A New Contract With America

In 1994, as in 1980, Republicans gave voters a meaningful choice. That choice gave Republicans their first majority in decades. It's time to do it again.

by Rod D. Martin
October 24, 1997

People may be willing to vote for liars, but they don't want to. People may be willing to vote for the status quo, but they'd rather embrace a vision. All of our history attests to this, perhaps nothing so well as the Contract With America.

Perhaps the most successful political document in modern history, Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich's Contract With America literally changed the world. Seventy years of almost unbroken dominance by the Democratic Party were terminated, and an army of idealistic freshmen turned out a pitifully corrupt and scandal-ridden old guard. Even more importantly, the terms of political debate in America were changed overnight: not whether to raise taxes, but how much to cut them; not whether to reform welfare, but how to do it; not whether to balance the budget, but when; the very ideas Americans discussed shifted from left to right in a blink.

The Contract is often lambasted by the left (and by the media, which is all too ofte…