Episode 756: Contract with America – 30th Anniversary

Published Sep 27, 2024, 9:00 AM

On the 30th anniversary of the Contract with America, Newt discusses the historical significance of the Contract, a pivotal moment in U.S. political history. He talks about his leadership aspirations upon his arrival in Congress, which culminated in the Republican Revolution of 1994. This revolution marked the end of 40 years of Democratic control in the House of Representatives, leading to significant reforms such as welfare reform and a balanced federal budget. Newt underscores the strategic planning and team effort behind the Contract with America, emphasizing its role in shifting the balance of power in Washington and its lasting impact on American politics.

The story of the Contract with America begins with new Gigrich.

When Nut came to Congress, he was very impatient, He wanted to get things done. He was somebody who aspired to leadership.

The Contract provided substance behind the rhetoric.

It's remarkable how wonderful winning is, and it can change people's views of everything.

On this episode of News World, we're going to explore a historic moment thirty years ago in November nineteen ninety four, when the Republican Revolution took control of the House for the first time in forty years, using a concept called the Contract with America. It was a remarkable moment because for forty years, the same party, the same ideology, the Democrats, had been to control of the House without much challenge, and suddenly, at the end of that forty years they were defeated decisively and you had new people, new chairmen, new leaders, a new speaker, all moving the country in a significantly different direction. The gap between the liberalism the Democrats and the conservatism of the Republicans meant that shifting power in the House decisively shifted power in Washington made it possible to reform welfare, to balance the federal budget to have a whole series of changes that could never have occurred without some kind of breakup of the old order. And in that process, the Contract with America a specific pledge to the American people that if you elect us, we will do these things. That contract became the tool which enabled us to end four decades of one party rule and to create a period of dramatic reform and dramatic change. I'm delighted to say that Fox Nation features a special on the Contract with America. I think we're once again in a period where there are big decisions to be made, big questions to be answered. When you look back on what happened with the Contract with America and the nineteen ninety four election, it was a moment of decisive change. When I say decisive, think about this. For forty years, from the election of nineteen fifty four to the election of nineteen ninety four, the Democrats controlled the US House of Representatives. Now that included President Eisenhower's re election, President Nixon's election, President Reagan's election and reelection, and President George H. W. Bush's election. Yet, no matter what the Republicans were doing at the presidential level, and that included some control of the US Senate. They could never break through in the House, and so suddenly here we were. Forty years of Democratic control ceases in one evening. And a major part of that was the adoption by the House Republicans of a contract with America. A contract that was important, first of all, because it was about things the American people wanted. It was about balancing the budget. It's about reforming the Congress. It was about reforming welfare, it was about cutting taxes. Had a series of steps that seventy or eighty percent American people really wanted to have Congress take, and they really knew that the Democrats had failed to take them. And so after forty years, exhaustion had set in and they were ready for something new. It was also historic because it shifted decisively the balance of power. Think about this, for four decades, people knew the Democrats had been in charge of the House. You'd go out to recruit somebody to run for Congress, and if you're a Republican, you know, and they know you're recruiting them to serve in the minority. If you're a Democrat, you know and they know you're recruiting them to serve in the majority. So it was much easier for Democrats to recruit, much harder for Republicans to recruit. And these things become self fulfilling prophecies on the contract, on its importance, on how it happened, I think it will be a great Civics lesson because there were things that were done that could be done again, but they were quite remarkable. First of all, it was a team effort. It wasn't one or two or three people. I ended up becoming Speaker of the House, but that's because there was a whole team. Congressman Bob Walker, who had been my ally for years, played a major role in thinking through how to make this happen.

We had a whole series of dinners in the basement of Tortilla Coos to talk through how we were going to make this into a real successful revolution. The people who I remember being there were Dick r Me, Tom Delay, Bill Paxson, Newton, myself.

They came out of there thinking that we can all work together and trust each other to do the heavy lifting and not cut and run on each other.

