PEARLS BEFORE SWINE

PARTY CRASHER
By NEWT GINGRICH


September 23, 2007 -- The decision of the leading Republican candidates for president to skip the debate being organized by African-American talk show host Tavis Smiley this week is shortsighted, not just for the party but for the country.
Contrary to what candidates in either party may think, the political dividing line in America doesn’t run between the GOP and minorities. For most Americans, it’s not even found between Republicans and Democrats, or the red-versus-blue-state invention of the media.

The real division is between hardworking, tax-paying Americans - of both parties and all races - and an entrenched, permanent governing system in Washington and state capitals designed to serve its own needs and not the needs of the American people.

Over the 42 years since the beginning of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the increasing power of public employee unions, the growth of the bureaucracies, the rise of lawyers, the development of complex regulatory legalism, and the entrenchment of an elite establishment that imposes political correctness have combined to create this permanent governing class system.

And the values of this permanent government are not those of the Americans who pay the taxes and the union dues that support it. Its bureaucracies value process more than achievement; its lawyers value rules over results; and its politically correct elite value avoiding embarrassment more than telling the truth about failure.

In stark contrast, the American people, regardless of race and party affiliation, are overwhelmingly united on key values and on the need for real change in the way America governs itself.

American Solutions for Winning the Future is a new, nonpartisan organization I created that is built around three goals: to defend America and our allies and defeat our enemies, to strengthen and revitalize America’s core values and principles, and to move the government into the 21st century. Our research found that 86 percent of Americans agree that there are key values such as family, freedom, faith and work ethic that unite a large majority of us. And this support for basic American principles is true across the board. Among African-Americans, 78 percent agree, as do 79 percent of Hispanic Americans, that we have such unifying values.

Ninety-two percent of Americans believe that we need to provide long-term solutions instead of short-term fixes.

Eighty-four percent - including 81 percent of African-Americans and 78 percent of Hispanics - believe the scale of change we need is bigger than the presidency and has to involve citizens and public officials at all levels of government.

And a full 74 percent of Americans support changing the way government works by bringing in ideas successfully used in the private sector.

PERMANENT PROBLEMS

Democracies fail when the values of the voters are so clearly at odds with the values of the permanent governing establishment who control the nation’s and the states’ capitals. How did we get to this point?

We’ve witnessed failure after failure of the permanent government: failure to secure the border; failure to adequately respond to Hurricane Katrina; failures in implementation in Iraq and Afghanistan; failure to control the grotesque explosion of congressional pork; failure to make our urban school systems produce educated children; failure to make English the official language of government; failure to balance the federal budget; failure to fix our healthcare delivery system; and failure to reform - Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

These failures of the permanent government are clearly unacceptable to most Americans. But for the permanent government and its interest group allies, the system works just fine because it serves their needs.

For example, from the standpoint of the bureaucracy, the Detroit public schools are a great success, which they prove every time they issue a check. To think the bureaucracy would be horrified over its catastrophically low graduation rate that destroys young lives would assume that their most important metric is how well they serve the students.

Changing Detroit’s dismal performance will not be possible without citizen intervention and their insistence for accountability and the leverage needed to ensure accountability. Detroit parents must be given immediate recourse for underperforming or failing schools beyond waiting for the next election.

One idea for fundamental change would be to give parents the leverage they need by allowing them to take their child out of a failing school and put them into a performing school. The money to educate that child would go with the child to the new school thus giving the parents the leverage and the schools the incentive to perform. Without both leverage and incentives, no change is possible. But the fact is that neither exist today in the Detroit public school system.

This system of self-reinforcing power can never be reformed from within. Change, if it is to come, must come from without.

HEALTH-CARE FOLLIES

The problem is that our current political system is tragically ill-equipped to bring about fundamental change and not just in Detroit but throughout America’s aging and increasingly ineffective bureaucracies.

The model for our bureaucracies were invented in the later 19th century and codified into law during the 1930s. While they worked marginally well in the agrarian and industrial ages, they are increasingly inadequate for the information age.

Health care provides one of the most vivid examples. In health care, there exist few, if any, of the required elements for well-served consumers: products and services of higher quality with more choices, at the lowest cost and with the greatest convenience. Yet, at the moment we need to innovate and transform health care, we have proposals from presidential candidates based upon this now failed model and moves instead toward a Washington bureaucratic-controlled healthcare system.

We need to go in the opposite direction by putting citizens in the driver’s seat by making the price and quality of health-care services transparent so that they can make informed choices.

Florida has already posted pharmacy drug prices online so consumers can compare prices. They have also posted hospital medical procedure prices and their outcomes.

There are many solutions to both improve health care and lower the cost. Health Savings Accounts (HSA) are a good start. But even more price-lowering, quality-improving competitive elements are needed like cross-state insurance purchasing so that health consumers can choose a policy from anywhere in the country that makes sense for them. Getting as many people insured as possible would have enormous benefits to health-care price and quality, and we could insure a substantial number of today’s uninsured by providing a refundable tax credits so the poor can purchase health insurance.

A NEW WAY

In all areas that challenge our nation, we need collaborative, citizen-based solutions, but our political process is designed to give us consultant-led partisan warfare.

We need dramatically new ideas, but the system is designed to give us safe, poll-tested sound bites.

We need a genuine dialogue that transcends party and race, but the system gives us bitterly partisan, highly choreographed political theater and calls it “debate.”

And when someone dares to depart even slightly from the current debate formula - as Tavis Smiley did when he invited Republican candidates to an African-American-organized debate - the front-runners discover that they have “scheduling conflicts.”

For their part, the Democrats are no better. The major Democratic candidates would rather the people not hear their views than attend a debate sponsored by the Fox News Network. Like the Republicans, they’d rather play it safe than risk a genuine conversation about our future.

What America needs in 2008 is the opposite of modern political campaigning.

This requires the creation and sustaining of a citizens movement that reaches out beyond the presidency to the more than 500,000 elected officials at every level of government, from school boards to the White House. To begin the process of creating such a movement, my organization, American Solutions, will hold a series of nationwide workshops on the challenges facing America this Thursday and Saturday, the 13th anniversary of the Contract with America (americansolutions.com).

In substance, this requires reclaiming our country from the permanent governing elite and some difficult choices for both parties.

For Democrats, it means taking positions that may alienate key interest groups but will appeal to a majority of Americans. For instance, the Democratic Party cannot support the overwhelmingly popular positions like controlling the border, English as the official language of government, consumer-based health care, and providing parents who have kids in failing schools with an education coupon redeemable for a good education at another school because their leftist interest groups will not allow them to.

For Republicans, it means offering a clean break from the status quo. The model for the GOP comes from - of all places - France. There, newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy demonstrated that it is possible to produce a decisive election victory in favor of more conservative reform. His most “radical” proposal was to let workers be able to work overtime tax free. This allowed him to stake out a positive position to entice workers who traditionally looked to the Socialist Party to support their interests.

It remains to be seen which political party can create the next governing majority. The time is right for bold leadership that recognizes that in order for America to succeed, the entrenched, permanent government in Washington and our state capitals can and must be defeated. If it sounds like a tall order, that’s because it is. But here’s a modest start: Democrats agree to debate on Fox News, and Republicans agree to debate with Tavis Smiley.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich is the chairman of American Solutions and author of “Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8” (St. Martins Press)