Robert Costa of National Review on Newt's Comeback

Two excerpts:

“There is plenty of room,” says R. C. Hammond, the campaign spokesman. He bets that by early January, when New Hampshire and Iowa are blanketed by snow, Gingrich’s “tortoise” campaign will inch ahead.

That optimism is backed up by cash, Hammond says. In the past week, the campaign has raised more money — nearly $200,000 — than it collected in July, the month the campaign nearly collapsed. The capital infusion has enabled Gingrich to hire early-state staffers, such as tea-party leader Andrew Hemingway in New Hampshire, and produce a slew of Web videos.

Wait and see -- that is the Gingrich mantra. In coming days, his team does not expect him to go negative against Cain, the latest Republican hotshot, but to poke holes, in a friendly manner, in aspects of the 9-9-9 tax plan. When Perry unveils his flat-tax proposal this week, look for Gingrich to trumpet his own flat-tax plan, which he released earlier this year. He’ll also likely challenge Perry to explain specifics, such as his chosen rate.

Meanwhile, finally, the campaign will spend some coin, opening offices in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. An outpost in Miami will expand, as will the operation in Atlanta, where the campaign’s main call center is housed.

And to the joy of political junkies, Gingrich will join Cain for a one-on-one discussion at a tea-party forum in Texas next month, an event the campaign hopes will spark tea-party voters to reconsider, on a policy basis, their Cain support. The battle for the “non-Romney” slot in the primary, at least in Newt World, has only begun.

That last part -- the one-on-one with Cain next month -- I had not read about before, and it should be a great event.

The article is too long and too packed full of great details for me to quote everything worth quoting, so please read the whole thing.

National Review and Grover Norquist on 9-9-9

The editors of National Review wrote a piece yesterday about Herman Cain's 9-9-9 plan in which they say it is "unworthy of conservative support." They write:

The two-stage scheme is self-defeating in another respect as well. The 30 percent national sales tax, whatever its other merits, would be significantly softer on the poor than the 9-9-9 transitional step, since the larger sales tax includes a “prebate” check to all Americans to exempt the basic necessities of life from being taxed, while 9-9-9 includes no similar provision. Leaving aside whether a major tax increase on people at the bottom of the income scale is a good idea, what is the point of first raising their taxes and then cutting them?

Grover Norquist, head of Americans for Tax Reform, used an original analogy:

He argued that each of the three taxes could end up growing, saying it was like “[putting] tapeworms in your tummy to try and maintain your weight — they may have their own idea about their growth patterns and what they want to do.”

Newt: "The Root-and-Branch Candidate"

(Thank you to Gary Moss for passing along this article.)

Below the title of the article is the line: "Gingrich doesn’t want to beat just Obama, but statism, too." (An interesting side note is that Sarah Palin likes to use root-and-branch imagery a lot.)

Some excerpts:

[Gingrich] knows how to play the game, but he has always had his own very strong ideas about how it ought to be played — and he has been the smartest guy in the room enough times to realize counterrevolutions are not impossible, even if the conventional wisdom says so.

Newt will never be the safe candidate. But he could be the root-and-branch candidate. And the branch he is currently targeting for deracination is the federal judiciary. In his “21st Century Contract with America,” a bold action item is: “Bringing the courts back under the Constitution and the rule of law.”

And bold it is. For more than a half-century, it has been monotonously proclaimed that the judges are the last word on what the law is, and, therefore, that not only the litigants in the case but the whole of society must yield to their decisions. It has become easy to forget — or to have never known — that it was not always this way. As Gingrich argues in a position paper he rolled out with a speech on Friday, there is nothing in the Constitution that stands for this proposition. It is a promotion the Warren court gave itself in 1958, in a gambit Stanford Law School dean Larry Kramer aptly described as “not reporting a fact so much as trying to manufacture one.”

If he were elected president, Gingrich promises, he would pursue a series of concrete steps to reestablish the original balance of constitutional power — the balance designed to ensure that Americans decided important affairs of state democratically rather than having decisions imposed on them by unelected lawyers. In passing laws, the political branches would make use of Congress’s constitutional authority to deny courts jurisdiction to hear categories of cases, something about which progressives will no doubt shriek...at least until someone catalogues the provisions to avoid judicial review that are written into the Obamacare statute.

Following the example of President Jefferson and the early 19th century Congress, Gingrich foresees the political branches’ eliminating courts that consistently attempt to rewrite the laws and impose their personal predilections. In particularly egregious cases, judges could be impeached for ignoring the Constitution and failing to heed the legitimate prerogatives of the political branches. Congress could use its power of the purse to defund enforcement of lawless rulings, and the political branches could ignore them -- as they did in the Civil War era with respect to aspects of the notorious Dred Scott decision. We could go back to the Lincoln formulation, which conceded the binding nature of judicial rulings on private litigants in a particular case but denied that these rulings operated as precedents binding on the American people and their elected representatives.

Here is the link to the full article again.

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?"