Congressman Dick Army, who was the chairman of the conference and became the majority leader played a key role in organizing the legislation. Dan Meyer, who today is working for Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, was at that time my chief of staff, played a decisive role. Joe Gaylord, who's been my partner on politics sincerely nineteen eighties. He was on the whole journey with me year after year. Remember I came into Congress in nineteen seventy eight and I said, we need to become a majority. We've been a minority for twenty four years. Well, we lost in eighty eighty two, eighty four, eighty six, eighty eight, ninety two. You know, I was getting a little tiring by that stage. Finally we won in ninety four, and sometimes people, boy, you guys, sure we're lucky. No, we were lucky, But more importantly, we were prepared. We had grown a team ready to go out and win the election. And frankly, it took a team. It's a big country. One of the lessons I think for the Republicans in Congress today is to think about, how are you going to have big enough issues, How are you going to recruit good enough people, How are you going to run a national campaign where people get up in the morning and say yes, I want them to win. So this twenty fifth anniversary, I think is a very useful moment before we get into the actual twenty twenty campaign, to think about how politics works in America, how government works in America. We picked up fifty three seats that year. Nobody expected that. It was a remarkable breakthrough. The Democratic Speaker of the House, Tom Fowley lost. The Democratic Chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski, who was in a very Democratic district in downtown Chicago. Nobody thought he was in trouble. He lost again and again. We were able to reach out and we ran an all except three districts. Out of four hundred and thirty five districts in nineteen ninety four, four hundred and thirty two of them had Republican candidates. So we were the most competitive we'd ever been in modern times, and I think that took a real commitment. Now, the Capitol Steps event was the second time we'd done that. We actually did the first one back in nineteen eighty. It was a remarkable moment. I had been approached by Republican National Committee Chairman Bill Brock with the idea that maybe we could get all of our House and Senate candidates to stand on the steps with Governor Reagan and with George H. W. Bush as vice presidential nominee, and pledged that we would do a set of things. I really wanted to do it because I knew that my good friend Mac Maddingly, who was running for the Senate in Georgia, was going to come very close to beating incumbent Senator Herman Talmodch who had a big scandal and who'd had a very strong Democratic opponent in the primary, but that probably Mac couldn't quite get the last two or three or four percent, and he needed some boost from Reagan to get over the top. And so we put together an event, and in the fall of nineteen eighty, for the first time ever, we had a chance to bring all the Republican candidates together to commit to a series of specific, big ideas, all of them based on the Reagan campaign. And the result was we picked up twelve US Senate seats, one controlled the Senate when nobody thought we would. Six of those twelve we won by a combined total of seventy five thousand votes. So you can see that that Capitol Steps event really made a big difference now in that setting. As we came up through the years, and when we got to nineteen ninety four, we said, well, let's learn some lessons from that, and let me be clear. What we did was standing on Ronald Reagan's shoulders. He'd campaigned on welfare reform since nineteen sixty five running for governor. He was deeply committed to a balanced budget. He believed in lower taxes. A lot of the pieces of our concept grew out of Reagan and his belief system, and that made it easier for our members to rally together and decide that they wanted to be part of this kind of a contract. Now. We decided just instinctively that we wanted to do a contract. The reason was people were used to candidates making promises. We needed to have something different. We need to have a flavor that said, look, we're really serious about this. Because we wanted to convince a lot of people who normally didn't vote in and off year that this was worth their going out and voting for. So we called it a contract. We really worked very hard to build publicity. I come out of a school that believes that repetition beats everything else. Partly I suspect because I represented Atlanta, and the Coca Cola model was that you had to hear the word Coca Cola seven times a week to be reminded about a product which began in the eighteen seventies. So I really understood the idea of a repetition, and so we wanted all the way through. Starting in May June, began talking about the idea of a contract, talking about the ideas to go into it. We developed it. We got Helly Barber and the Republican National Committee to pay for two full page ad and TV Guide, the most expensive ad ever taken on behalf of the House Republicans.

Newt's big idea was we're going to put an ad and TV Guide. The idea was we're going to put an insert in there about contract with America, and the message is if you elect Republicans to run the House Representatives, if we win the House Representatives, this is what we pledge we'll do.

