Dad would be so proud.In the Washington Post today — The Party of Performance — David Ignatius explores Newt Gingrich’s ideas drawn from two memos he has circulated to Republican leaders since the storm hit and from a conversation earlier this week.Excerpt:
Gingrich argues that the values debate that has divided America so sharply during the past decade is over. There’s a broad consensus about most issues, and anyway people realize that the country’s big problems aren’t about morality but performance. “We’re not in a values fight now but over whether the system is working,” Gingrich told me. “The issue is delivery.” And that’s true at every level — city, state and federal.Gingrich’s critique of the federal response is as devastating as that of any Democrat. “For the last week the federal government and its state and local counterparts have consistently been behind the curve,” he wrote fellow Republicans this week. “The American people overwhelmingly know that the current situation is totally unacceptable,” and for that reason, “it is a mistake to get trapped into defending the systems and processes which clearly failed.” He observes in another memo, “While the destruction was unprecedented, it was entirely predictable.”What’s needed is a creative government response as big as the disaster itself. Gingrich urges in one of his memos that Bush appoint a super-manager who can oversee the rebuilding and suggests Rudy Giuliani for the job. “The former mayor has enough management toughness to force the federal agencies to actually change their behavior,” he writes.The former speaker has some classic Gingrich zingers for how to rev up the rebuilding effort. He wants to turn the Gulf Coast into a “Zone of Recovery, Reconstruction and Prosperity,” by offering a 25 percent tax credit for all job-creating investment in the region over the next three years. And he wants to create a cadre of “entrepreneurial public managers” who can replace the leaden public bureaucracy and get things done on Internet time, with the reliability of FedEx or UPS.
Maybe he’d like the EPCOT Solution I suggested.