Gingrich: Americans hungry for change, conservative solutions

CEDAR RAPIDS – This could be a very good year for Republicans in Iowa and across the nation, according to the architect of the 1994 GOP takeover of the U.S. House.

Former Speaker of the U.S. House Newt Gingrich, the author of the Contract with America, predicted in Cedar Rapids May 26 that the GOP has a 50-50 shot at winning control of the House and a one-in-three chance of controlling the Senate after the mid-term elections in November.

Speaking to more than 100 people at a fundraiser for the Republican Party of Iowa and Republican Iowa House Majority Fund at Kirkwood Community College, Gingrich said that as American voters come to understand the “disaster” that is unfolding before them, they are going to want to make a change.

“Some of you will recognize this is a really important year that leads to another really important year,” he said. “If we do our job in these two cycles, we will replace the left, replace Obama, we will put the country back on the right track.

He senses American are hungry for solutions and a majority of them are more likely to agree with Republicans than with liberal Democrats.

“There are more people in America who are conservatives and moderates than there are left-winger,” he said, “more people who believe in freedom and free markets and private property than there are socialists, there are more people in American who believe our rights come from our creator than there are secularists.

“We allow them to dominate us because they are arrogant enough to do it and we're meek enough to let them get away with it,” Gingrich said. “We need to stand up and say, ‘No, that's over.'”

The elections of 2010 and 2012 are going to be about whether the country is going to become a “secular-socialist machine dominated by a group in Washington,” Gingrich said, or whether American will move in a fundamentally different direction “and we're going to allow (Obama) to go to Europe to become a tenured faculty member in a socialist country teaching that decay is acceptable.”

“We're not going to accept his policies for this country,” he said to applause.

It won't be easy. Gingrich challenged his audience to see it as a “as a personal obligation of citizenship to make sure that we do, in fact, send a signal that America wants very dramatic change and that change begins in Iowa.”

“We need to be ready to campaign, to raise money, to turn out the vote, to make sure that every person who agrees goes to vote this fall,” he said.

He encouraged that GOP leadership is following his lead in developing what is being referred to as a “Compact with America,” a series of positive solutions to the problems facing America.

“We need to say what we will do when we govern, not just what we oppose,” he said and encouraged Republicans to be the “party of yes.”

Such a plan would be the basis for a “national campaign based on a positive pledge to solve real problems,” Gingrich said.

Gingrich also delivered a lecture in Davenport and spoke at a GOP fundraiser in Des Moines.