Newt Gingrich controls debate on energy policy

Even though he is currently running third in the Republican Primaries, with approximately only half of the delegates won so far by Rick Santorum, who is running second, and one-third the delegates of the current leader in the Primaries, Mitt Romney, it is the ideas proposed by Newt Gingrich, not Mitt Romney, and not Rick Santorum, which are drawing fire from the current Democrat-controlled White House. Neither Romney nor Santorum have revealed a platform that is compelling enough to draw commentary from our current President, Barack Obama; but Newt Gingrich's energy proposals, being simple to communicate and easy to defend given the abundance of facts supporting them, clearly represent an early threat to the President's re-election, so much so that he is already actively campaigning against those ideas. Neither Romney nor Santorum can boast the honor of having such compelling and broadly appealing ideas that the President has singled out those ideas for rebuttal.

Even the analogies used by Newt Gingrich, being powerfully descriptive and meaningful to Americans, are being absconded and repeated by the President as his own.

Newt Gingrich: It's kind of strange to have an American president who favors Saudi oil over American oil. Saudi jobs over American jobs. I frankly want an energy policy so no president ever again bows to a Saudi King...

Brian Kilmeade: Mr. Speaker, you are clearly on the President's mind. The $2.50 [per gallon]... and he used your example that you've been using, because you wanted talk about space exploration, you said, "they would have said that about Christopher Columbus" -- he's even using your phrases.


Newt Gingrich: Well, imitation is a high form of flattery... It is the President who is refusing to recognize the modern world. In the modern world, the amount of oil we have in North Dakota because of new drilling technology has jumped from 150 million barrels to 24 billion barrels in the last decade. We have more oil in North Dakota than we ever dreamed possible, and some poeple think that with another generation of new technology, we'll have 500 billion barrels in North Dakota. It's the President who is sort of a -- he used the term "flat-earth society" [in reference to Newt's energy proposals], I would say that he belongs to the "Sierra Club Flat-Earth Society," he can't believe anything new that would improve energy because then it takes away his desire for government to control our lives... Look, I'm for biological research, I'm for developing algea over time, but with the current algea technologies you'd have to have over $850 per barrel oil to make them economically competitive. The President just lives in this fantasy land where he goes around -- it's like Solyndra -- he imagines these things up. It's like shovel-ready jobs. Remember he finally admitted two years later that there were no shovel-ready jobs in his shovel-ready jobs program? Well, we're back to the same fantasy life. The American people deserve inexpensive oil and gas, if it's possible, they deserve it from American sources, to keep the money in America to create American jobs. The President is doing just the opposite. He's asking the Saudi's to bail us out, which means that he'll have to bow even more deeply the next time he sees a Saudi King. I'm deeply opposed to that kind of foreign policy.

Notice how throughout his conversation, Newt effortlessly weaves the health of the American economy with foreign policy and national security. It's all connected, and this connectedness is easy to manage in the course of discussion for someone like Newt, who has command of the ideas and the facts. His main competitors, on the other hand, compartmentalize topics and limit themselves to pragmatics that spin well as marketing slogans and commercials. Romney and Santorum come off as traveling salesmen, selling themselves for President. Newt, on the other hand, is an intellectual with ideas, who's task is earning the Presidency through informed and persuasive argument.

We Conservatives got snookered by a "traveling salesman" in 2000, and held our nose in 2004 when we knew what we were voting for. But we couldn't do it in 2008. I'm not sure I can force myself do it in 2012, either. As I stated in February, the more I listen and watch, the more I am convinced that Newt is the only candidate on the field today with the experience and the intellectual horsepower to lead our nation back to its founding principles in the Great Ideas of Western Civilization, having a clear view of our nation’s unique position in the Arc of History and our vital importance to the continuation of Liberty and Human Rights in the World. With these Great Ideas as foundation, I am further convinced that Newt's leadership will be essential to returning America to a position of economic and political respect and dominance in the World.

Newt Gingrich 2012