•  Campaign Videos (July 2011) « Newt 2012
  

Gingrich: I'm Newt Gingrich and I want to welcome you to the first ever TeaParty.net Twitter Debate.  It's a brand new approach to getting the American people involved.  And we need new approaches because the old ways aren't working.  

The old ways aren't putting 14 million Americans back to work.  The old ways aren't helping housing prices which have dropped deeper than in the Great Depression.  The old ways aren't fixing a $2 trillion deficit. 

Let's be clear.  We have a president dedicated to a socialist, big government, high tax bureaucratic system that leads to unemployment, to poverty and to food stamps.

There's a reason President Obama's the best food stamp president in American history.  He believes in big government.  He believes in crushing business.  He believes in regulating every American.  He believes an ObamaCare that takes your health and puts it in the hands of a Washington bureaucrat.

We need a very different approach.  We need somebody who knows what they're doing and somebody tough enough to do it.

I am the only candidate in this race who has balanced the budget.  We paid off $405 billion in debt.  We passed the first entitlement reform in modern history, and took people off of welfare.  Two out of every three who were on welfare went to work or went to school.  They were better off, they earned a better future, and the taxpayer was better off.  In addition we had the first tax cut in 16 years.  Unemployment dropped from 5.6 percent to slightly under 4 percent.

Since those days, I've been studying deeply what's gone wrong.  I've looked at the Defense Department, the intelligence community, the State Department; I've worked inside the Department of Health and Human Services trying to understand why is health care so expensive?  Why are the bureaucrats making such a mess out of everything?

And as I've studied it, I've developed some very big new approaches designed to accomplish three things.

Get Americans back to work.

Re-establish American exceptionalism based on the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist papers, and the Founding Fathers.

And once again make American national security and homeland security the best in the world.

Those three things are big assignments.  They're going to take all of us.

I'm asking people to be with me, not for me, because we're going to need help all the way through the next eight years making sure that we actually get the job done.

It's not enough just to win an election.  It's not enough just to beat Barack Obama.

We have to change Washington.  We have to change the judges, the bureaucracies, the policies; we have to get back to the things that work for America.

With your help, we can and that's why I think it's important that together we have this debate out in the open.

[Music florish]

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Notes: For the TeaParty.net First President Debate on Twitter candidates were allowed three-minute opening statements.  Gingrich was the only one who produced a special video for his opening.

Copyright © 2011 Eric M. Appleman/Democracy in Action.