2+2 = 4

Lately, Newt Gingrich has been invoking the first grade solution to combat Barack Obama on cable talk shows, and now, at events.

It's actually a very good line: simple, obvious, and the antithesis of health care legislation..

Kathryn Gaines heard Newt use it during a speech to the Young Americans Foundation conference this week, and says it has Contract with American implications:

Among those speaking was former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, the master mind of the successful 1994 Contract with America.

15 years later, in 2009 he shared a new slogan with the youth in attendance “2 + 2 = 4”.

This slogan, he explained, came from George Orwell’s famous book 1984, in which the main character has a dialogue with the government officials who are torturing him trying to make him say two plus two equal five, and realizes that “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”