Gingrich To Unveil ’21st Century Contract With America,’ Compares It To Lincoln

Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA)
Start your day with TPM.
Sign up for the Morning Memo newsletter

Newt Gingrich will roll out his new platform later this month — calling it the “21st Century Contract with America,” and declaring that it will be so much greater than his original “Contract With America” from the 1994 elections for the House of Representatives.

Gingrich told a Council Bluffs audience that his new platform “will be 10 times deeper and more comprehensive than 1994,” the Des Moines Register reports. “Because the truth is, while we changed the system some…we didn’t fundamentally change the underlying system.”

Gingrich also declared that his ideas will be “very big, and they’re exactly what Abraham Lincoln would have campaigned on.”

He will unveil the platform on September 29 in Des Moines.

This does cause one to wonder how Gingrich’s platform will compare to the Republican platforms of 1860 and 1864, the elections in which Lincoln was elected and then re-elected. Those platforms focused heavily, of course, on the issues of slavery and the Civil War — matters that do not directly apply in our modern times.

But beyond that, those platforms inherited the Whig tradition of what were known at the time as “internal improvements” — government investment in infrastructure. For example, the platforms called for government to aid in the large project of constructing a transcontinental railroad, to improve rivers and harbors, and to have “a vigorous and just system of taxation” in order to ensure the payment of the national debt.

The 1864 platform also declared: “Resolved, That foreign immigration, which in the past has added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations, should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy.”

Latest Election 2012
Comments
Masthead Masthead
Founder & Editor-in-Chief:
Executive Editor:
Managing Editor:
Associate Editor:
Editor at Large:
General Counsel:
Publisher:
Head of Product:
Director of Technology:
Associate Publisher:
Front End Developer:
Senior Designer: