U.S. voters think the system ‘ain’t working,’ Newt Gingrich says at summit in San Diego

The daily struggles of Americans could create inroads for Republican politicians, Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House, told a national group of conservative lawmakers in San Diego Wednesday.

Gingrich was a lunchtime speaker at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s 2021 States and Nation Policy Summit, being held in downtown San Diego through Friday. Gingrich said at the opening session that inflation, homelessness and pandemic-related financial woes are generating dissatisfaction across cultural lines.

“If gasoline keeps going up, if it costs 50 percent more to heat homes each winter, and the price of food keeps going up,” those misfortunes will open avenues for Republicans to unseat Democrats and roll back liberal policies, he said.

“You have a series of waves coming,” he said at the Manchester Grand Hyatt. “I think this is the most important phrase for 2022: ‘This ain’t working.’ There are hundreds of thousands of homeless in Los Angeles and San Francisco. You ask people, is that working?”

The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, describes itself as an organization of state legislators “dedicated to the principles of limited government, free markets and federalism.” It regularly brings numerous lobbyists and lawmakers together and has over the years pushed thousands of model bills in state legislatures across the country.

The Center for Media and Democracy found that right-wing donors and foundations gave a total of $9.2 million to ALEC from 2014 to 2019.

Throughout his speech, Gingrich focused on such issues as trimming bureaucracy, improving schools and competing effectively with China. However the longtime conservative firebrand avoided some other hot-button issues roiling the right, including COVID-19 vaccine mandates and “critical race theory” in education.

Gingrich served in Congress from 1979 until 1999, holding the position of speaker of the House for the final four years before resigning. As speaker he shepherded such causes as welfare reform and capital gains tax cuts through Congress.

He also took combative stances toward Democratic opponents that many political observers say set the stage for today’s partisan animosity.

In his speech at the summit, Gingrich didn’t spell out detailed policy changes that Republicans should offer as alternatives to Democratic legislative agendas, but he predicted that voters would pick change over the status quo.

Democrats hold majorities in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate and in the California Legislature, and Gingrich suggested that’s a liability for them amid the country’s social and economic distress.

He cited as an example Ed Durr, a truck driver who toppled New Jersey’s Democratic State Senate President Steve Sweeney last month. Gingrich said Durr beat the incumbent for a simple reason: “People looked at (Sweeney’s name) on the ballot and said, ‘Not him,’” Gingrich said.

“Next year almost every state in the country can become a ‘not them’ election, even here in California,” he said.

Gingrich said the United States faces dire economic and political challenges from China and argued that American schools aren’t educating students who can perform on the global stage.

“How are you going to produce students in that environment who are going to compete with the Chinese?” he asked. “It’s terrible for the future ... and terrible for national security.”

Outdated bureaucracies are dragging down the country’s ability to respond to crises, he added, arguing that everything from schools to military administration should be scaled back.

“We would be better off if we reduced the Pentagon to a triangle and transformed the rest into a museum,” he said.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed failures in America’s health systems, he said, arguing that the Centers for Disease Control was protective of its own turf and slow to act on COVID-19 testing.

“The failure to deal with COVID in a calm, rational way is a symptom of a collapse of our public health system,” he said.

Gingrich didn’t discuss the Trump administration’s role. Critics have complained that the former president did not take the pandemic seriously, missed the chance to halt its spread before the virus became widespread and sometimes touted unscientific remedies.

Gingrich opined that medical researchers should devote as much attention to developing treatments for the virus as they do to developing vaccines, but he made no mention of claims by some conservative activists and politicians that masks and vaccine mandates constitute civil rights violations.

The former speaker warned that the U.S. needs to upgrade its technology, innovation and industry to compete with China and Russia. He said he believes big changes are needed to keep America competitive.

“There come times when you absolutely have to have a cycle of modernization and revitalization,” Gingrich said. “We’ve done it several times in our history. We can do this. We can learn.”

He did not say what he thinks of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan, which proposes to do much of the same.

On Nov. 15, Biden signed into law the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which allocates more than $1 trillion to improve transportation networks, expand broadband Internet access and promote clean energy projects. A second, nearly $2 trillion plan that would expand health care and social benefits and fight climate change passed the House last month but faces Republican opposition.

Other speakers featured in the conference include former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Sen. Mike Lee of Utah and South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem.