How do disgraced politicians retain their relevance as far as the Sunday talk shows are concerned? They write a book* on how to fix all the things they broke while in office. *Offer works only for Republicans, naturally.

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Newt Gingrich challenges both Congress and the President to enact "Real Change" to make things better. Coincidentally, Real Change is also the title of his new book. Amazing how that works. What's equally amazing is what Newt thinks constitutes real change:

Michigan was in a recession when the rest of the country was growing. Other than the states hit by Katrina, Michigan which had been hit by a Democratic governor, Democratic legislature, raised taxes. Yet none of the candidates are willing to be radical enough. Part of what we…Real Change focuses a long section on Detroit. Detroit has gone from a 1,800,000 people in 1950 and highest per capita income in the United States to 950,000 people and it ranks today 62^nd in per capita income. And yet nobody want to get up and say...tell the truth. The truth is large bureaucracies are destructive . High taxes are destructive. The system we built discourages any businesses from opening up in Detroit. The schools don’t deliver. They uh they do deliver paychecks. They do take care of the union, but they don’t deliver for the kids. And this is a time where if you’re an African American male and you drop out of high school, you have a 73% chance of being unemployed and a 60% chance of going to jail. So I think we need dramatically deeper and more fundamental change.

The prescribed change? Reduce spending and tax cuts. Real revolutionary, doncha think? Does Newt cover the devastation to Detroit's economy by trade agreements like NAFTA, taking manufacturing jobs out of the country? Nah...it's the bureaucracies that are destructive. He bemoans the state of education, but advocates cutting spending even further. Is he under the impression that will help???

However, it's hard to argue with the premise here:

The Congress and the President, rather than say that’s an interesting campaign, now let’s get back to politics as usual in Washington, the Congress and the President do have a real opportunity to listen to the American people who are saying that real change does matter and the real change is what they want. And I think it will be a pretty good contest for the two parties to say so how much can you deliver in the next three or four months, as opposed to seeing politics in Washington over here and politics in America over here.

Listening to the electorate? That IS revolutionary.