Now it's a sign of how the world has changed. But back then TV Guide was the biggest magazine in America. Nobody in the House Republican Party, after forty years in the minority, thought it was possible to get that kind of attention, and so Haley Barber gave us a commitment that really worked, and as a result, our members did a sense of excitement. Now it also meant they had to be for the contract. So one of the interesting processes that we went through was convincing the members, look, we're all going to go out here on the Capitol steps. We're all going to sign the contract. And we had a handful of members who didn't want to, but all but three of them did sign it, and as a result, you had a huge momentum of positive thought.

Today on these steps, we are for this contract as a first step towards renewing American civilization. I'm going to sign the contract now, as the last member to do so. On behalf of the Republican Conference.

We had an actually pretty good rule of thumb for what made an issue part of the contract. Member you depicked tons of things, and I had two sets of rules. The first one was not to put anything in which would allow the Mayor Times in the Washington Post to attack us as extremists. I personally believed in school prayer, I personally very strongly committed on issues of life, but I knew if we put those two in, the entire thing would be distorted and our liberal news media would attack us for putting together a right wing document, So we avoided giving our opponents in the media an easy target. The second thing we did is we had a ground rule. Everything had to be at least seventy and preferably eighty percent approval. We knew, for example, that there was overwhelming support for welfare reform. The people believe in the work ethic, they were tired of paying people to be dependent, and so we were able to go out and we were able to put together a welfare reform plank. And why did that matter? Well, it mattered because if you're going to run as a party which has not been in power for forty years, if you're going to run one hundred or one hundred and fifty candidates who've really never been candidates before, you've got to give them things to talk about. They give them a huge advantage. The Republicans had to have talking points. We wanted our candidates mutually reinforcing each other. So if you were out driving and you happened to drive through Boise, Idaho, and you heard one of our candidates on local drivetime radio. We wanted their message to reinforce what you're going to hear later on that day if you drove through Spokane, Washington. Plus, we thought that the points we had come up with in the contract were just more powerful than people would find randomly on their own. So this was a very serious and very concerted effort. So we wanted our candidates to be able to go on drivetime radio back home and have the interviewer say, so, how do you feel about welfare reform? Oh, I'm really for a welfare reform. I believe in work. How do you feel about a balanced budget? I'm committed to a balance budget. When you did three or four or five of those in a row, that person driving to work listening to you is going well, I agree with that one, and I agree with that one, and I agree with that one, and all of a sudden, gone, gee, you know, this candidate's pretty good. And that was a big part of our underlying effort to put all of this together. When we come back, we'll revisit election night in November nineteen ninety four, when the Republicans took the majority. Now, election night was amazing because I knew him in local talk radio. My good friend Sean Hannity agreed to be the host for the election night in Georgia. The results started to come in. We'd already been told on September seventeenth that we were going to pick up fifty three seats by Joe Gaylord, who really knew the country so well. It was astonishing the fact that we had really followed and tracked and had a pretty good sense of what was going to happen. And on election night, as the return started to come in, as we started to pick up seats that nobody thought we could win, began to realize, you know, this is going to come together. It was remarkable. My two daughters, Jackie Cushman and Kathy Lebbers, were there. They knew they were part of history. Many of our friends who'd been major supporters Gay Gains, for example, who had run go Pack and helped us grow the Modern Party, Bou Callaway, who had run go Pack before Gay, they were all there. All of my local supporters from Cobb County and from around Georgia were there, People like Steve Hanser and Mel Steely, who I taught with at West Georgia College. It was a remarkable, remarkable evening. I think that we were a little overwhelmed as the evening went on, just by people calling for all over the country talking with us and beginning to recognize that we actually were going to have to organize the House and actually going to have to do things. We've not been in a majority for forty years. If you were under fifty eight years of age, you'd never voted in an election that had a Republican House majority. And if you were a hardcore, solid Republican supporter, you were just giddy.

We're weddy, We're wedding, We're ready. Let me say first of all.

That Halle Barber, who will go down in history I think is one of the great National chairman of all time, didn't tell you the whole story. This ad was in TV Guide because Halle Barber and the Republican National Committee paid I think it was two hundred and eighty thousand dollars to put this in there. And when he said if the House Republicans are willing to commit to real change, I'll pay for the ad, an awful lot of folks thought he had lost his mind. Most of them have since told him, I'm glad they were that they thought it up, but we would not be here as a majority without Halle Barber and the Republican National Committee.

