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Newt Gingrich 'Can't Explain' High Poll Numbers
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Monday he is still eyeing a run for president and can't explain polls that show him ranked near the top-tier candidates for the Republican nomination although he has not formally announced. "It's sort of frightening sometimes," Gingrich said. "Sometimes the guys who aren't running are doing better than the guys who are running. Why would you want to start running if you're doing better by not running than you would if you were running? I can't explain it." Polls in some states show Gingrich, speaker from 1995 to 1999, running behind former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, U.S. Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, but ahead of U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas and Fred Thompson, an actor and former U.S. senator from Tennessee. Gingrich said the 2006 elections in which the GOP lost both houses of Congress are a sign of disappointment among Republicans, and that his relatively high poll numbers may indicate that many people remember the 1994 Contract for America that he co-authored and his highly publicized spats with President Clinton.
Story Continues Below Gingrich, 63, said he will not decide whether to enter the race until October following a nationwide Solutions Day workshop on Sept. 27 - the anniversary of the Contract for America. "There are 511,000 elected officials in the U.S., from school boards to city councils to county commissions to state legislatures," Gingrich said. "To get the scale of change we need to successfully compete with China and India ... we need to have change across the whole system, not just in the Oval Office." Gingrich, in Oklahoma City to speak to business executives about health care, said he supports the concept of executive roundtables "to really start learning how complex health is." "I would say health is 30 times more complicated than national security," he said. "You have to move toward more prevention, more wellness, more early testing. If you manage your diet and your exercise, you can really have dramatic improvement in your outcomes." On the issue of illegal immigration, Gingrich said he believes President Bush "is gradually moving in the right direction" on developing a policy that would control the nation's borders, enforce immigration laws on employers who hire illegal immigrants and create an identification system for immigrants run by a private contractor that would allow a person a swipe of a card to reveal their immigration status.
"The American people strongly want something along this line," he said. "I don't blame anyone for coming to America to earn a living. I blame America." Gingrich also commented on former CIA Director George Tenet's new book, "At the Center of the Storm," and said Tenet should have resigned in the summer of 2001 if he believed he could not tell President Bush during their daily briefings about intelligence indicating that al-Qaida terrorists were planning a major attack on the U.S. "If what he says in the book is true, then he should have resigned. And if what he said in the book is not true, then he shouldn't mislead the American people," Gingrich said. Gingrich said he has grown weary of former administration officials who suggest that others were responsible for intelligence breakdowns that led to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. "They're covering their own ego and their covering their own reputation at the expense of the United States," he said.
© 2007 Associated Press.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
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