Newt calls for no tax hikes in debt ceiling deal. Will be on Fox and Friends Sunday Morning.

Newt wrote an op-ed for National Review about how Republicans need to resist any deal that raises taxes:

Republicans should reject the establishment’s demand for a tax increase. There is plenty of money to be saved from a bloated government without giving Washington one penny of higher taxes.

The pressures from the Washington establishment to raise taxes are unending. This has been true for at least 30 years.

When Pres. Ronald Reagan adopted the Kemp-Roth three-year tax cut, the establishment hated it. Both Democrats and Republicans in the establishment hated the idea of allowing the American people to keep their own money.

I was there and I fought the 1982 tax increase that the establishment had foisted on President Reagan. He presently figured out their game and rejected all other efforts to get him to raise taxes.

When Pres. George H. W. Bush pledged, “Read my lips, no new taxes,” the establishment was determined to force him into breaking his word. I led a majority of House Republicans in voting no when the tax increase came up in 1990.

When I was Speaker, we balanced the federal budget by cutting taxes to increase economic growth, reducing spending, and reforming government. These policies led to four straight years of balanced budgets and the repayment of over $400 billion in federal debt. Unemployment dropped from 5.6 percent to under 4 percent.

With more jobs, people left welfare, left unemployment compensation, left food stamps, left Medicaid, and went back to work taking care of their families and paying taxes.

This two-step process of reducing government spending and increasing government revenues was a major factor in our ability to balance the federal budget.

In light of Friday's anemic jobs report, Newt said "[e]very conservative should say, firmly and loudly: NO.

America is over-spent, not under-taxed."

Newt on what should be done:

What Congress should be doing is passing a Balanced Budget Amendment as Senators DeMint and Snowe suggested, cutting unnecessary spending through dramatically reducing fraud (maybe $120 plus billion a year), bringing private-sector management techniques to government that would eliminate vast layers of bureaucracy (between $125 billion and$500 billion a year), and creating an American energy policy to create American jobs and keep $400 billion plus a year here at home that is currently going overseas for energy. (See my paper on the debt ceiling at Newt.org for more details.)

Newt will be on Fox and Friends at 9:00 AM ET Sunday Morning.

He will be on Sean Hannity's TV show Tuesday night from the site of his townhall meeting with the Charleston Tea Party.

Politico seems to be hunting for Soros cash. Or they're just awful journalists.

Jonathan Martin of Politico has a new column out in which he takes a nasty, unprofessional tone throughout. (Remember, Politico poses as a fair journalistic outlet, not one that is composed of partisan, left-wing hacks. Maybe they are not doing well and need some of that money George Soros has been tossing around to different media outlets.)

Worse than his unprofessional tone is when he claims Newt is "nearly devoid of paid staff." Had he read this piece in National Review, he would have seen numerous staffers mentioned, and the article did not even mention all of Newt's.

As I have shown, Politico is not real great at doing actual research, though.

Great article on Newt's campaign by National Review

Robert Costa of National Review interviewed Newt's communications director, Joe DeSantis, about all the recent events. The entire thing is worth reading, and I recommend you do, but I will pick some of the best parts:

On Thursday morning, June 9, former House speaker Newt Gingrich was informed that more than a dozen of his senior political advisers had resigned. All of them, except for longtime spokesman Rick Tyler, were recent additions to his team, hired guns for his nascent presidential campaign.

Knowing that things could quickly spiral out of control, Gingrich called an emergency meeting at his personal office, a few floors above K Street in downtown Washington. Along with his wife, Callista, Gingrich assembled his remaining loyalists for an important, closed-door discussion about how he would handle the news, and whether he would stay in the race.

“They were calm,” recalls Joe DeSantis, a longtime Gingrich adviser, in an interview with National Review Online. “Newt said that he was not going to get pushed out of this race. He and Callista both said that they felt compelled as citizens to keep fighting, to keep running for president, regardless of the news.

“Immediately, we all felt boosted, we got a wave of energy,” DeSantis says. “For weeks, with the old staff, we all wondered why we weren’t busy, why things were moving so slow. Once we saw that Gingrich was reinvigorated, we felt the same way. Newt World felt like it was kicking back into gear, back into the way it has operated for years. We worked till 9 p.m. that evening, looking at how to reframe the campaign in the days ahead.”

But things turned sour within hours. The advisers not only quit, they criticized Gingrich in numerous stories about the exodus, and some blamed their departure on Callista. This sent Team Gingrich into a fury, and remains an open wound within the inner circle.

...

“Those who left were more mechanical; they did not fit with the constant brainstorming culture within Gingrich’s inner circle,” explains DeSantis, who now serves as communications director for the presidential campaign. “It was more of an operational clash. There is an old saying in Newt World: Either you stay for two months, or you fit in and stay for five years or more. It is a different kind of pace here: Newt works 80 to 90 hours per week. You have to roll with it.”

Others have left Newt Gingrich’s camp before, DeSantis observes. It is not always an easy place to work, since the boss is an unconventional political figure, who operates more as a magnet for ideas than as the chief executive of a political machine.

