>> newt gingrich for the hour, piers morgan interview starts now. good evening. eyes are on south carolina. the republican primary days away. candidates are swarming all over the state. here is something you may not know about one of them, newt gingrich. the man has an absolute passion for animals and zoos. he invited us to south carolina's science center. dog eat dog on the campaign trail. all the wild things in here seem pretty peaceful to me. with exception possibly of newt gingrich. why here? >> it's fun. it's interesting. it gets you back to nature. it reminds you of the world we live in and the fact that life is bigger than us. >> last time i saw you, you instinctively cited being in the african bush, seeing wild animals at play. it wasn't entirely surprising that you chose this location, but i walked around earlier, it seemed to be an appropriate venue in the sense that right behind you is a large praying mantis, the most predatory animal on earth. >> think of that as the super pac. >> you could. you could. whose super pac? >> any. >> yours or mitt romney's. >> any super pac. i think the nature of those organizations is that they have no responsibilities, they have no connection to any kind of pattern of reasonable politics. and it's a model i hope we can get beyond, but we won't this year. >> last time i spoke to you, we talked about super pacs and you were scathing about the super pacs mitt romney was using, amount of money he was spending, implying these were his ex-staffers and friends and so on. you were trying very hard, and laudably, to rise above this and be nice guy newt. clearly that didn't work very well. the halo, may i suggest, has slightly slipped, and your own super pac, $3.5 million worth is about to be unleashed in south carolina. presumably you would concede now you changed position on this. >> i concede every effort i made to stay positive and every effort i made to talk romney out of doing this failed, that you can't, you know, you can't unilaterally disarm unless you want to get out of the rest. since this is the objective reality, we have no choice, so we have to match in some way, we have to have effective advertising that matches their advertising or literally no matter how good your ideas are, how big your crowds are, weight of television and radio and direct movement -- in iowa, 45% of all the ads were attacks. >> you were blown to pieces. >> right. >> what your friends and supporters found surprising was that you allowed yourself to get in that position in the first place. i want to read you some of the things you have said before. they're quite interesting about how your position on this has changed. you once said one of the great problems we have in the republican party is we don't encourage you to be nasty, we encourage you to be neat, obedient, loyal, faithful, all of those boy scout words that would be great around the campfire, but are lousy in politics. so where does saint newt come from? >> it is not a question of being saint newt, it is a question of where you're prepared to fight. i think when we are up against obama this fall, we're going to have no choice. they're raising a billion dollars. they clearly intend to run a continuous unending negative campaign. and you have to match that or you won't be in the same business. >> with hind sight, would you have played it differently in iowa? >> i would have reacted to attack ads, especially those that were untrue, and i might well have gone to contrast with governor romney's record in massachusetts much earlier. but you know, this is the beginning of a long process. frankly, i wanted to run the experiment. i wanted to see if you stayed totally positive, if you were relentlessly positive, what would happen. well, it turned out you could come out with 14 or 15%, you could be fourth, but remember, i started pretty strong first in early december. so it's pretty clear that the relentless negative ads do have an effect. >> two very famous businessmen have tweeted about you today. rupert murdock, can't blame newt g too much. he was carpet bombed with negatives by romney. brilliant, visionary, but just too much baggage and erratic. what's your response to that. >> i like the brilliant, visionary part and i like the fact that he recognizes that the context in which we were responding is, in fact, in the context of carpet bombing by romney. that sets for a different tone. people give you permission to behave differently. it is sunk in, even in the news media there's a broad acceptance that i took all the hits for three solid weeks and patiently tried to figure out if there's a way to stay totally positive. so i think there's a much higher tolerance now for me to bring up romney's pro-abortion record or tax increase record, or the degree to which romney governed in massachusetts with liberal judges. so i think you can now draw a contrast with a sense that that's fair, given the context of all of the negative ads. >> in answer to the too much baggage and the erratic allegations, i mean, a bit of truth in both, wouldn't you say? >> that's part of what i have to overcome. i think we have been pretty successfully