Video: Gingrich discusses '08 presidential race

updated 9/14/2007 8:14:09 AM ET 2007-09-14T12:14:09

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has been toying with the idea of jumping into the GOP presidential contest, sat down with National Journal's Linda Douglass this week to discuss the 2008 candidate fields, the state of American politics and his own future. Edited excerpts follow. For previous Insider Interviews, click here.

Linda Douglass: You said fairly recently that the Democrats had a very high likelihood of winning the presidency next year.

Newt Gingrich: I think that the country, after the last couple of years, has a bias in favor of change -- I think probably starting with [Hurricane] Katrina and coming through Baghdad and the whole sense of too much spending. And you sense a lack of enthusiasm in the conservative base, and you sense a stunning level of intensity in the anti-war Left. And so you just look at the dynamics and you have to say the odds are probably 80-20 [in the Democrats' favor].

Douglass: 80-20?

Gingrich: Yeah. That's my guess. Now, it could change. If you had a [Republican] candidate who could break out and who could say, "Obviously, we need to change pretty dramatically, and the party of trial lawyers, public employee unions, [and] left-wing ideologues probably can't change," and could force Hillary [Rodham Clinton] or Barack Obama or whomever to be the defender of failed bureaucracies, then I think you could see a Republican win next year. But I don't think they can win by passively staying within the framework of where we have been.

Douglass: Let's talk about the Republicans who are in the race, starting with former Governor Video: Gingrich shares his strategy for Iraq







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Douglass: What aren't the Republicans saying that they should be?


Douglass: You always say that what the country needs is a candidate with big ideas. Is there anyone in either party who has the kind of big ideas that you have been talking about?

Gingrich:[John] Edwards has a lot of big ideas, but they're the wrong ones. The country needs solutions, and we need an ability to come to grips with how much change is involved in getting to those solutions. I'm deeply opposed to launching campaigns on late-night television. I think it just trivializes the whole process.

Douglass: You are heading an organization called American Solutions for Winning the Future that is going to have workshops at the end of the month that will affect, you've said, your decision about whether to run for president. Why?

Gingrich: I reached the conclusion over the last five or six years that the scale of change we needed was not achievable in the current partisan political process. I set out to create an organization which would hold workshops, develop solutions, reach out to Americans in both parties, outline dramatically different ways of doing things. And then we are trying to set up a dialogue about the scale of change [that] people should expect. There is nobody out there prepared to say, on the Democratic side, "If we don't win in Iraq, here's how big the mess is going to be," with the exception of Joe Lieberman. There is nobody out there on the Republican side who is prepared to say, "You know, we are going to have to do it differently." I mean, "Stay the course" is not a rational option.

Video: Will Gingrich run for president?

Douglass: What is going to happen at the end of this coming-together?

Gingrich: This is not about 2008. Very large public movements take a while to get off the ground. The only circumstance I can imagine under which [my wife] Callista and I would be faced with a choice about running this year would be if there is a vacuum in October so deep and people began to be so afraid of Senator Clinton winning that you could actually see by the end of October a scale of resources that would let you be genuinely competitive. The odds are, that won't happen. I'm very comfortable with projects that take more than a sprint.

Douglass: You could imagine circumstances in which you might run for president in 2012?

Gingrich: I'd be the same age in '12 [that] Reagan was when he was elected in 1980. The most tempting thought about running next year is the idea of debating Senator Clinton. That would be fun.

Douglass: You have been critical of the Bush administration's handling of immigration and the war on terrorism. And you said that Republican candidates need to discuss the failures. Should the candidates be putting distance between themselves and Bush?

Gingrich: I think [French President Nicolas] Sarkozy said it very well when he said of the Chirac administration, "We need a clean break." There is no excuse for not controlling the border. There is no excuse for New Orleans being the mess it is. I think we ought to say these things are not right.

Douglass: Let's talk about Hillary Clinton. What do you think is her Achilles' heel?

Gingrich: I think the danger she runs is that in attempting to appease the left wing of her party she becomes unacceptable to the majority of Americans once they understand what she said she'd do. She is actually much more centrist than She is much tougher on military affairs than [her party's] Left. She is more rational, and I have very great respect for her as a hardworking professional. No Republican should think she is going to be easy to beat. But I have watched her now for a year be gradually pulled to the left. Her husband was too clever to do that.

Douglass: Do you want to run?

Gingrich: Not necessarily. I want to serve my country. I don't want to run as an act of habit. I have no great interest in going out to campaign. I have every interest in finding a generation of solutions. So if you said to me, would I be willing to serve my country, the answer is yes. But it won't bother me to spend all of next year running workshops and developing a new generation of ideas, and trying to be available for every American, not just Republicans.

Copyright 2012 by National Journal Group Inc.


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