Democrats' Radical Hold on Washington

This is a rush transcript from "Hannity," April 23, 2010. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

SEAN HANNITY, HOST: Harry Reid is slamming the door on bipartisanship yet again. Now first, it was health care reform and now he plans to move forward on Wall Street reform without any republican support. Now, the Senate majority leader says the time for debate is over and he's not going to wait for a bipartisan agreement. Instead, well, he says, the first vote on the bill for Monday at 5:00 p.m.

So, after weeks of being promised a seat at the table, the Democrats are once again going back on their word and unilaterally moving forward with their radical agenda.

Now, meanwhile, things aren't looking so bright at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. It appears that President Obama is finally acknowledging just how much his political clout has diminished.

Now, according to Politico.com, the president will not commit to helping Democrats save his old seat. Now in that race, Democrat Alexi Giannoulias is trailing in the polls against Republican Congressman Mark Kirk. Now, this prompted a meeting between Illinois Senator Dick Durbin and Rahm "Rahmbo Dead Fish" Emanuel last week at the White House. But sources familiar with the meeting say it appears the White House is more comfortable losing the seat and putting the president on the campaign trail.

So, not long after Obama mania swept all across the country it now appears that the anointed one does not even have enough pull to win over his old constituents. How things have changed.

Here with reaction to that story and Wall Street reform and much more is former Speaker of the House, Fox News contributor Newt Gingrich. And he has a free weekly newsletter and you can sign up for it at Newt.org.

How are you? I love seeing you in studio.

NEWT GINGRICH, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Fun to be here.

HANNITY: Alright. You wrote a hard-hitting, incredible piece in the Washington Post today. "How America became a secular-socialist machine."

GINGRICH: Well, I think that is what the government is. The country is still a center right majority. But if you look at Washington, you just talking about this a second ago, with Harry Reid.

You know, the health bill wasn't the first time Reid decided to be totally partisan. The stimulus was. And the reason I call it a machine is if you can get $787 billion out of Congress, with no elected official having read the bill, that's not representative democracy. That's a machine. That's like Chicago. When you watch how Harry Reid operates, anytime he has a choice between being a left-wing machine boss and being participating in representative government, he always picks being the left-wing machine boss.

Now, secular and socialist are the other two words. I wrote in this part in reaction to a colleague of mine with the American Enterprise Institute, who seemed surprise that we used these words. And I said, well, if you look at the judges that Obama is nominating, they tend to be very rigid, anti-religious secularists. If you look at Obama's policies, we currently own most of General Motors, we own most of Chrysler. AIG is deeply in debt to the government. The president is proposing now to take over Wall Street with this financial reform, having taking over the health system, having nationalizing student loans. I mean, you go down the list.

I don't know what word would best describe this administration if it wasn't socialist. Anytime you have a "czar" in the White House who thinks that he is smart enough to decide on pay for dozens and dozens of people in institutions he's never visited, in a business he's never been part of. And think about the arrogance from the hubris of politicians thinking, I'll wave a magic wand and decide this person is worth this much, that person is worth that much.

HANNITY: Well, look, you end the piece and this was — you stated this in your speech at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans. And you have ended and said, Obama, the most radical president in American history.

GINGRICH: He is.

HANNITY: I agree. I have a book that says the same thing.

GINGRICH: Look, you are the one who started me down this road.

HANNITY: Well, blame Hannity.

GINGRICH: No, no. The spring and summer in 2008, you were right I think before any other major person in the news media or politics in identifying the fact that Obama's natural base is the corruption of Springfield which we are seeing with the trial of the governor and by the way with Giannoulias who is the perfect corrupt candidate for the Democratic Party for the U.S. Senate in Illinois.

You are seeing the machine politics that Rahm Emanuel and President Obama learned in Chicago and you're seeing the radicalism of Alinsky which Obama used to teach. In fact, there is a picture I think of the White House website of Obama teaching an Alinsky course on radicalism.

Now, all that comes together into the most radical president in American history.

HANNITY: One of the things, if we watch for example, the democrats and their attacks on the Tea Party movement, their attacks on Fox News and anybody with an opinion on Fox News or talk radio, I mean, it's a steady stream. It seems to have accelerated.