Peter Jenning, Good evening.

We begin tonight with the most straightforward reaction we've heard all day for the results of yesterday's midterm election. The Democratic Chairman David Wilhelms had simply, we got our butts kicked, and you can see how badly by this. In every race for the Senate, the House, and for governor yesterday, not one incumbent Republican lost. Republicans are now the majority party, both in the Congress and in the governor's mansions across the nation. The only power base the Democrats still have is the one that was not at stake yesterday, the presidency itself.

After forty years of Democratic control of the House, Americans grew wary of candidates saying one thing and doing another. I had the opportunity to lead a team of Conservatives hungry for the opportunity to take over the party and the House and try a new way of governing. We embarked on a listening tour to learn what was most important in people's lives and from that create an agenda worth voting for We promised Americans that if they voted Republican, we would fight for ten important planks, each representing bills we would bring to the floor in the first one hundred days of office. And we neated the Contract with America. Because a campaign promises one thing, a contract is something very different. We even added a scorecard on the planks inside TV gun and if we didn't bring these bills to the floor in the first hundred days, the American people could kick us out. The importance of the first hundred days was first of all, that it was a model that President Franklin, Down and Roosevelt had used to maximize getting things through back in nineteen thirty three. Second, we wanted a deadline to force ourselves to work. Ironically, the person who's written best about this is Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who wrote a book back in two thousand and seven. It was Schumer's view that the real purpose of the Contract with America was to radicalize the House Republican Party, that it was a management document, and that was exactly right. I knew that it would be powerful for us in terms of the election, but more importantly, I didn't want to create a majority and have them promptly run over to Georgetown, start going to lobby ast cocktail parties, and become normal. I wanted them to consciously be different, to be reform oriented, to be militant. And that lasted about three years. We couldn't sustain it forever, but for about three years we were very, very different, and very much in the tradition of Henry Clay and the Warhawks back in eighteen ten, we said, in the first hundred days, we're going to vote in every one of these. Now, I want to make a point about this. I think it's very important to understand that we did this very carefully. We promised what we could do. We didn't promise what we couldn't do. We didn't promise we'd pass everything because we knew we didn't have the votes. But as the speaker, I could schedule everything. So we said we will have a vote on everything in the first hundred days, and we did. And on the House side, we passed everything except the term limits, which did not get a constitutional majority, but we passed a constitutional amendment for balance budget. We passed every major bill. Now, imagine when we sat down after election and we took stock. We realized that the only Republican who had served in a Republican House majority was Congressman Bill Emerson of Missouri, who was a page in nineteen fifty four. There was not a single congressman on the Republican side who had served in a Republican majority. There were several Democrats who had switched and become Republican, they'd served in Democrat majorities. But it was remarkable. So give an entire team here. And this is where Bob Walker was so important, because Walker is a great parliamentary leader, understands the rules of the House, and he literally spent December training our members. We didn't have people who were used to being in the chair, So how do you preside over the house? How do you use the game? What are the procedures you're following. So we went through all of that and on the opening day we probably went a little bit overboard, I'll be honest. We met to like two or three in the morning. We did so much. I think we'd been a little wiser, we might have spread that out over three days. We were so excited, we felt like we were making history.

So with partnership, but with purpose, I passed this great gavel of our government, with resignation, but with resolve, I hereby, in forty years of democratic rule of this House, I now have the high honor and distinct privilege to present to the House of Representatives our new Speaker, the gentleman from Georgia, Newt Gingrich.

