Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, speaking on a Tuesday conference call held to respond to his controversial comments about Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget, said that he didn’t go into his interview with NBC’s David Gregory “hostile enough” and should have pushed back more forcefully against the “gotcha” questions the host asked.
But he argued that this controversy, which many have argued spells the end of his candidacy, will be fixed in a matter of days, and he likened his experiences to Ronald Reagan’s.
“Every once and awhile there’s going to be a problem, and you gotta spend three or four days fixing it,” he said. “If you go back and look at Ronald Reagan’s record, the opening week of the campaign in Sept. 1980, they didn’t have a very good week. And they had to go back and fix it. This happens occasionally. The trick is to relax, look at it, try to figure out what happened, and keep moving.”
Gingrich said he should have been better prepared for the ““adversarial nature” of “Meet the Press.”
“I didn’t go in there quite hostile enough, because it didn’t occur to me going in that you’d have a series of setups,” Gingrich said. “This wasn’t me randomly saying things. These were very deliberate efforts to pick fights.”
He said his comments on the show were “a lot more controversial than I intended them to be.”
Gingrich said the show first portrayed him as a racist for comments he made about food stamps and for mentioning Detroit, and then challenged him with a short clip from 1993 in which he advocated an individual mandate.
“It’s nonsense to start a conversation by going back 18 years and playing ‘gotcha,’” he said. “I was explaining the position of conservatives who were trying to defeat HillaryCare. In 1993, you had nothing like the current focus on the 10th amendment. You had nothing like the current desire to get power out of Washington. And you didn’t have the sense of radicalism that Obama has injected into the system, in the sense of drifting toward a socialized bureaucratic structure that runs the whole country.”
Gingrich said his comments describing the Ryan budget as “radical” and “right-wing social engineering” resulted because he didn’t push back forcefully enough against Gregory.
“I probably shouldn’t have allowed Gregory to set the terms of the question,” he said.
He explained, “I used language that was too strong, although the underlying principle I think is right. When you’re passing very large reforms that affect people’s lives, you have to have an an approach which engages them, listens to them, doesn’t just try to sell them, listens to them, modifies the bill if necessary, builds a consensus.”
Gingrich explained that his differences with the Ryan approach is that he thinks instead of transitioning Medicare entirely into a system in which retirees are given money toward the purchase of private policies, seniors should be given the choice between the current system and a new system. He said he would support offering them that choice immediately, so that the government could study the results of the so-called “premium-support” model with the hundreds of thousands of people rather than implementing it system-wide for all Americans currently 54 and younger.
Yet in explaining this on the call, Gingrich once again used strong words.
“Part of what I’m worried about is compelling people to go through a radical change that has not been tested,” Gingrich said of Ryan’s approach.
Nonetheless, he said, “I am reaching out to Paul Ryan.” He said he has already spoken with several House Republicans and to Ryan himself later today.
Were he to do it all over again, Gingrich said he wishes he had responded to Gregory by saying, “I am very proud of Paul for starting a process that is very important and I’m confident that he will work with the American people so we will never be faced with the kind of situation Gregory is talking about.”
By the “situation” Gingrich meant a scenario in which Republicans are seen as imposing something on the American people that they don’t want. He said his experience was formed by the backlash against the Medicare catastrophic law in 1988, which eventually led to its repeal.
“Medicare is not like anything else,” Gingrich said. “Medicare is something that people really take personally. You’re dealing with nitroglycerin.”
During the call, Gingrich offered to cut an ad for any Republican who gets attacked by a Democrat with his “Meet the Press” comments.
Gingrich also conceded that, “At times I’ve been an analyst, at times I’ve tried out ideas, and those are not the prerogatives of somebody who is offering to serve as president.”
One of the many problems with Gingrich’s defense is that it isn’t as if he’s some rookie to the process. He’s been in Washington for decades and should know that the whole point of “Meet the Press” is to try and trap the guests into corners by playing old clips and drawing them out on any contradictions. So it’s perplexing that Gingrich would be in any way surprised by Gregory’s approach to the interview.
Also sure to draw scrutiny. On the call, he said, “I’ve never changed on cap and trade. I’ve always opposed cap and trade in its current form.”
