a diner this morning.

...

Asked about Gingrich’s grassroots activism, Hammond pointed to public events Gingrich did on previous trips, including a town hall meeting on health care in Derry, a meeting with Tea Party activists in Dover, and a meet and greet at a Conway cafe.

More from Shira Schoenberg:

"The difference in substance and difference in experience will make a difference by January," Gingrich told reporters in Manchester. He pledged, "You'll see me here a lot just as you’ll see me in Iowa a lot."

Gingrich said he believes he will attract support from the Tea Party through a "10th amendment enforcement act." Hammond said that refers to an initiative to have citizens identify areas like education or health care where the federal government is overreaching. Republicans promoted a similar concept in 1996, when Gingrich was speaker, through legislation ensuring the federal government does not infringe on states’ rights.

Gingrich also suggested health initiatives focusing on brain science, regenerative medicine, and diabetes. He has said Congress should repeal the Dodd-Frank bill, President Obama’s reform of the financial industry.

"I'll rely on a strategy of substance and the notion that this country is in very deep trouble," Gingrich said. He pointed specifically to the problems of China outpacing the United States in science, technology, and manufacturing; the erosion of American exceptionalism; and the lack of a strategy for dealing with radical Islam. He said Washington has failed to solve the economic problems, and "there"s a very real danger we’re going to have a second dip" of the recession.

In the current impasse between President Obama and Congress over raising the debt ceiling, Gingrich said House Republicans are missing an opportunity to pass numerous potential solutions and force Senate Democrats to vote on them. Gingrich proposed increasing oil and gas exploration offshore and on federal lands, and raising the debt ceiling by $200 billion in exchange for getting that additional revenue.

"They have every right to say to the president 'here are five different ways of solving the problem, are you going to force America to default?' " Gingrich said. "If you are, we’ll have the Obama depression plus the Obama default."

Newt on a talk radio barrage; will call for the repeal of Dodd-Frank

Yesterday, I linked to Newt's radio interview with Dana Loesch from last week.

He was also on Bill Cunningham's show last week.

This morning, it was the Jack B. Show (audio here) and William Bennett's Morning in America. Tonight he was on Hugh Hewitt's radio show. Tomorrow morning, Laura Ingraham and Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson.

Newt is out, aggressively selling his plan to the American people.

---

Newt will be at the Atlanta Press Club on Wednesday, talking of the need to repeal the Dodd-Frank bill from last year that will be a hamper on the economy, adding red tape and decreasing investment in the economy.