overcoming it. prior to the negative ads when it was a question of good ideas, good solutions, positive thinking, we were literally pulling away, and gallup and others were reporting an increasingly wide gap, which is why romney picked panic and went to all out negative attack. the truth is today, as "the wall street journal" pointed out, i have the best jobs plan, and his according -- a big gap ichb ideas. >> the critics were right. newt really will say and do anything to win. he is very pro-romney. >> give me a break. so romney lines up famous people for romney who will say anything and use jack welchs language. they will say anything to get romney elected. what's new? the fact is what i have said has consistently been conservative, and the only critique people are upset about is raising questions about a business record which romney has touted as the base of his presidential campaign. >> here's the potential flaw in going after bain. nobody knows the answer whether he created more jobs doing what he did at bain, taking over troubled companies and in most cases making them more successful and selling them on, but at a cost, a human toll cost. a few went bankrupt. argument goes from their side, they probably would have anyway. did he create more jobs or did he wreck more jobs? do you know the answer? >> well, the point is if a guy is running for president, he has two major credentials. his record as governor which he doesn't want to talk about because he was more liberal as governor than a republican primary will ever endorse, and his record in business which he doesn't want to talk about. now, at what point are you allowed to say running on commercials alone isn't enough? >> if he manages to establish that his record at bain was such that he created more jobs than he effectively lost, you could argue that's exactly what is needed in america right now in the sense that you have to cut. >> but he makes that assertion anyway. but it doesn't prove it. he just asserts it. >> have you proven the opposite? >> i just raised the question. certainly raised the question. it is not about capitalism and free enterprise, it is about values, character and judgment. and even he said i think it was in 2007 that he looks back at things he would do differently now. the question is in terms of values, character and judgment, were those the right decisions in those circumstances, and i said up front i think he is going to sooner or later go press conference and walk people through three or four of the most troubling cases. and anybody that thinks he is going to be able to get by obama and axelrod this fall without explaining this is kidding themselves. >> rick perry told me last night in a way you guys are doing him a favor because you're having the debate in the open now. >> yeah. >> the democrats have to get into it. >> last thing you want is to nominate somebody that collapses in september because they can't answer the questions. people want to attack for my past, that's fine. i will answer and be ready to be the nominee or i won't. romney ought to have to meet the same test. >> he has been very scathing through the super pacs and also pretty personal against you. got pretty nasty, pretty quickly. only now are you responding. what do you actually think of it personally as a man. >> i don't. >> you have no view? >> i have no view. >> do you like him? >> he is a competitor. he is somebody who i think was unnecessarily negative and who knows that some of the things he ran were not true, but that's his decision. that's how he wants to play the game. >> you called him a liar last week. >> no, i responded to somebody that asked me that. >> same thing. >> well, if you watch sunday's debate, there's a marvelous paragraph where romney begins by saying i have never seen any of the ads. and then he outlines one of the ads exactly correctly. >> don't have to go to the sun to know it is hot, do you? >> i am saying, watch the paragraph, then you decide. >> do you stand by the fact he is a liar about you? >> i stand by the fact that he is not truthful, i stand by the fact he doesn't want to be candid about his record as governor, and stand by the fact he doesn't want to be candid about the ads. all i ask you to do, watch, don't ask me, watch him. >> you said that character is very important for whoever wins this nomination, yet you won't tell me what you think of mitt romney. what do you think of his character. >> i don't have obligation to answer that. >> but if character is an important category for this nominee, isn't it perfectly acceptable to ask his competitors what they think of his character? if that is a criteria for choice. >> it should be quite clear that i believe that he ought to be candid about being a moderate. he ought to be candid about the fact he was consistently pro-choice, not pro-life as governor. his tax paid abortions. he has planned parenthood written into romney care by name. he appointed pro-abortion judges. his government helped build an abortion clinic after he supposedly converted. you could go through a whole series of things, say there's a big gap between the romney commercial and the