MTP Transcript for Dec. 17

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: You close down any Web site that is jihadist.

MR. RUSSERT: But who makes that judgment?

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: Look, I—you can appoint three federal judges if you want to and say, “Review this stuff and tell us which ones to close down.” I would just like to have them be federal judges who’ve served in combat.

MR. RUSSERT: Are you concerned, however, that with carte blanche, that the government could move in and say, “This mosque is closed, this Web site is shut down”?

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: No. You have—you have more censorship in the McCain-Feingold bill, which blocks the right of free speech about American campaigns than you have from the FBI closing down jihadists. We’ve already limited the First Amendment right of free speech by a set of rules that are stunningly absurd. In California, you can raise soft money to run negative commercials attacking your opponent through the state party and you cannot raise soft money to run a positive commercial on behalf of your own candidate. That’s California state law. It’s stunningly stupid and a clear infringement of free speech.

So we’ve had a 30-year period of saying it’s OK to infringe free speech as long as it’s about politics. But now if you want to be a jihadist, and you want to go kill people, well who are we to say that’s morally wrong? I think that’s suicidal. I’m using the word deliberately. A country—a Supreme Court justice once said “The Constitution is not a suicide pact.” This country has every right to defend itself, and you saw the same thing recently on this U.S. Airlines provocation, where you had six people go way out of their way to cause trouble, and then claim they were infringed upon. And I think, frankly, the president should invite that U.S. Airlines crew to the White House and thank them, because we ought to set a standard that if you’re provocative about killing people, we’re not going to show you any mercy.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to what is going on with your life, and travels around the country, the 2008 presidential election as well. Your old colleague in the House, Tom DeLay, made this prediction the other day, according to The New York Post. He predicted that “Hillary Rodham Clinton will win the presidency in 2008 - and that Barack Obama would likely be the vice president. ... ‘Hillary will be the next president of the United States.’” Here’s the cover of Newsweek magazine with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Do you agree with Mr. DeLay that Hillary will be the next president?

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: I think she certainly has an opportunity to be the next president.

MR. RUSSERT: Will she be a formidable...

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: So does—so does Barack Obama, and I would say so does John Edwards. On the Democratic side, I think those are the three clearly serious contenders.

MR. RUSSERT: What about Al Gore?

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: I—look, I’ve known Al Gore for many, many years. If he runs, he’ll be a serious contender, but I think he would be fourth on that list of plausible people. I actually think Barack Obama’s having as good as run as anyone could hope for, and he’s doing it by being positive, by being engaging, and by being above all the negative Washington-based, you know, this morning’s hotline nasty attack, you know, e-mail kind of stuff. And I think if he can sustain that, despite the best efforts of many of my good friends in the media to drag him down to mere issues, he could become very formidable.

MR. RUSSERT: Does he have enough experience to be president of the United States?

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: Well, Abraham Lincoln served two years in the U.S.

House, and seemed to do all right.

MR. RUSSERT: Will Hillary be a formidable candidate?

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: Hillary Clinton is one of the hardest working professionals I know. I mean, she is serious, she is married to the smartest politician in the country, they have an enormous network of fund-raising. No one has made any money betting against the Clintons since 1980.

MR. RUSSERT: So she could win?

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: Oh, of course she could win. And anybody who thinks she can’t win must have been living on a different planet, I mean this—I, I watch Bill and Hillary with deep professional admiration. It’s like, like watching a formidable opposition football team. You coming from Buffalo will appreciate this. You know, there are years when it’s good, and there are years when it’s bad, and they are formidable.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me show you the latest NBC poll about the Republicans. Rudy Giuliani leads the pack, 34 percent; John McCain, 29; Newt Gingrich at 10; the governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, at 8. And yet, when asked about favorable/unfavorable attitudes among all voters: favorable, Newt Gingrich, 28; unfavorable, 44. High negatives.

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: Absolutely. And look, I, I was a very aggressive Speaker of the House, I was very controversial. I had 121,000 negative ads run against me nationally. That’s—but I’m not running for president right now. I mean, what I’m doing is talking about ideas, and even, I think, most people agree that we could use a new generation of solutions—solutions on energy, solutions on education, solutions on national security, solutions on health. I founded the Center for Health Transformation as a non-partisan program that reaches out. American Solutions, the, the organization we’re creating, is going to reach out to every candidate in both parties. And I’m, I’m pretty happy to try to develop a very positive, very solution-oriented future for the country. And then we’ll see what happens over time.

MR. RUSSERT: But that’s a change in your demeanor. When you ran for speaker, you did call Democrats grotesque, dishonest, you said Jim Wright, the former speaker, was a crook. I mean, there’s a long history of very aggressive partisan rhetoric from Newt Gingrich. Do you regret that now?

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: No. Look, first of all, it was a different time. I mean, you had a 40-year monopoly of power in the House by the Democrats. You, you were in very different kind of environment. You didn’t have a war that, that should focus every American on our own survival, which we—we have a big war, of which Iraq and Iran and Afghanistan are sub-sets. But we have a much bigger threat to our very survival. We didn’t have the rise of China and India. I mean, I think we’re entering a period where, as Americans, we have to pull together in what I think will be the largest complex challenges since the Civil War. And I don’t think there’s any period since 1861 in which the nation has been—will be as tested as it’s going to be in the next 15 or 20 years.

And part of it, I think I’ve, I’ve reacted—again, we’re all creatures of, of the world we’ve lived in. I’m now a grandfather, I have two grandchildren who are five and seven, and I think you, you think differently about time when you think about your grandchildren’s future, and you think about, “What kind of country am I going to leave them?” And I also think the country’s at a point where it—where, where the negativity has gotten to the point, whether it was right or wrong in ‘94, it has now gotten to the point where it’s pathological. I mean, where you have consultants who, who don’t know how to write a positive commercial. That’s bad for the country. Maybe good for their candidate, it’s bad for the country.

MR. RUSSERT: You said you’re not running for president yet. In every article that assesses your presidential prospects, starting with today’s New York Times, your home state paper, the Atlanta Constitution, it always talks about your liabilities. I want to talk about that and give you a chance to respond.

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: I can’t imagine you’d do that, Tim.

MR. RUSSERT: Well, it’s, it’s in case you’re going to be a candidate. This is how you’re—this is the Atlanta Constitution.

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: This is what it would be like.

MR. RUSSERT: “Gingrich’s liabilities, as Americans would certainly be reminded in a campaign, run the gamut from personal to political. Twice divorced, he has been accused of having extramarital affairs—including one while he was leading the movement to impeach President Bill Clinton for lying about an affair. ...

“And then there are the ethics charges first raised in 1996. ... The House Ethics Committee investigated Gingrich’s use of tax-exempt charities to fund a college course he was teaching at two Georgia colleges.

“Critics charged that the course was political in nature and violated the groups’ tax-exempt status. Gingrich was reprimanded and ordered to pay $300,000 for improper use of funds and for twice providing the Ethics Committee with false statements.” How do you deal with that in a presidential campaign?

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