I think the thing that is frustrating the most is the narrative that this president is radical and extreme and out of touch and it's not the moderate that he ran as has taken hold, based on 15 months of this presidency. And I think it is irritating him to no end that the American people, as you point out, the center right country see him for the leftist that he is.

GINGRICH: Arthur Brooks, the Head of the American Enterprise Institute who may be the best student of gallop data in the country, has a book coming out in June called "The Battle." And he basically proves, I think convincingly, that this country is about 70 percent center right and about 20 or 25 percent on the left. We have to be governed by an accident by very left wing radicals but the underlying country is dramatically to the right of the government.

Now, I think what is beginning to get to the Democrats is deeper than the narrative, use the word you did. They're beginning to running into two big realities. The first reality is that the policies don't work. I mean, look at the economy. Look at the unemployment. Look at today's numbers in terms of durable goods which dropped.

You go around the country. I was in Naples Florida last week, where they have 26 percent — and you know this area well. They have 26 percent of the homes that are up for foreclosure. They have a 13 percent unemployment rate. They recently advertise a job for $30,000 and 120 applicants, some of whom were MBA graduates, and they look around and they see this administration, which is proposing to cripple the financial industry and drive jobs offshore and it's proposing to cripple the energy industry and drive jobs offshore.

And if you are a normal everyday working American, Washington right now must seem like it's just totally out of touch with reality.

HANNITY: See here is, if I was right before with my prediction — and all I did was really looking at Barack Obama's record in the Illinois State Senate and U.S. Senate and his radical associations as Alinsky background and didn't take a lot of work. The rest of the mainstream media ignored it. If I was right then, here is my prediction now: that this is the most important midterm election in my lifetime by far. And that if we don't change government, if Nancy Pelosi is not fired, if we don't have a shift in Congress, I think we get to the point with the deficit is so large and we weaken our defenses so much, it's irreparable harm. I don't know how we dig ourselves out of the hole we're digging.

GINGRICH: It makes it much harder. I was in the true Pennsylvania last night with Tim Burns, who was a great young candidate.

HANNITY: He's running in the Murtha seat.

GINGRICH: He's running for the Murtha seat. He's up against the Democrat, who had Biden come in to raise money, even though Biden has said, he wants to wipe out the Coal Industry. To bring Biden into that district is just, you know, it would be like bringing you and me in the San Francisco —

HANNITY: Or Nancy Pelosi.

GINGRICH: The same candidate in the Democratic side did a fundraiser with Pelosi while he is running an ad saying, he is a conservative democrat with the money Pelosi has raised for him. I mean, what I said last night was a Tim Burns challenges, could he raise the money to tell the truth at a rate faster than the Democrats raise the money to lie?

HANNITY: But the Democrats, this has been their strategy for some time. They've run their candidates as center, moderate, even conservatives and then when push comes to shove and they get pulled in the oval office and Nancy Pelosi twists their arm, there are no Blue Dog Democrats.

GINGRICH: Well, the position that the Obama, Reid, Pelosi machine has is simple. You can be a conservative or modern Democrat as long as you vote doesn't count.

HANNITY: I have one last question, what would you advise the Republicans, I want to see another contract or something similar?

GINGRICH: I think that Kevin McCarthy had been asked by John Boehner — Kevin McCarthy is a chief deputy, brilliant congressman from California — to organize an effort to reach out to the public much like the contract from America that the Tea Party developed. I believe the Republicans in the House will have a compact or contract probably in mid-September. And I think that, that is coming together. I think they have to be the party of yes in the sense of saying, we're for a balance budget, we're for cutting taxes to create jobs, we're for American energy.

HANNITY: Alright. Now, you're coming back with, because your background as one of a history professor. And you're going to tell us about nine days that literally change the world.

GINGRICH: Absolutely.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

HANNITY: And now I am rejoined in studio by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. He is the co-host of the brand-new DVD "Nine Days That Changed the World," along with his wife, Callista, who is the president of Gingrich Productions. Newt and Callista are here to tell us much more about —

Gingrich Productions? You have a movie...