romney record. >> is he better for a leader, potential president of the united states, to admit they have been wrong and change their mind about issues or to stick stubbornly by their same platform on these things decade after decade? >> if somebody -- first of all, if you had a fairly long career, you should have changed your mind on something. i mean, there should have been something -- >> it would be strange if you hadn't, right? >> someplace where you said gee, i learned something new and now i have a different position. >> anything about romney's motivation for changing position? >> first of all, you go to romneytaxes.com, see every tax he raised while governor. he will pretend he didn't raise them. as i said to you, after he claims he became pro-life, he went through pro-abortion steps as governor. these are facts. so i think you can look and decide for yourself. he will tell you that he's a conservative. he will appoint liberal judges consistently. >> could you imagine ever working for him? >> no. what does that -- he couldn't ever imagine working for me either? i mean that's just -- >> people become president and appoint people to key positions they don't necessarily like but who they really respect as political operators. you would be a big catch for a big job. >> you ask, i don't even think of him as president or thought about working for him. >> i asked to you consider the unthinkable. >> if you said the president of the united states asked you to do something, would you consider it, i am with jon huntsman. if the president of the united states of either party asks you to help on something that matters to the nation, you have an obligation as a citizen to see whether or not you can do it because you owe it to the country, not to the personality. >> take a short break. come back, talk about south carolina. many are saying for you, newt gingrich, this is the biggest moment of your political life. maybe you don't agree, maybe you do. 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getting attacked by newt gingrich is somewhat akin to being attacked by a pore cue pine. he attacks everywhere, no strategy, no consistent theme and looks so mean when he does it, it is not the most effective attack. >> ari fleischer, press secretary from george w. bush. keeping with the animal theme, newt gingrich is back, a porcupine. everywhere you look, someone is getting pricked. >> i don't think that's my reputation. that's fine if that's what ari fleischer wants to say. >> same ari fleischer also came out today in a column and said that actually given the amount of fire power you have going into south carolina with the super pac and ads it can buy you, buys a lot of ad time, you could be the one that could threaten mitt romney quite seriously. a dent to him there could precipitate a whole new battle ground. >> i think south carolina on the 21st is unbelievably important. okay? romney, although he has anywhere close to getting majority, 3 to 1 republicans in iowa voted against him, 2 to 1 in new hampshire were against him. nonetheless, he can claim he won both, even if one was won by eight votes. if he wins here, he has enormous momentum towards the nomination. >> unstoppable? >> in this day and age, i don't know that anything is unstoppable, but he would have enormous momentum. >> if he won by more than 10%. >> if he wins by one point, he >> if you don't win, given you set that parameter, do you drop out? >> i don't know. i don't want to prejudge anything. >> is it that crucial? >> first of all, i think i'm going to win. the events in the first day here have been remarkable. >> politicians play hypotheticals. >> i am not answering hypotheticals. you can ask 23 ways. i am not answering. my goal is to win on the 21st. if we win on the 21st, we go to florida. it is a brand new game. at that point romney has to confront that when you get outside of, remember, new hampshire is his third best state after utah and massachusetts. so if he only gets 37% in his third best state and he can't win here, then i think you're in a very different nomination process. so this is going to be armageddon armageddon. they will come in here with everything they've got, every surrogate, every ad, every negative attack. at the same time, we're going to be basically drawing sharp contrast between a georgia, reagan conservative and massachusetts moderate whose pro-gun control, pro-choice, pro-tax increase, pro-liberal judge, and voters of south carolina are going to have to decide. >> when it comes to armageddon, good way of putting it, he has a better machinery. >> yes. >> do you regret the fact your machinery has such cat clis mick start? disappeared in the summer. you said yourself, you did interviews, basically you're dead, what about the others. but you made an incredible come back. what you still don't have is the proper machinery. >> and because of money. romney ran for five years. he is a money machine. he has raised millions on wall street. >> is that his fault or good politics? >> i am not saying it is his fault, to try to match him at what he does best, which is raise money, would be a dead loser. what i