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WALLACE: Let's start with your interview in The New Yorker magazine this week. And I want to quote from it at length. Let's put it up. "Newt Gingrich is one of those who fear that Republicans have been branded with the label of incompetence. He says that the Bush administration has become a Republican version of the Jimmy Carter presidency when nothing seemed to go right."
And later, there's this. "Not since Watergate," Gingrich said, "has the Republican Party been in such desperate shape. Let me be clear: 28 percent approval of the president, losing every closely contested Senate seat except one, every one that involved an incumbent — that's a collapse."
Jimmy Carter? Watergate? Collapse? Are things really that bad?
GINGRICH: Well, let me say, first of all, nothing that I said in The New Yorker disagrees with things I said as early as December of '03 when I talked about having gone off the cliff in Iraq, things I said all through '04 in trying to get the Bush campaign team to shift from attacking Kerry personally to forcing a genuine choice over values and policies, to concerns I raised in December of '04, January and February of '05, about how they were approaching Social Security reform, through what happened at Katrina.
I mean, so what I said in The New Yorker may be compressed, but in fact, it is things that for the last three years I've talked — I've warned all last year that I suspected we were drifting into a catastrophic defeat. I don't see any other way to read '06 except it was a defeat.
And if we don't have a serious, open discussion of where we are, I don't see how we're going to change.
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You go through this list. You say to yourself this government — I mean, not just the president. This is not about the presidency. The government is not functioning. It's not getting the job done.
WALLACE: But you compare George W. Bush to Jimmy Carter, which, as you well know, is fighting words among Republicans.
GINGRICH: Look, the functional effect in public opinion is about the same. Now, Republicans need to confront this reality.
If you were at 28 percent, 29 percent, 30 percent approval, and if things aren't working, and now you have a fight which splits your own party — and this immigration fight goes to the core of where we are.
If you read Peggy Noonan's column last Friday, which was devastating — and I think it resonates with where the base of this party is right now. The base of this party is looking up going, "What are we in the middle of — why are we ramming through an omnibus Teddy Kennedy bill, and attacking Republicans who criticize it, and calling us," for example, as one senator did, "bigots, when all we're saying is this government couldn't possibly implement this bill?"
There's no evidence at all that this government is capable of executing this.
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In 1988, no one running for president on the Republican nomination tried to differentiate themselves from Ronald Reagan.
There's a lesson there. Ronald Reagan was enormously popular. The fact is that — forget presidential politics. We as a country over the next 1.5 years have to do dramatically better.
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WALLACE: Basically, what do you think is wrong with George W. Bush?
GINGRICH: Look, I think that he means very, very well. I think he's very, very sincere. But I don't think that he drives implementation and looks at the reality in which he's trying to implement things.
And I think that's why you ended up with, "Brownie, you're doing a great job," when it was obvious to the entire country at Katrina that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had collapsed and was not capable of doing any job at that point.
And I think as a result, the administration has very, very high goals — Democracy throughout the Middle East — and very weak bureaucratic support for those goals, and the result is an enormous mismatch in just sheer implementation.
And this is, in the end, a practical country. Americans want their government to work.
WALLACE: You say that this president doesn't solve anything.
GINGRICH: He doesn't methodically insist on changing things. I mean, again, take the example last week. If somebody with tuberculosis, who is actually in the computer system, can't be stopped at the border; if you have three terrorists in New Jersey who have been here illegally for 23 years — and the Senate, by the way, voted to sanction cities and counties not asking if you're illegal, an amendment to this — what I think is an absolute disaster of immigration legislation — you have to look at that and say, "We're not serious."
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GINGRICH: Well, the bill explicitly grandfathers in somewhere between 10 million and 20 million people. We don't know the number because the government has no idea how many there are — again, an example of incompetence.
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And it's simply, I think, disingenuous. I'm assuming that the president and his staff understand what this bill does. And if they do, what the president said is disingenuous.
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GINGRICH: No, I don't think you need to run — in fact, I don't think you should run against President Bush. I think most of his major decisions have been very sincere, and most of them are decisions the average American actually would endorse.
I think what you do have to do is run in favor of radically changing Washington and radically changing government. And I think that all you have to do is look at the examples I've given you today where the government simply fails.
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http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,277454,00.html
