Dec. 12 Republican debate transcript

Washburn: Thank you.

Congressman Tancredo, what's your take on all that?

Tancredo: I had the opportunity to serve under Ronald Reagan as the regional director for the U.S. Department of Education. Our task was to try to narrow it down because we knew we couldn't legislatively get rid of it, although we wanted to.

And so I went -- in my region we went from about 222 people, it took us about four or five years to get down to about 60 people. I used to always say, "We've gotten rid of 80 percent of the people in this department. Has anybody been able to tell the difference?" And you know what? Not a single soul said they had.

And, something else, if we had gone to zero, you'd never know the difference. That's because we don't need the department. It doesn't -- it's an encumbrance on our attempt to actually teach children in this country, as is the federal government and its intervention and its rules.

But you can't, I don't think, Governor, with all due respect, you can't say on one hand you're against having government intervention; and on the other hand tell us that you want music and art and everything else in the school. That's not the job of a president. It is the job of a governor. That's what you should run for if you want to dictate curriculum.

(Applause)

Washburn: Governor Huckabee, would you like a rebuttal? You have 30 seconds.

Huckabee: Well, I made very clear to the congressman that what I suggested was that the federal government become the clearinghouse. It shows the best ideas.

I was a governor ten and a half years. I had executive experience longer than anyone on this stage running a government. And I had also the most, I think, impressive education record.

And, you know what, I looked for what other states were doing that worked. I was looking for all the ideas. We raised standards. We measured. And we held people accountable for the results.

Any time you give governors the opportunity to know what will work, they'll use it, because it means jobs, it means economic development. That's exactly the only role.

But if anyone doubts that the president ought not to use the bully pulpit to encourage the best practices, I would say the second- most job of importance to the president, second to being commander in chief, is to be the "communicator in chief."

And we're losing a lot of kids in this country. A third don't graduate. For a president to say, "That's none of my business," is recklessly irresponsible.

A president needs to say it's unacceptable that that many kids leave our schools every single day.

Washburn: OK. Governor Romney?

Romney: I just wanted a small adjustment to what Governor Huckabee had to say. And I don't believe you had the finest record of any governor in America on education.

(Laughter)

And because there's another one on the stand whose kids out- performed me -- the kids in our state, as I indicated, scored number one on all four measures on the national exams.

And they did that because of Republican principles, free market principles, applied -- and it was a partnership.

You see, education is not just the teachers -- I agree with Senator Thompson on that. Boy, they've been the biggest obstacle to changing education and choice.

It's not just one side of this. It's teachers; it's parents; it's the state; it's the federal government; it's all levels coming together and working together for the benefit of our kids.

And we face, right now, an education challenge that's really unusual. We're behind. America is behind on education. Our kids score in the bottom 10 percent or 25 percent in exams, around the world, among major industrial nations.

And we've got to have the kind of change that requires all of us working together, not just poking and saying it's someone else's job.

Washburn: Thank you. In light of the big needs and the financial realities we've just discussed, up to this point, realistically, what do you believe you could accomplish in your first year as president?

We're going to go down the line, starting with Mr. Giuliani. And, so that everyone gets a chance to talk, I need you to keep your remarks to 30 seconds.

Giuliani: We can make sure that the country is secure against Islamic terrorism and on the road to winning the war against Islamic terrorists.

We could end illegal immigration, beginning a BorderStat system. It might be two or three years but we could begin it.

We could do a major tax reduction -- the ones I indicated earlier -- to stimulate the economy.

I would immediately begin to reduce the size of the federal government the way I did when I was mayor of New York.

And I would move toward energy independence as a goal similar to putting a man on the moon, the Manhattan Project -- you can use a lot of ways to describe the imperative nature of it. But I would make sure that we accomplish energy independence.

We would do things that we hadn't done before and that we previously thought were impossible, and you need both leadership to accomplish that, and I think I can do that.