tried to match him at is what i do best, new ideas, better solutions, better ability to communicate with people. we had a pretty interesting campaign so far. >> is this the biggest week of your life politically? >> yeah, i think it is the most decisive week. this is the week when everything culminates. we either convince south carolinians to vote for a conservative and unify them around me or, you know, you see romney probably becoming the nominee. >> very quickly, what do you think of the other competitors? rick santorum, he had the santorum surge, took a bit of a hit in new hampshire, not necessarily surprisingly, is it over for him, continue to see him get track tion. >> governor perry is here, i don't know if huntsman will -- >> are you surprised governor perry is around? >> he is a smart guy, governor the texas, he has the resources, if he wants to stay, he can. the concern is how do we communicate to south carolinians they better pick one conservative, in which case would almost certainly be me, if they want to beat romney. any vote that goes to anybody else is going to be a vote that helps romney win. >> at what point does the party have to rally as you say. has it reached that point? >> the party never has to rally. >> doesn't have to collectively say we're going to have these two duke it out? >> no. >> does it help you have endless candidates carrying on? >> that's not the party's function. the party doesn't have any authority to do that. obama and hillary went all the way to early june. nobody thought they could step in and say gee, let's not do this. the american political process is the most wide open process on the planet, and it attracts very, very strong personalities, and they get to see what they can do. it is really a marvelous process for sorting out who's capable of enduring the presidency. >> take a break. when we come back, i want to get personal with you. take you back to when you were 14 years old, and your stepfather bob took you to the old battle fields in france. and you had some extraordinary sites you saw that i think shaped in many ways the way that you became as an adult. back with my special guest, newt gingrich. i want to talk about a time in your life, you're 14 years old, stepfather bob, a military man, tough man, took you to the battlefields of france, and as you walk through the war graves and got a sense of the scale of what had happened, you also had this very disturbing moment when you went down into some recess, some cellar. >> well, it is a glassed in basement like area that had the bones of 100,000 people that had been blown apart in the fields and left to rot. the battlefields lasted for nine months. literally, back in that era, they went out after the war and they gathered up all of these bones, german and french bones, put them in this one extraordinary memorial. we were staying with a friend of my father's who had been drafted in 1941, and sent to the philippines, served in the baton death march. spent three-and-a-half years in a japanese prison camp. so the combination of seeing the battlefield, 600,000 men died in nine-month period in this battlefields, listening to him talk about stories of defeat. then a few weeks later, french paratroopers killed the french fourth republic, brought back general degallon to create the fifth republic, that combination of things for a young kid from harrisburg, pennsylvania, drove home that this stuff is all real. this isn't just a game. >> how would it shape you as a president, in the sense you face if you become president moments where you have to decide, you take your country to war. it is going to happen to you. what does that tell you about warfare? >> it is deeper than going to war. it is the question of how request you make the historically right decisions to give your children and grandchildren a prosperous, safe, free country. it may be avoiding going to war because you use the right build up, diplomacy, because you have foresight. also how do you operate in a principled manner. you can't ad hoc all of these decisions. you have to have some underlying set of principles that say for america to remain a great nation, an exceptional nation, these are things we have to focus on, and you have to set priorities, and where possible, you have to get ahead of the problems. i mean, one of the amazing things about eisenhower and reagan was that they were able to sort of see around the corner, and so they could take steps that achieve the great deal at minimum risk, and both tended to avoid risk. >> many say the iraq war was fought on completely false premise, that saddam hussein was on weapons of mass destruction and he wasn't, and therefore let's not use the word illegal, a pointless war that cost a lot of lives and money and would have been much better off not involving american troops the way it did. given what you experienced on the battlefields, given what you saw, if you had been the commander in chief, with that decision about iraq, would you have taken that decision? >> well, there were two decisions. there was the decision to go in and then there was the decision to stay. i mean, you can look back in