Summary

FTG OF REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE NEWT GINGRICH TOURING OTTO ENGINEERING IN CARPENTERSVILLE, ILLINOIS 15:39:50: Gingrich: "Well let me just say we're so delighted to be here at auto indsturies, Jack has been a great civic leader and a real advocate for free enterprise and a real advocate for the taxpayer so he has a reputation and a career that goes back many, many years. this is a great company as you'll see, this is a great example of innovation and work and why having entrepeneurs and having innovators and of course as you watch the innovation here he was just showing us there were some 800 parts in the space shuttle that came frm this country so it's fascinating how many different impacts it has. So it's facinating how many different impacts it has plus it creates jobs here in Illinois." 15:40:30: "So I was thinking about this, the whole theme of innovation is at the heart of the argument we're having over energy policy. Because it was innovative breakthroughs in new drilling technology which made possible the extraordinary increase in natural gas which we've now had and which has driven the price of natural gas down by substantitally increasing production. And the same innovation is happening in oil which is why in North Dakota they've now gone from a project 150 mil barrels of oil to a projected 24 bil barrels of oil that they have available and they think that probably understates the real supply. They think that with another one or two generations of innovation that they'll actually be up at around 500 bil barrels just in North Dakota." 15:41:22: "So things are changing dramatically, you know the President attacked my policies a few minutes ago and I just want to respond directly to the President while we have an opportunity like this, because I find it fascinating on a couple of grounds: President Obama asked the Saudis to pump more oil. Secretary Chu, the Secretary of energy said yesterday how grateful he was that the Saudis were pumping more oil. Now obviously they believe supply and demand works because they think that an additional supply of Saudi oil will drop the price and so they've very grateful to the Saudis who are willing to help Barack Obama get reeelected." 15:42:00: "That raises a couple of questions: if supply and demand works - why is the President for Saudi supply instead of American supply? And how does the President think the Saudis find the oil? They drill. So why is it that Saudi oil works but according to the President American drilling will fail? And the reason is all ideological. The President himself has cited natural gas. If the price of gasoline dropped as much as the price of natural gas has dropped since 2008, we'd be paying $1.13 a gallon. I just passed a gas station up the street here that is $4.59. Now if you go ask the people at that gas station, would you rather pay $1.13? Probably 99-100% would say yes, I'd rather pay $1.13." 15:42:52: "So what the President is saying - phase one of the President's defense was algae. And that got ridiculed so much he's now given up on algae at the moment." 15:43:00: "Phase two is: American oil is bad but Saudi oil is good. Now this is wrong on a couple of counts. First, I don't want the oil going to Saudi Arabia. I want the money going to American companies creating American jobs in American territories." "Second, it further increases our dependence on the Saudis who are the largest funders of terrorist education and the largest funders of radical Islamist education in the world. I don't want American Presidents who bow to the Saudi King. I want American Presidents who produce American oil within the United States, make us energy independent, precisely so that we don't turn to the Saudis. This is the worst of all policies. It takes money out of the US to prop up the Saudi King at a time when we want the money in the US to create American jobs." 15:43:48: "And finally, I'm really hoping the White House Press Corp will get the nerve to pursue this at some point and actually ask questions to the President in an aggressive way. How can he say supply and demand doesn't work- when suppy and demand does work if it's Saudi supply?" 15:44::07: "How can he say drilling doesn't work when drilling does work for natural gas and drilling does work for Saudi Arabia? I mean this is clearly boloney." 15:44:14: "And I'm prepared to debate the President anytime, anyplace. I don't think he can defend this policy. I think this policy is total nonsense and I think the American people will recognize it for total nonsense. I think we should have an Ameican energy policy. We should open up off-shore. We should open up federal land. We should take the royalty money, set it to one side and use it to pay off the national debt. We should balance the budget over here and have a debt reduction fund over here and not put a penny of the oil royalties into balancing the budget but instead put into paying off the national debt. We'd be free of the Saudis and free of the Chinese with an American energy policy. And in the process we'd create several million new American jobs so I just want to lay that out. 15:44:59: "As I just said the President just said this about 2 hours ago so I want to take this opportunity to respond very directly to Barack Obama." (INAUDIBLE QUESTION ABOUT BIOFUELS) 15:45:17: "I don't ridicule biofuels, I support biofuels. Of course I've supported ethanol which is a biofuel. I've supported celulosic (?) which is a biofuel. I have friends at Texas A&M who are working on algae. the idea that algae is a solution this summer is a fantasy and he knows it's a fantasy. Now let's go a step further, let's talk flat earth society - new, innovative technologies - exactly Jack's whole life career, new innovative drilling has increased the amount of American natural gas from 7 to 125 years. So I'm for innovation. New, innovative technologies in natural gas has driven down the price so it would be the equivalent to a decline of $1.13 in oil. So I'm for innovation. 