The second day we were there, we put the Thomas system online at the Library of Congress, so any American anywhere in the country, at no cost, with no lobby, could go online, for example, and see bills in One of my proudest moments was when Bill Archer, the Chairman of Ways and Means, got up and announced that he had introduced the tax cut and that they read the URL for to go and look up the tax cut on the new Congressional Internet. And I was so proud of that breakthrough because it meant that every American had a chance to learn about their Congress on their terms without having to pay anybody. So we really worked at it. We went first of all in terms of this sheer power and the change of how the system worked. We went for forty years with no Republican being Speaker of the House, no Republican majority. In ninety four we took control. We kept it for twelve years until two thousand and six. Then in twenty ten, with John Bayner's really remarkable leadership, we took it back again and we kept it until last year. So suddenly you went from a period where they had controlled the House for forty years to a period where for twenty out of the last twenty four years, we have controlled the House. Now that's a real shift in power, so real shift in whose moving ideas, whose moving legislation, what's happening. Some of it was remarkably important. I'll just give you one example. Welfare reform, which was far and away the most important single domestic bill we passed, changed the whole face of welfare. Before our Welfare reform bill, every welfare office in the country train people and how to be dependent, how to maximize getting money from the government, how to avoid work. After we passed welfare reform, they became employment offices. They started training people, they started helping people find jobs. The miraculous result was that in the first couple years, we had the largest decline in the number of children in poverty in American history because their parents went to work. God salaries began to rise. Life got better, and so I look at things like that and I think, you know, the Contract did make a big difference. It was a remarkable moment. I'm very proud to have been part of it. It is possible to have an idea oriented campaign to offer big reforms, to rally the American people and to move the country in the right direction. And remembering the twenty fifth Anniversity of Contract, I think is really an important thing to do. Next we'll talk about the legacy of the Contract and why it's still important today.

This is a night to celebrate.

So I just want to share one, just one story with you, because I thought it was so amazing.

We were on the House floor last night.

We were down to the last vote.

We had defeated the Democrats.

Substitute, and we had defeated the Democrats motion to recommit. And I never ever before fully understand how much they love bureaucrats and hate tax cuts. There we were on the House floor, we were about to vote. I was about to get my voting card out. I was excited. It was the final big vote of the contract, and suddenly a Democrat jumped up. Now we had been debating all day and every Democrat had said, this is a huge tax cut. We can't afford it. This is a one hundred and eighty nine billion dollar tax cut. We can't afford it. This takes money away from bureaucrats and gives it to children.

We can't afford it.

This takes more money away from bureaucrats and gives us to entrepreneurs. It takes even more money away from bureaucrats and gives it to senior citizens.

This is a horrible tax cut.

And at the last second one of the Democrats jumped up and said, I have a point of order.

This is a tax increase. Now.

I thought it was one of the weirdest moments in the history of the House. And then I realized that was a Democrat from northern Virginia who represented bureaucrats and resented the tax cuts, and he just couldn't get it. So I just want all of you to know this was the beginning. You made it possible. With your health, we passed it. And with your health we're coming back in May to even bigger and even better and even more exciting.

Even thankful.

The Republican Revolution of nineteen ninety four really happened. I think for three very different reasons. First, there had been a group of younger activists Republicans who had been working now for sixteen years to create a majority, and they knew they had to go all out in order to become a majority. Second, we were still standing on Ronald Reagan's shoulders, and we knew, or at least we believed that the core of Reaganism, welfare reform, the work ethic, lower taxes, more economic growth, those kind of ideas we believe deeply still appealed to a massive majority of Americans. And Third, after forty years in power as a monopoly, the Democrats had finally just gotten tired, and so they were sort of in a position to be knocked out of power. We had a bunch of hungry, aggressive, eager people really wanting to get into power, and Ronald Reagan had given us a set of ideas powerful enough and clear enough to in fact enable us to win a majority. I think the Contract remains important because first, it's proof that you can change history. It's proof that something can happen that hadn't happened in forty years. Second, it's proof that you can be for big, positive ideas and actually run an ideal oriented campaign and have the country respond by electing you. And Third, it's important because it's a reminder that it takes a team to run a country the size of America, and that when that team came together, the American people responded, thank you for listening. You can watch the Contract with America's Special streaming now in Fox Nation. Newtsworld is produced by Gangwish three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnsey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. The artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Ginger three sixty. If you've been enjoying Nutsworld, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcasts and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of Newtsworld can sign up for my three free weekly columns at gingwidthree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm newt Gingrich. This is Newtsworld.

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