hindsight and say a lot of things. every intelligence group in the world believed saddam was dangerous, given the real danger of him getting weapons. >> president in a year's time, which you may be, and you're faced with the same compelling evidence about the new leader in north korea, for example. what would you do? are you just going to accept that level of intelligence again? >> you mean with hindsight or not. >> with foresight. >> somebody walks in says we have reason to believe the iranians are two weeks from having an nuclear weapon, we have reason to blee ama did i know jod would use it. no american president, i can't say about obama, i think even obama would in the end not tolerate an iranian nuclear weapon. >> what would you do in that circumstance. >> by then, you are pushed into a corner where only military action is possible. you want to shape the eventuality by taking steps now that fundamentally alter the iranian regime nonmilitarily. the ultimate goal in north korea has to be to get beyond the dictatorship. >> america can't afford another conflict with iran or north korea. you're not going to commit hundreds of thousands of boots in the ground. >> first of all, i don't think there's any circumstance you want to put hundreds of thousands of troops into iran. but there are circumstances you may want to go after the nuclear program, and the question becomes, this is what the real world is all about. you are suddenly faced with a choice. you list amad did i know jad take the gamble of having weapons and that he won't use them? the middle east is dangerous. pakistan has between 1 and 200 nuclear weapons. a government badly divided, has very substantial islamist radical elements in it. we have no idea whether or not one or two or three of those weapons will disappear someday. we are living in a world that is vastly more dangerous than most of our elites want to deal with. i think it is a very serious question. >> if i said to you give me a phrase which would sum up your kind of overview of a modern american foreign policy, what would you say it would be? >> i would say it would be to protect the interest of america and her allies and to do it in as effective way as possible with minimum of force and minimum of risk. >> take another break. let's come back, talk about the economy and bill clinton, because you and he, i had no idea about this, had the most extraordinary number of similarities in your lives. >> okay. >> even you might not be aware of this. [ male announcer ] you love the taste of 2% milk. but think about your heart. 2% has over half the saturated fat of whole milk. want to cut back on fat and not compromise on taste? try smart balance fat free milk. it's what you'd expect from the folks at smart balance. he is first resilient and secondly, he's always thinking, and he's got a million ideas. i mean, some of them are good, some of them i think are horrible. >> typically honest assessment from former president bill clinton. back now, my guest, former speaker of the house, newt gingrich. praise there and a little dig as you would expect. fascinating similarities to you and the former president from time magazine's 1995 person of the year writeup about you. that dynamic between you and president clinton is all the more surprising, given the similarities between the two men. born three years apart. each was the eldest child of a livly, worshipful mother. each tangle with a gruff stepfather. both produce elementary school teachers saying they each landed what he both intended. verbally promiss queues, deeply pragmatic. both sacrifice everything for public lives, indulge themselves in private lives. both overreachers that tried pot and chased women. neither served in vietnam, both own 1967 mustangs. >> fairly strange collection. >> would you quibble with those comparisons? >> no. i think he has more pure energy than i do, he is a very bright guy. we had a little bit of a graduate student relationship where you would sit in a seminar, talk. i think we drove our staffs crazy, we would get off on ideas. we were both leaders of ideas. we didn't just campaign to achieve power or office, we actually liked getting things done, and that's why you could have a conservative congressman speaker of the house and a liberal democrat in the white house and actually get a lot done because we would hold press conferences, attack each other, then we would meet and talk and sort it out, and -- >> why is this not possible now? >> it is. >> but it is not happening. >> but that's because you have an obama, somebody that's a radical and who doesn't know how to negotiate. remember, clinton had been governor 12 years. so clinton understand how to deal with legislators, and he understood under our constitution, if i didn't schedule it, it wouldn't pass, and if he didn't sign it, it wouldn't become law, so we had a deep interest in learning how to work with each other. i don't have any sense that obama has either the temperament or skills or the interest in learning to work with john boehner. >> how to deal with republicans mainly on the tea party side, they have been quoted saying whatever it takes