Gingrich: GOP Needs a 2018 Contract With America

No one understands the conservative Republican movement or the importance of big ideas better than former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. For the last 40 years, he’s been a generator of ideas and a leading strategic messenger for the GOP. In 1981, the brash two-term congressman was part of President Reagan’s supply-side tax-cutting task force. By 1994, he created a successful campaign platform -- his party’s “Contract With America” -- that helped Republicans take control of the House for the first time in 40 years and resulted in Gingrich being elected speaker. In 2012, he ran unsuccessfully for president, but emerged in 2016 as an early Donald Trump supporter and a kindred spirit of the president’s growth message and disrupter outlook.

Few people in American politics today are better at explaining and creating a platform of ideas than Newt Gingrich. As a former history professor, he has authored an eye-popping 36 books of fiction and nonfiction, and has recently added to his list a new online-only mini-book, “The Republican Choice for 2018: Win or Lose.”  His latest publication is presented more as a political strategy paper than a book, weighing in at only 58 pages.  It’s a concise playbook for anyone running for office in 2018 and mimics the “Contract With America” by listing idea-based slogans and focused campaign themes. Throughout the e-book, Gingrich is a master at weaving current political issues with historical examples and then applying those examples to the 2018 election.  For anyone with a short attention span or in need of a quick political primer, it’s insightful, thoughtful and full of out-of-the-box ideas.

Gingrich is clearly concerned that the GOP has not packaged its accomplishments or defined the issues in a clear way for the voters in 2018.  “Republicans won’t win with the way they are currently campaigning,” he states in the book’s first few pages. He wants his party’s candidates to put forward a bold national plan rather than the traditional district-by-district approach with attack ads. His premise is that “the 2018 election is a big choice election between two alternative universes.”  He wants the Republicans to create a contrast between their platform of “Contract With America”-related ideas and  the extremes that, he believes, now characterize the Democratic Party: 

“The contrast of the positive achievements of the Trump-Republican program with the destructive proposals of the Left creates a remarkable opportunity.  Republicans represent lower taxes, more jobs, rising take-home pay, the lowest Black unemployment rate historically recorded, fewer people dependent on food stamps (because they are getting jobs), better trade agreements, less bureaucratic red tape, and skyrocketing small business confidence. The Left represents higher taxes, more bureaucratic red tape, more people dependent on food stamps, and bankruptcy through a totally unaffordable government-run health care system…

“The opportunity for defining two alternative universes has seldom been better, nor the choice clearer. If the Left’s universe defines 2018, the Republicans will lose the House and will be lucky to gain one or two seats in the Senate. If the conservative, grassroots rebellion Republican universe defines the 2018 midterm fight, election night will be as big of a shock for the Left as it was in 2016.”