...

[DeSantis]: "We had press events scheduled at the office, but our former point man there (Scott Rials) nixed them. When we went down to the office this past week, we heard about how badly things were being run. Volunteers were not getting calls back, endorsements were not being lined up the way they could have. Totally inexcusable and unprofessional."

...

DeSantis is less critical when it comes to his former colleague Rick Tyler, who was part of Gingrich’s top team for many years. “I think it was more of a burnout thing with Rick,” he surmises. “We all still respect and like Rick. We have been in contact with him since. He was part of Newt World, whereas the others were outsider advisers who were only here for a bit. It’s a bit different with him.”

Looking ahead, DeSantis emphasizes that Gingrich is in the race to win it, that he never considered dropping out. “Newt is reasonable about things going forward,” he says. “He sees a path to the nomination, but he knows that it will not be easy. He will fight for it. But he is not a masochist. He will not stay in if he sees that there is no way for him to win.”

To help out Gingrich, DeSantis says that the entire campaign team has been reshuffled, with longtime aides playing new roles: Kathy Lubbers, Gingrich’s daughter, is a senior adviser; Michael Krull is the campaign’s political director; R. C. Hammond is the press secretary; Jody Thomas runs fundraising; Karen Olson advises Callista; Brady Cassis is the lead researcher; Bess Kelly is the scheduler.

Perhaps the most important shift, DeSantis says, is Gingrich’s decision to make Vince Haley, his coauthor on books and policy proposals, the campaign’s policy director.

“Making Vince Haley the policy director is important,” he says. “The previous advisers did not organize the team with a policy director, so we had all of these communications and ideas floating out there without organization. Now we are going to keep the campaign ideas- and solutions-oriented, with policy organization and presentation our number-one goal.”

DeSantis:

"Iowa is where we are focused," he says. "Other early states are important, but this is where we need to build a powerful movement. We think we can still be competitive there. It is where face-to-face communication can really help you win. Newt has drawn huge crowds there already. He’ll be back in July, if not sooner, building on that early buzz....this will be a different kind of campaign moving forward, the kind of campaign that Gingrich envisioned from the beginning.

...

It will be based around ideas and solutions, individual outreach, and built around Newt’s strengths, from policy speeches to engagement with voters. It will delve into policy areas that other campaigns won’t touch. It will be an open, grassroots-fueled effort — lots of media, trips to early states, speeches, and talk with supporters on Facebook and Twitter."

More DeSantis:

"Newt is also going to look for more long-form venues, whether it is on television with a reporter or during a policy speech at a college or GOP club, to make his ideas known. Later this month (at the Atlanta Press Club on June 22) he will speak on housing in Georgia, for example, to talk about repealing Dodd-Frank and about his ideas on the Federal Reserve....He will directly talk with thousands of primary voters, not interact with them via press releases and stiff appearances."

Newt in 2006: "Renew Milton Friedman's Conservatism"

After Milton Friedman's death in 2006, Newt, along with David Merritt, penned a piece on NationalReview.com titled "Renew Milton Friedman's Conservatism."

In it, they called for the types of solutions Friedman always wanted -- those that powered individuals, and thus markets -- in two areas specifically: health care and education. "Friedman would agree that government can and should play a role in overcoming these challenges. But he would warn that its role must be limited, as he often said that a government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem itself."

On education:

The success of school choice, when properly administered, is indisputable -- proven by hoards of academic studies and thousands of personal experiences. School choice attracts better teachers, encourages creative curriculum, and improves student achievement. Friedman was a passionate advocate for school choice, particularly through his work at the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation. He argued -- correctly -- that by applying market principles to education, you empower students and parents at the expense of bureaucratic government control. This combination, of limited government and a vibrant market, never fails to deliver better outcomes -- even in public education.

On health care:

We need to put the consumer at the center of the health-care system, just as we do in every other market. And the surest way to do this is by creating a national market to purchase health insurance.

...

More competition among insurers in a national market will encourage more creative products, better services and lower prices — just as it always does wherever competition thrives — and every American will be able to find affordable coverage.

...

A vital part of this rational market is the availability of information. Information on performance, cost, and quality allows consumers to make informed decisions, but health care is perhaps the only market in which consumers have virtually no access to this information. When Americans shop for a new car, home, or thousands of other items, they quickly and easily gather information on cost and quality from an endless array of resources. But in health care, consumers are blind. Try finding out how a doctor stacks up against his colleagues. Try finding out how much a hospital charges for an elective surgery. Try finding out which surgical team has the lowest mortality rate.

Gingrich and Merritt wrap the article up this way:

Friedman was right: The only way to do this is to allow markets to work. A fitting tribute to him — and our country — would be a new generation of leaders who see intrusive government as part of our problems and markets as part of the solutions. By applying the conservative, market-based solutions that Milton Friedman so passionately and eloquently advocated, we will undoubtedly bring about real change and build a brighter future for America.