Transcript: Newt Gingrich and Howard Dean

Aug 9, 2009 — -- ABC NEWS, THIS WEEK WITH GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS INTERVIEW WITH FORMER HOUSE SPEAKER NEWT GINGRICH AND FORMER DNC CHAIRMAN HOWARD DEAN

STEPHANOPOULOS (voice-over): Good morning, and welcome to "This Week."

Health care town halls gone wild.

(UNKNOWN): I don't want the government to do it for me!

STEPHANOPOULOS: Passionate questions.

(UNKNOWN): I want to know if it's coming out of my paycheck.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Raucous crowds. Both sides dig in.

(UNKNOWN): Health care now!

STEPHANOPOULOS: This morning, the debate sweeping the country with our exclusive headliners, Newt Gingrich...

GINGRICH: I don't want the government to try to run things.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... and Howard Dean.

DEAN: If you're not going to have a public option, don't pretend you're doing health care reform.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Gingrich and Dean, face to face, a "This Week" debate.

Then...

CLINTON: The pictures were worth a million words.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... Bill Clinton's mission.

CLINTON: I'm not a policymaker.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Is the breakthrough with North Korea another comeback for him? That and the rest of the week's politics on a special expanded roundtable with Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haas, Sam Donaldson, Cokie Roberts, Matthew Dowd, and Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal.

And, as always, the Sunday funnies.

CRAIG FERGUSON, TALK SHOW HOST: After the journalists landed, Al Gore gave a speech. Now, I don't want to say that Al went on too long, but about half way through the speech, the women are like, "We can go back to prison if you want."

(LAUGHTER)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ANNOUNCER: From the heart of the nation's capital, "This Week" with ABC News chief Washington correspondent George Stephanopoulos, live from the Newseum on Pennsylvania Avenue.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Hello again. Health care may be the most personal issue Washington confronts, and this week there was plenty of evidence to back that up.

Town halls on health care went viral. Members of Congress everywhere got tough questions. Some got shouted down. As the rhetoric heated up, we even heard Nazi Germany invoked.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. NANCY PELOSI, D-CALIF., SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: You be the judge. They're carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on health care.

LIMBAUGH: There are far more similarities between Nancy Pelosi and Adolf Hitler than between these people showing up at town halls to protest a Hitler-like policy.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

STEPHANOPOULOS: And with that, let's have our own debate with two men at the center of the conversation, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Vermont Governor and DNC Chair Howard Dean, also the author of a new book, "Howard Dean's Prescription for Real Health Care Reform."

And, Mr. Speaker, let me begin with you. I wonder, are you comfortable with the tone of these town meetings? As you know, Democrats have said that a lot of this grassroots activity is manufactured AstroTurf, and they say the goal is to shut down conversation, not encourage it.

GINGRICH: You know, I -- I spent 20 years doing town hall meetings. I once had 800 machinist members on an Eastern strike for three hours, and they got to shout all they wanted.

I thought Senator Tom Harkin was the model this week. His staff got nervous. They wanted to close down the meeting. And Harkin said, no, these are Americans. They have every right to talk. And he just listened, and he engaged, and he conversed.

People are very, very upset. They're upset because the stimulus was passed unread. They're upset because, at 3 o'clock in the morning, Pelosi introduced a 300-page amendment for an energy tax increase and voted on it at 4 the next afternoon. They have this sense of a thing -- of a machine running over them.

And so there's -- there's a substantial number of people who are genuinely upset. The American way is let it hang out, talk to them. Members ought to go back home, hold as many town hall meetings as you have to, let people get it out of their system. And by September, we could have a genuine dialogue in this country.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And I know your allies, Governor Dean, have been -- have been saying that this is just all, you know, paid for, people recruited by lobbyists here in Washington, but you can't create -- you can't force people to go out to a town meeting. You can't manufacture that kind of anger, can you?

DEAN: Well, there actually is a lot -- there is a lot of orchestration. There's the Brian MacGuffie memo, which actually tells people to do -- do what they're doing, which is sit in the front, jump up and interrupt. You know, one -- one thing...

STEPHANOPOULOS: He's got like 23 friends on Facebook, though.

DEAN: Well, yes, but he's also -- there's a lot of other organizations, including some pretty reputable companies, who are -- formerly reputable companies that are financing all this stuff.