to make this guy a one term president, we have to get him out. >> we had a huge freshman class in 1994. it was the first majority in 40 years. we will an enormous freshman class. they had to come in. as senator lindsey graham will come in, a lot of stuff they did, they were too impatient, looking back. he knows i was trying to develop a growing republicanism hadn't been there 40 years. it was frustrating and hard and difficult. people of goodwill should be able to figure this out. it has to start with a willingness on the part of the president to have a conversation. clinton reached a decisive moment about june of 1995 where all of his liberal staff said to him you got to fight gingrich every day, you cannot cut a deal, and he said to them if i do that, i'll be a one term president. we have got to find a way to work together. and that made a huge difference. >> is the pressure in this current pretty self serving impasse i witnessed, i have been on air a year, seems like all the time, washington is paralyzed. >> it is a mess. >> it seems absurd that the world's great democracy behaves like this. what you're saying, it is mainly president obama's fault, not john boehner's not the republicans? >> i think it is the whole system. the republicans don't quite get how to be clever, and there are things they could do that would break the impasse. the president has no skills and understanding. >> what should we be doing? >> if i were the republicans, i would find democratic bills that fit my values. there's a webb warner bill that provides offshore gas in virginia. house republicans ought to pass it, harry reid, look at two of his own members with a bill passed in a bipartisan majority, what's he going to do? and i would look for ways to begin to break up the log jam. >> do people underestimate you, do you think? >> i love the capacity of washington pundits to be sort of serial wrong, they're wrong, they come back and they're wrong, but they're still pundits. they're wrong and they're wrong. and you think at some point, many, many years ago, megagreenfield was the editor of washington post, it is amazing how many are wrong this saturday, who will be back on the air next saturday and sunday with a new prediction. >> of course. >> i think we'll know in ten days. >> if you're in south carolina, thinking should i vote for this guy, what is the biggest misconception about you personally? >> i don't know. what i would say to people is that i have had a very long record as a reagan conservative. i am the only person in the race who actually has balanced the budget four times. i am the only person in the race who negotiated with the president to get welfare reform passed. i have twice participated in creating huge numbers of jobs, with reagan in the '80s and as speaker, we had 11 million new jobs while i was speaker. so i have, i think i have three abilities that none of my competitors have. first, i think i am a person who could most likely beat obama in debate. second, i actually have ideas and solutions big enough for a country this side. third, i have actually done it. it is not a theory. you're not sending an amateur to washington to learn to do it, i have done it. >> those that say you are temperamental, you will blow up, and that's the problem, your family interviewed this week show you have calmed down. you are a calmer newt gingrich. >> that's true. >> being a grandfather they say has mellowed you. >> being married to callista has been an extraordinary mellowing and relaxing experience, plus i think at 68 as a grandfather, you just have a different natural sense of time and sense of pacing. >> take another break. come back, talk about three of your favorite subjects. god, america, and callista. i think i'm right. >> got them right. >> good start. so, this is delicious okay... is this where we're at now, we just eat whatever tastes good? 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(announcer) starts working on contact and at the nerve level. to block pain for hours. new capzasin, takes the pain out of arthritis. again and again, the american people have demonstrated a remarkable ability to choose wisely when faced with great challenges. >> our best leaders remind us we have a moral obligation to the cause of freedom. >> from the documentary film a city upon a hill. executive producers newt and callista gingrich. newt is back with me now. how important is your wife to you? >> extraordinarily. i was fortunate finding someone that's remarkably intelligent, very, very professional, very beautiful, a lot of fun. she got me to golf. anybody that can get me to golf, that's so far beyond my expectation. and we just enjoy being with each other. i think i relax vastly more around her than any other time. >> are you as happy with callista as you have been with any woman in your life? >> sure, totally, yes. it is a different world. you know, a long time ago when i was trying to rise and do all sorts of things, i was a very driven person. i had very -- i had a very intense life, and the intensity was as much inside me as it was around me, and i think that getting to know callista really unwound a