By Newt Gingrich
President Barack Obama has recently experienced two very rough one-year anniversaries. Last November, at the one-year anniversary of his election victory, Obama saw decisive Republican gubernatorial victories in two states he had carried.
On Tuesday, the anniversary of his inauguration, he saw a Republican election victory in Massachusetts effectively derail his health care plans, the initiative on which the president has spent the most time, energy and political capital.
As Obama looks out to the two-year anniversary of his election in 2010, the landscape looks bleak.
Analysts like Charlie Cook are warning that 2010 could become a catastrophic year for Democrats. At best, it is going to be a bad year. Cook’s recent National Journal article made the stunning point that since World War II there have been only 12 months in even-numbered (election) years in which unemployment was above 8 percent. All 12 months were in 1982. I was in Congress then, and we lost 26 seats. This year, America will almost certainly have 9 percent-plus unemployment for the entire year. That alone bodes badly for the Democrats.
Next week, Obama will give his first State of the Union address. Between now and then, he needs to stop, rethink, recalibrate, and learn some painful lessons.
He needs to accept that the country was not voting for a left-wing agenda in 2008. Instead, it was voting out a Republican leadership it deemed unable to govern effectively.
The person the American people thought they were voting for in 2008 was a moderate who wanted to bring transparency to government and work with leaders of both parties on common-sense reform.
However, upon taking office, the president turned over massive power to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, who wrote legislation in such a stunningly partisan way that they received almost no Republican votes on any major piece of legislation.
Furthermore, the bills were often written in secret, passed without giving the American people or even Congress a chance to read them, and included special deals for big-business interests, political supporters and key senators as a way to get their support.
This clearly was not change America could believe in.
It is a mystery why Obama thought he could govern as a different person from the one he campaigned as, but he now has a chance to reset his presidency around the principles he espoused during the campaign.
No more secret deals.
No more Pelosi-Reid machine votes.
No more left-wing, Democrats-only strategies.
Republicans would be very smart to approach Obama with a series of reform proposals in health care, national security, deficit reduction and economic growth. Obama would be even smarter to figure out which of these he and the moderates in the Democratic caucus can get behind, and score an easy series of legislative victories that would help both his political fortunes and the country.
They should be small, narrowly focused bills and written in a transparent way. A good starting point would be aggressive steps to fight fraud in Medicare and Medicaid, which Jim Frogue at the Center for Health Transformation estimates costs taxpayers as much as $120 billion a year.
The left-wing leadership in the House and Senate would hate and fight such a change in course. However, moderate Democrats (and most Americans) would breathe a sigh of relief.
A year of President Obama that was more like candidate Obama could make the two-year anniversary of his election much more pleasant than his first.
Newt Gingrich is general chairman of American Solutions and a former speaker of the House.
{Matzav.com Newscenter}
this fool should stay quiet. he has no moral authority after what he did.
Thanks for saying it like it is. Very well thoughtout article.
Newt is a hypocrite. his wife was sick in the hospital and he went and acted reprehensibly while he was busy leading impeachment proceedings against clinton.
I think Mr. Newt can’t ever be taken seriously for public office again, but he should still be a voice at the table.
Re: “Mr. President, Govern as you promised.”
Well, to my dismay, that’s what this guy
is doing—in a perverse fashion.
“People thought they were voting for a
moderate who wanted to bring transparency to
government…”
Newt might be right about what people
thought. But if you listened to Obama’s
campaign rhetoric, you have to conclude
this guy is everything but a moderate
even though he often alluded to
transparency.
The fact remains that Obama spoke very clearly about his ideological agenda.
He meant every word of it from his erroneous
ideological premises. (Whether his ideology is
Marxist or Fabian Socialist, the precise
definition can be left to political scientists.
Professor Jonah Goldberg depicts it as “Liberal
Fascism” in a recent book on the subject.)
The important thing to know is that
Obama really believes in maximizing the role
of government. (A political scientist would
classify him as a statist.)
One aspect of the Obama doctrine
pertains to a disregard for the Constitution.
(In campaign statements, Obama said that the
Constitution—as we know it—is inadequate.
I paraphrase.
Based on such a radical formulation, Obama perversely advocates granting aliens—even enemy combattants—the
same jury-trial rights that American citizens
enjoy. Pursuant to such folly, the President
promised to disband Gitmo to bring Islamo-Fascist murderers—enemies of America and the
free world—to New York City. (For such
folly alone, the guy deserves to be impeached.)
Thus, contrary to Newt’s desire
to make Obama keep his promises, here’s one promise people want the guy to break.
Here’s another promise Americans
want Obama to break: setting up a secret police force. Yes, that’s right. The guy actually wants to do that. He said so in a
campaign speech, to paraphrase: He wants to
set up a security force which “is just as strong and just as powerful” as the regular
armed forces of the United States. (That’s
what the Bolsheviks and the Nazis proposed and
implemented.) Well, we don’t want that here.
Break that promise.
All this stems from Obama’s left-wing obsession with globalism which is at the
expense of American patriotism. (That’s why
Obama constantly bows to foreign dignataries—
an unprecedented gesture for a president in
American history.)
Now, in the aftermath of the
Mass. election, his socialist health care
plan is dead on arrival—rejected by the
electorate in a state whose late senator
made socialized medicine his major political
ambition.
There are other problematic promises normal people want the guy to break.
Let’s start with keeping those Jihad scoundrels
out of the United States. Keep Gitmo open for as long as necessary. Tell Shlemeel Schumer and Rebbetzin Gillibrand that the people want
those Islamo-Fascists to remain incarcerated out of America. If Shlemeel Schumer wants
enemy combattants to be cared for. let him go
to Gitmo and care for them down there as long as he wants.
It’s up to Conservatives to take back this country. All the liberals and socialists (most of them are in the Democrat
Party) have to be voted out of office.
Obama’s empty slogan of hope and
change actually meant—more government,
less freedom. More globalism—less patriotism.
The guy is sending troops into
Afghanistan but still allows aliens to cross
our borders with impunity. To allow this now
is even more outrageous than before in light
of current unemployment rates which are going
up—even though the Comrade-In-Chief says
everything is fine.
We need tough security measures
to deal with America’s enemies—
especially after the Fort Hood masssacre.
The murderer, Major Hassan, should be
executed—and then we can his Miranda
rights.