15:46:06: "I'm just asking the President who apparently belongs to the flat earth sierra club society (LAUGHTER) to consider that in fact, if we had the same level of drilling for oil, you know, ask the President - why is Saudi oil good and American oil bad? Why is Saudi drilling good and American drilling bad? This is utter intellectual nonsense. The fact is, the same amount of effort here we'd be producing the royalties. The Saudi King is going to get the royalties. The US government ought to be getting the royalties." 15:46:40: "So I just think that the President is defending a totally indefensible position and they just double downed on that position by bringing the Saudis into this and if he wants to represent Saudi oil and algae - I'll be happy to represent American oil and American jobs and we'll see this Fall who the American people to elect. Thank you all." (APPLAUSE) (INAUDIBLE QUESTION) 15:47:19: "Well in the first place, I have 175,000 donors - 95% of them give less than $250. So I'll be glad to match the average donation I get with the average donation Barack Obama gets for his SuperPAC. Now I'm not going to defend Mitt Romney who raised $3 mil on Wall Street last night in a fine expression of crony capitalism. People who got taxpayers funding gave money to Romney last night so they could run ads to make sure that they are still protected. But I will tell you flatly: I represent working, middle-class Americans." 15:47:56: "I am staying in this race, in part, because we got a thousand new donors yesterday who went online to newt.org. The average donation was a little over $50 and I'll match that up against Joe Biden's fundraising any day of the week." (INAUDIBLE QUESTION) "Yes, I will" "No - not yet, you'll love it" 15:48:21: "Actually I can give you a little bit of guidance, did you see the speech at Barrington or the talk I gave at the college a ltitle while ago? I think what you'll see is a much clearer definition of a visionary Conservative as compared to a sort of traditional Romney-Santorum Conservatism." (INAUDIBLE QUESTION) 15:48:45: "No - I want to fine tune my message to say: without the vision, people perish - you need a visionary leader with very big, very bold ideas. This is a very big, very bold country. And then we're going to have a series of things that are very specific, I mean I'm going to stay on gasoline frankly all summer and we are working right now - we're going to have a mouspad, a coffee cup, a wall chart, and a desktop set that has 'algae with Obama' and a drilling rig with Gingrich and $10 versus $2.50. So we're going to give you an entire array of things you can have. And if you really want you can have the entire set, it'll become the famous 'algae gasoline set' for someone who wants to have the whole package." 15:49:28: (OFF-CAMERA MALE REPORTER): "As a great fan of history how does it feel to be involved in this monstrous process?" 15:49:36: "You know the biggest surprise to me - and Callista and I were talking about this for the last 2 or 3 days - this is much more complicated than first of all I think it's the most complicated nomination since either 1940 or 1920. I mean, there's been nothing like this in the Republican Party. And I think it's the dual - I think there's been three big changes that I did not foresee: the one is that by having so many proportional states, it is very hard for someone to get 38 or 39% and win. So Romney who spent 6 years and 40 mil of his money and all this stuff, he's been avering I think 39%. Well, as long as that's proportional that means he's not getting to 50. And he's the frontrunner but I think he's the weakest frontrunner since Woods was back in 1920." 15:50:27: "Second - the scale of Romney's SUPERPAC makes it really hard to know him out. I mean just the fact that he went to Wall Street last night to raise 3 million dollars. So money will keep him afloat for awhile longer." 15:50:41: "But third - the inexpensiveness of the internet. The fact that we can send out as we did today a whole series of things to all of our donor and all of our supporters for virtually nothing. the fact that people can go online to newt.org and give money for virtually nothing. I mean it creates a low-cost campaign, so it's hard for him to knock us out and it's hard for us to knock him out. And that makes it a much longer campaign than I would have guessed." 15:51:09: "And then I frankly have had to spend the last couple of months trying to rethink - we had a model, the model really worked up until December when we ran into Romney's attack ads. And I was ahead by 21 point in Rasmussen and 15 in Gallup just being positive. And I think frankly, we made a mistake. We should have figured out someway to have transcended the attacks and stayed aggressively positive. And we're at sort of a half-time, Louisiana's sort of the half-way point, like a football team, we're having a half-time resetting of the game plan. We're going to go back to doing what we did up to the first attack ads which is very big ideas on brain science, on space, on for example paying off the national debt with royalties from natural gas. These are big concepts." 15:51:56: "And my opponents can ridicule them as they did on space but I think the country's not going to ridicule them. I think if you go to the country and say - 'how you would like $2.50 a gallon or less with security and we take the royalties to pay off the national debt.' All of a sudden you've got a lot of Americans going you know, this is an idea worthy of the size of the United States." (OFF-CAMERA QUESTION: DO YOU HAVE A SPECIAL MESSAGE FOR YOUR DELEGATES?) 15:52:25: "Campaign like crazy. (NEWT LAUGHS)" (APPLAUSE) (MAN COMES FORWARD: "Can I take you and your wife in and show you some pictures that we have in the other room and then we'll come right back through here - Gingrich: "Okay, we'll be right back, we're going to go see some pictures) BROLL OF GINGRICH TALKING WITH FACTORY HEAD, CHIT CHATTING, ETC. THEY THEN TOUR FACTORY FLOOR SHOWN PICTURES...CONTINUES TO TALK WITH HEAD OF FACTORY