N. GINGRICH: She has a movie. I'm just talent. I show up. She does all the hard work.

HANNITY: You know, I brought up earlier, when we were discussing politics, the radicalism of the president, et cetera. There was a time where we thought, some were even suggesting America's better days were behind us. But there was the election of Margaret Thatcher. There was a new pope installed in Rome. There was the election of Ronald Reagan. Three people came together, converging, and the world became a much better, safer place.

You talk about the nine days where the pope went to Poland.

CALLISTA GINGRICH, PRESIDENT, GINGRICH PRODUCTIONS: Yes. Well, we first learned about the significance of this visit in 2008 when we were working on our documentary about President Ronald Reagan.

HANNITY: That's the "Rendezvous With Destiny" one.

C. GINGRICH: That's right. And at that time, we went to Gdansk, Poland, to interview President Lech Walesa. And then we went to Prague to interview President Vaclav Havel. And in both interviews, we asked about the significance of the Holy Father's trip in 1979. And each of them said that that visit was critical to liberating Eastern Europe.

HANNITY: It was critical. It was also incredible. I remember looking at the statistics that almost the entire country followed the pope in the nine-day visit that he had there. Correct me if I'm wrong. Was it three-quarters of people turned out to see him at some point?

C. GINGRICH: One-third of the country...

HANNITY: One third.

C. GINGRICH: ... came out to see him live, and the rest watched on television.

HANNITY: Or listening on radio. The impact historically was amazing.

N. GINGRICH: I think we — when Callista and I decided after we'd done the Reagan film, but then we were haunted by what Havel and Walesa said. We said, "We have to go back and do this movie."

And we found — and I give Vince Haley (ph), who works with us, who you know, real credit for this — we found that the bishops had given cameras out in 1979, because they knew communists wouldn't cover it favorably. And there were hundreds of hours of footage that had never been shown, and we were able to get access to them, and they're in the movie, key parts of the movie.

And what you have again and again is Poles who would say, "We were standing in a crowd of three million in Victory Square with the pope at mass and looked around and suddenly realized there are more of us than there are of the government." And they said from that point on, they never backed off for ten years until they finally had the first free elections.

HANNITY: When you compare what it was like then to where we are now, Barack Obama said we don't have the right to impose American values on other countries. America's arrogance. He went on an apology tour. And I'm thinking, you know, the values that the pope stood for and President Reagan stood for and Prime Minister Thatcher stood for were the basic human right of liberty and freedom. It seems like a great contrast to where we are today. Doesn't it?

C. GINGRICH: Right. Well, the pope's message was really timeless. He said there is no state or government that can stand between you and God and that the only true freedom that we have is freedom that is attained through our faith.

HANNITY: That's true. And it's also predicated on the idea that, you know, we are endowed by our creator. To what extent does — I don't often say what would the world look like but for the United States of America.

N. GINGRICH: I think Jefferson and Lincoln and Reagan and FDR all said, this is the bulwark of freedom, that liberty grows out of the American Revolution. It grows out of our Declaration of Independence, which you just quoted. We are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. No lawyer, no judge, no politician can take them away.

But part of the reason Callista and I decided we had to make this movie, which is going to come out in Polish, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Chinese, as well as English...

HANNITY: That's fantastic.

N. GINGRICH: Is we think this is a world message of freedom through faith that applies to every person in every generation in every country. And precisely because the secular relativists who the pope, frankly, preached against don't understand the importance of our rights coming from God.

We think a movie like this has a very important message for our generation here in America.

HANNITY: He won't answer this. How do you feel about him running for president?

C. GINGRICH: We haven't talked about that yet.

HANNITY: Not once? Never even came up at dinner?

C. GINGRICH: Once or twice perhaps.

HANNITY: You notice how I...

N. GINGRICH: I'm just watching. She's never been put on the spot like that before. I wanted to see where she was going to go with this.

HANNITY: I thought she did a very — were you planning on a long discussion about it maybe in the near future?

C. GINGRICH: We'll discuss it early next year.

HANNITY: Boy, this is the last time. I'm getting that look.

That is all the time we have left this evening in this every uncomfortable moment.

We thank you all for being with us. And by the way, it is a great DVD, "Nine Days That Changed the World." And it's on my website, by the way, Hannity.com. It's on your website, Newt.org.

N. GINGRICH: Or at GingrichProductions.com.

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