Transcript for May 14

MR. GINGRICH: Oh, first of all, I didn’t pay a fine, I paid the cost of the investigation.

MR. RUSSERT: Well, Nancy Johnson, Republican, House Ethics Committee, said it was a fine.

MR. GINGRICH: Yeah. OK. But I—if you go back and read the actual report, it—we agreed that the—it had cost $300,000 dollars to investigate.

We had one letter—out of 83 ethics charges filed by Democrats, the only allegation that had any substance was not even from 83. All 83 in the end were not problems. We had one letter, which my attorney wrote, which was technically wrong. And I said that was wrong, I took full responsibility for it being wrong, and I said, “Therefore I, out of my personal money, I will pay the difference.”

I just want to suggest to you that that’s a pretty high standard of enforcing ethics and saying we ought to do the right thing, and both the president and the speaker are under the rules and under the law. And therefore if you do something that’s not correct, you ought to pay up for it.

MR. RUSSERT: But do you believe it would be impediment for you to seek high office?

MR. GINGRICH: I, I’m sure if anything like that ever happens, we’ll have all sorts of consultants with all sorts of ways of attacking Newt Gingrich. That’ll be one of the 73 items that they’ll figure out.

MR. RUSSERT: When you were on the program in ‘03, I said, “Will Newt Gingrich ever seek elective office again?” You said, “I doubt it very much.” Is that comment still operative?

MR. GINGRICH: I doubt it.

MR. RUSSERT: You doubt...

MR. GINGRICH: We’ll drop very much, it seems to me that’s a little bit extreme.

MR. RUSSERT: You doubt you’ll run for president?

MR. GINGRICH: I doubt it at this point.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me show you your travel. You’ve been in Iowa four times, New Hampshire three times, and then you told the Des Moines Register that—at the Lincoln Day dinner, that you’d be back in Iowa to see the state fair, that your wife had graduated from a college in Iowa that “we hope to personally visit all 99 counties.” Is that because you love Iowa?

MR. GINGRICH: Well, first of all, we are trying to create a movement for real change. I mean, I do believe the concept the real change requires real change, and whether you’re talking about education, you’re—so you can compete with China and India; you’re talking about using bioenergy so you can be safe, whether you’re talking about transforming health so that you could eliminate cancer as a cause of death, which I think is possible, these are all real changes, these are not just cosmetics. The two places, as you know as a professional, the two places you’d most like to change the language of politics are Iowa and New Hampshire. And, and I am very committed, on a bipartisan basis, Democrat and Republican—I, I’ve suggested strongly to the Republican Party of Iowa that they spend 2007 in a bipartisan dialogue with Democrats, that they, they and the Democrats in Iowa jointly host for dialogue, not debate, not Mickey Mouse cattle shows, not, you know, clever 19-second answers, but for real conversation In the, in the Lincoln-Douglas tradition. Lincoln-Douglas debates lasted three hours each, there were seven of them.

MR. RUSSERT: But you’re not, you’re not ruling out running?

MR. GINGRICH: I’m not ruling out running, but I’m also saying we have real things to do in ‘06. We have real things to do in ‘07. And it’ll be nice to have a couple of years of talking about solutions, not just talking about ambitions.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me show you May 11, 2005, and then May 11, 2006. There’s May 11, 2005. One year later, 2006. Newt Gingrich, Hillary Clinton—political odd couple. Do you think she’ll be the Democratic nominee?

MR. GINGRICH: Well, I think she’s the front-runner. But I think, you know, she has, she has a lot of challenges and there’s a question whether or not there’s a ceiling, that when you got down to the Hillary/anti-Hillary, whether or not she can break 50 percent in primaries. But she’s clearly the most formidable Democrat in the field.

MR. RUSSERT: Could she win a general election?

MR. GINGRICH: I, I think—this is a country which has elected a peanut farmer, an actor who made movies with monkeys. I mean, you know—with chimpanzees. I mean, many things happen in America. I think any Republican who doesn’t believe that Senator Clinton is an intelligent, hard-working professional, and that if we beat her we’re going to beat her with better ideas. We’re not going to beat her with some kind of negative campaign. We’re going to beat her because in the end, the country decides our ideas and our solutions are better than hers. And, and, and I think, I think she’s very formidable, but I also think, you know, she’s been around long enough. I mean, she understands if, if we don’t break out of the partisan mess that we’re in, if we don’t—this is why the dialogue idea I think is so important...

MR. RUSSERT: Let, let me close on that, because when you came to Congress and you took control of the Republican revolution, you were described as a bomb-thrower. Some of your rhetoric was pretty hostile. Jim Wright being a bad man...

MR. GINGRICH: Sure.

MR. RUSSERT: ...and, and things like that. Do you regret some of that vitriolic, poisonous, bitter rhetoric? And do you think it should stop on both sides?

MR. GINGRICH: Well, well look. First of all, sadly, Speaker Wright resigned with an enormous number of problems, and, and the Democratic Party insisted he resign. So what I said there, I stand by.

Second, when I was speaker of the House, working with a Democratic president, we passed welfare reform and 65 percent of the people on welfare went to work or went to school. We passed the first tax cut in 17 years. We passed the first four balanced budgets since the 1920s. If you go back and look at our record, there was a period there...

MR. RUSSERT: But now, now, now...

MR. GINGRICH: I’m just saying. Senator—Speaker—President Clinton and I were able to reach beyond partisanship. On foreign policy, I consistently tried to strengthen the presidency overseas, and I think if you were to talk to Erskine Bowles or anybody else who was in the Clinton White House in that period they’ll tell you, we were able to get beyond partisanship, to cut very tough deals, to negotiate for, for literally hundreds of hours.

MR. RUSSERT: All right, this way: Should the blogs, talk radio, cable TV—should people lower their voices, and, and, and control their rhetoric?

MR. GINGRICH: If we could get the two parties to agree to a series of dialogues for all of 2007, to have real conversation about where should America be in 2015. How do you fix our education system so it—we can compete with China and India? The very act of having the political leaders required, you know, no ninth—what we have today is, can you raise enough money to hire a consultant to get a focus group to memorize 90 seconds? I mean, it is a banal and destructive...

MR. RUSSERT: And attack people personally.

MR. GINGRICH: And attack—and then can you run nasty ads defeating the other person. When you’re both on the same stage regularly, and you and I were talking about this the other day, the Barry Goldwater proposal that President John F. Kennedy...

MR. RUSSERT: Travel around the country with John F. Kennedy.

MR. GINGRICH: That they would actually be together so people would understand. We have a country that we, together, have to go through a lot of real changes if we’re going to give our grandchildren the kind of future that our parents gave us. And that, that should be beyond either party.

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Speaker, we thank you for joining us and sharing your views.

MR. GINGRICH: Good to be with you.

MR. RUSSERT: Coming next, our roundtable tackles the very latest Bush poll numbers and that issue, civil liberties vs. national security, coming up right here on MEET THE PRESS.

(Announcements)

MR. RUSSERT: Our roundtable with John Harwood, Judy Woodruff and Jon Meacham after this brief station break.

(Announcements)

MR. RUSSERT: And we are back. Welcome all. Let’s go to it. Newsweek has a new poll out this morning. President Bush job approval: approve, 35; disapprove, 59. Pretty much where it’s been. And then this question:

President Bush’s performance since his re-election: better, 4 percent; worse, 48; same, 47.

John Harwood, what do you make of that?

MR. JOHN HARWOOD: First of all, Tim, I have to salute my mom, the mom I’m married to and the terrific mom sitting next to me here.

MR. RUSSERT: Amen.

MS. JUDY WOODRUFF: Thank you.

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