Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Sunday President Barack Obama’s inaugural address probably will be as good as the one delivered in 2009, but warned that Obama’s actions must mirror his words.
“The president tomorrow’s going to sound right,” Gingrich said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” “If he follows through on tomorrow’s speech, he has a chance to be Eisenhower. I don’t think he will. I think he wants to be Roosevelt in his second term.”
Gingrich, appearing on the broadcast from the National Mall in Washington D.C., said he was impressed not only with Obama’s inaugural address but also speeches in Virginia and Chicago prior to taking the oath of office.
Gingrich said he remembered thinking, “If he governs like those three speeches, he’ll be Eisenhower, and he’ll split the Republican Party.”
On the issue of foreign policy and al-Qaida, Gingrich said the administration vastly has underestimated the breadth of the terrorist threat in the United States — and in the world.
“I think it’s like a virus, and I think we haven’t had any honest epidemiology,” Gingrich said of al-Qaida. “I think we greatly underestimate how many places you’re going to have trouble in the next decade. Pakistan’s probably building more nuclear weapons than any other country in the world right now.”
He said neither Obama nor the nominees for Secretary of State (John Kerry) or Secretary of Defense (Chuck Hagel) has “a positive vision of how you’re going to deal with a worldwide virus that is increasingly destabilizing the planet.”
© 2013 Newsmax. All rights reserved.