Fresh off an appearance on Larry Kudlow’s show, former House majority leader Dick Armey took some time to speak to National Review Online last night about his group FreedomWorks and its participation in an effort to draft a “Contract from America” — an effort I wrote about for the home page today.

Armey says he’s excited about the process by which the Contract is coming together. An umbrella group called Tea Party Patriots has posted 20 policy proposals from grassroots members on its website, and visitors to the site can vote on their top ten. The winners will be announced in the unveiling of the Contract on April 15.

“It is the American people,” Armey says, “speaking to office seekers and office holders and saying, ‘We offer you a contract. If you can make a commitment to these principles of small-government conservatism and responsible restraint of big government and protection of individual liberties and property rights, we would be willing to work in support of your electoral opportunities.’”

Armey says he sees his efforts and those of House Republicans, who are working on their own agenda document, as complementary. But he says, “What we need, what this massive groundswell of grassroots swing voters is all about, is we’re looking for people who will really reliably stand on the principles that we hold so dear. I think the House Republicans can show leadership on behalf of the officeholders, themselves and the Senators…if they really stand and deliver, I think we could have a good relationship.”

I asked Armey if he will be disappointed if the official Republican document is limited to broad statements of principle and doesn’t embrace specific policy proposals such as those on his group’s web site. “The first thing you’ve got to do is get the Republican party rehabilitated on the foundational principles,” he says. “If they can get themselves committed to those principles and we can believe they really mean it, they can always work out the details of legislation later.”

Armey believes the GOP really lost its way in the waning years of its congressional majority. “The fact of the matter is that this whole groundswell of grassroots activism was born initially out of a disappointment in the Republicans – the Bush administration and the Republican majority,” he says. “It only grew as large as it did out of fear of President Obama and Speaker Pelosi. So the Republicans have ground to gain back in terms of demonstrating their understanding and commitment to what we think of as the principles of sound government.”

On that subject, I asked for his interpretation of John Boehner’s remark that, if elected speaker, he would run the House differently than it has been run in the past under Democrats or Republicans. That led to a conversation about the benefits of divided government:

When we had to sit down as a Republican majority and negotiate with President Clinton, it was a very sobering influence and there was a lot of give and take, and frankly we had better results – as you know, we went from deficit to surplus. When President Bush decided that he could afford to be a spendthrift president, that played right into the hands of a Republican majority that thought they could use earmarks as a sort of federal funding for their own elections, and spending got way out of control. So I think there’s something to that competitive bargaining between different parties with different points of view.

Armey finished our interview with a barnburner on the need for Republicans to show intellectual leadership and political courage. (This stemmed from a question on whether it would be too difficult this year for the GOP to embrace serious entitlement reform):

It shouldn’t be. But this is the problem. Too many people in office are inconvenience minimizers. And if they don’t show a commitment to being an agent of change, being willing to do the hard work, being willing to do the creative thinking, and being willing to be an annoyance to those from within the body who want to just sit back and take life easy and conduct business as usual, they’re not going to be agents of change and they’re not going to win the affection and the loyalty of the independent voters of America.
The fact of the matter is, in 1994, Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey were the biggest pains in the rear there were to the Republicans in Congress. And if you don’t have leaders who are willing to be that, the Republican party is going to be just another version of the status quo party and they’re going to be attractive to nobody…
What the GOP has experienced and what they are seeing now is seats that the Democrats are losing because they’re running with what I call an Obamatross around their necks, ok? The win in Massachusetts begins with President Obama and then goes to the quality of the candidate. This was a legitimate grassroots candidate. So the Republican party as a party has very little credit they can take for that.
An entrepreneurial candidate working in a venue where there is a fear of the Democratic president – that’ll get the GOP fifteen, sixteen seats in the House and five or six seats in the Senate. But if they want to get the rest of the distance, they had better get creative and hard-working and appear to be consolidated in their commitment to principle before the swing voters, because they can’t get all the way to the majority on their own hoof, and they can’t get that way by being the same sort of intellectually and politically lazy people they’ve been for the last five or six years.