MTP Transcript for Dec. 17

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: First of all, you do it honestly and openly. We could take them one by one if you want to, but let’s start with the ethics stuff, OK? On every ethics charge, in the end, I was exonerated. The one thing that happened is I signed a letter written by one of our lawyers that was technically wrong, and I paid the cost of investigating that letter.

MR. RUSSERT: But you were reprimanded by the full House later for...

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: For having signed a letter.

MR. RUSSERT: And that you paid a fine or...

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: That’s right.

MR. RUSSERT: Three hundred thousand. It’s significant. It’s significant.

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: That’s right—it, it is, I just said it’s significant. And I vol—and I paid the $300,000. Now, but here’s the point: the rest of the stuff in that article about my—the ethics charges, are false. The Internal Revenue Service said there was nothing wrong with the course. I am a PhD in history. I was teaching a college course. It was totally—it goes back to free speech. I was allowed to teach courses. The Federal Election Commission was reprimanded by a federal judge and told that the charges against GOPAC were totally false. All of the courses—those things didn’t make page one. And, and I fully expected my opponents—remember, the Democrats were very mad after the ‘94 election. They had lost power. They—for the first time in 40 years. They knew it couldn’t be their fault, so it must be mine.

But if you go back and you took—if you were to some day take item-by-item what the charges were, and what the results were, again and again and again they turned out to be false. Now, I’ve had a very long career, and there’re lots of things people would be able to pick out from votes to attacking my life to attacking, you know, the ethics stuff. But people have to decide at some point down the road, first of all is, are the ideas good? I didn’t come here today and say you should put me in the White House. I came here today and said, “We need solutions on health; we need solutions on education.”

If the ideas are good, then let’s see how many candidates’ll just take the ideas. I’m, I’m pretty happy to have written the Contract with America. I’m pretty happy to have reformed welfare, balanced the federal budget, cut taxes, been the only person cited by the 9/11 commission for strengthening the intelligence community in the ‘90s. And if over the next 10 years I can help my grandchildren live in a safer, freer, more prosperous country by creating a wave of new ideas and new solutions, that wouldn’t be a failure.

MR. RUSSERT: But do you, do you regret pressing the impeachment of President Clinton so hard?

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: President—you know, I’m—I’ve been divorced twice.

Both times I’ve been deposed. Both times I was told, “Perjury is a felony. You should tell the truth under deposition.” President Clinton lied under oath as a lawyer in front of a sitting federal judge in a civil rights case. This was not about his personal behavior in the Oval Office. That’s a matter of judgment, and people can render judgment. The question is, do you want to go down the road of Nigeria and corruption and have a country in which, as long as he’s popular, he can break the law? And if Clinton gets to commit perjury on this topic, then what does the next president get to commit perjury on, and then what does the next president get to commit perjury on? This was entirely about something I knew personally. We have an obligation as citizens to tell the truth to a federal judge under oath. The president failed that.

MR. RUSSERT: You said this in Newsweek, which was quite interesting. “I’m not a natural leader. I’m a natural intellectual gadfly.”

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: I think that’s right. I mean, I—I think my—what I bring best to American public life is trying to find ideas and solutions—what I’ve tried to do for the administration is find ideas and solutions and, and try to find a way to get a path to victory. You know, I don’t know that I would have done better or worse than Bremer. I don’t know that I would do better or worse than other people at specific jobs. I think what I can do pretty well, as we have done at the Center of Health Transformation, is think through what America needs to do. And I’m always struck when I talk to reporters because on the one front they say, you know, there aren’t enough ideas in politics. And then they say, so who’s your consultant going to be? And you say, well, let’s talk about AIDS. They say, we don’t have time for ideas right now. Who’s your—who’s your finance chairman? I mean, you can’t have it both ways.

MR. RUSSERT: But...

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: I’m, I’m happy to be in public life. I’m thrilled and honored that you to have me on this extraordinary program that several million people will see a conversation and there’ll actually be three or four ideas involved in the conversation.

MR. RUSSERT: On the American solutions, is it possible to get liberal Democrats, conservative Republicans, to find common ground on Social Security as opposed to, “We want privatizing,” “We don’t need any changes”; on abortion: “It’s the taking of a life,” “It’s a woman’s choice”; on gay marriage: “It’s, it is something that’s immoral” or “It’s civil rights.” How do you find common ground on those issues?

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: Well, you’re—that is the great opportunity that Barack Obama’s describing. I mean, Obama gives, makes some superb speeches. I quoted him Friday night in Manchester from his speech the previous Friday night, I might say, to a bigger crowd. And—but I said, I said positively, he is talking to Americans. He’s talking about finding a way to come together. You know, and maybe it starts by saying, what is it we can agree on that we can work on together and then accept the fact that we’ll fight on these things.

But I—I think, for example, I would love to see hearings on what would a 21^st-century State Department be like, and how big does it have to be so you have enough personnel to have training, and how much do you have to invest in order to have modern information technology? And, and, and I would be very happy to have Democratic committees holding those hearings. Because there’s a conversation as Americans we ought to be able to have in a positive way.

Similarly, I think the president should ask the Congress to hold hearings on the larger war. What does Ahmadinejad’s threats as the leader of Iran mean to America? What does it mean that the North Koreans have set off a nuclear weapon? What should we make out of the missile firings in North Korea and Iran? I think if the Congress started out here and then came in to say, OK, if this is the nature of reality, then here’s how we Americans can work together, I think by May or June you might see a totally different tone in this city. But real change requires real change.

MR. RUSSERT: And the president has to drive it.

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: No. The president has to be open to it because the American people have to drive it.

MR. RUSSERT: You said you won’t announce your presidential plans until September.

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: Right.

MR. RUSSERT: Isn’t that too late? Won’t the other candidates be so well financed, so well organized?

FMR. REP. GINGRICH: You are a great student of this business. When we were young, I think you were younger than me, but when we were young, John F. Kennedy announced on January 2^nd, 1960, the year of the election. In 1975 and again in 1979, Ronald Reagan announced in November, OK? My view’s this. If—and you—and you put up the numbers. Romney’s had a good year. He’s emerging as a serious player. Giuliani is wildly popular for national security reasons. John McCain has built a base for years of hard work. If one them seals it off by Labor Day, my announcing now wouldn’t make any difference anyway. If none of the three having from now to Labor Day can seal it off, the first real vote is in 2008. And there’s plenty of time in the age of television and e-mail between Labor Day and 2008.

MR. RUSSERT: So you’re thinking about it.

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