piece of me and got me to sort of go into a different rhythm and be surrounded by just a different -- i remember one time very early on she turned to me and she said i'm not going to let your bad mood infect my good mood. >> good line. >> i stopped in my tracks, i thought she had captured this inner intensity that i had, tended to in some ways be destructive. >> for a conservative running in a republican nomination race, you'll be aware that the baggage of your previous marriages, circumstances behind the divorces and so on is a stick to beat you with. >> right. >> for those that want to do that. do you object to that in principle? >> i think people have every right to ask of any presidential candidate virtually everything. and i think i have an obligation to look them in the eye and tell them how i honestly feel, that i have done things in the past that were wrong, that i have had to go to god for forgiveness and to seek reconciliation, and have to ask him to measure who i am today, and decide whether a happily married 68-year-old grandfather is a person that learned from his mistakes and is a stable person, capable of leading the country in a very, very difficult time. >> you are now a catholic. callista is a catholic as well. how has that changed you as a person? >> there is a power to the eucharist in the catholic tradition, a power to the community. you know, one of the things people would say to me is "welcome home." there's a sense of family that is vastly more fulfilling and vastly stronger than i would have imagined. i tell people i didn't so much decide to be catholic as i gradually by going to the about a sill ka where she has been singing in the choir since 1996, i gradually sort of became catholic. then one morning the decision caught up with what had happened to me. >> i suppose the obvious battlefields ground of many battlefields grounds is that mitt romney is a mormon, to evangelicals, they think it is a weird religion. >> that's something romney has to explain. >> do you as a catholic find it strange? >> no. i am not judgmental how people go to god. i think we have traditions and different people go to god in different ways, and i am very respectful. >> take a final break. i want to talk to you after the break about america, because the key challenge now isn't necessarily the pairing of america. the better phrase i heard is how do you keep america great, because now there are other great powers emerging. how do you keep america great? back with presidential candidate and animal lover, newt gingrich. if you could be any animal, which would you be. >> if i could be any animal. >> you love animals. that's why we're here. >> an elephant. >> why? >> they have 105 muscles in their trunk. >> unbelievable. >> it is, it is cool. >> do you have 105 in your trunk? >> they are big, last a long time, live a long time, and they're smart, and social animals. very few things can attack them. >> what kind of animal would you think mitt romney would be. >> i have no idea. i am not doing that. >> cobras, vultures. rick perry called him a vulture capitalist yesterday. >> texans tend to speak in very colorful language. >> how are we going to keep america great because you've got china, you've got india, you have super powers emerging that are genuine rivals to america's former preeminent state. america remains at heart a great country. what do you think a new president needs to do? >> first of all, you have to offer an optimistic vision of a hopeful, successful american future. you have to deregulate a great deal to liberate the american people to once again go and be creative. you have to change the tax code to maximize savings and investment in work, so people are rewarded when they do the right things, and you have to challenge every parent in every neighborhood to help their children with their education and to fundamentally overhaul the education system. >> you mention parents, your mother, you were emotional recently talking about your mother, had problems in her life but loved you dearly. your stepfather, a fascinating character, a military man, a tough man, a poignant moment when you became speaker and you rang him. you had a tough time. he didn't approve of your first marriage, and you called him to thank him for what he contributed to you. what do you think he would make of the newt gingrich that you've become? >> well, considering that he wrote from korea after i did my first newspaper article at 10 and said to my mother, keep him out of the newspapers, he would say -- i think he would just say this amazing journey is continuing, and i think he would look on with both a sense of humor not to take it too seriously, and with a sense of pride. >> would he prefer the newt gingrich today to the one that he found slightly less savory? >> yes, i think he would say it was nice i finally grew up, and i think he would regard that as a good sign. he was a pretty tough, direct guy. >> what would your mother make, do you think? >> my mother would just love me. my mother loved me under any circumstance. >> didn't matter. >> no. it was absolutely unconditional. she just thought that i was newty. >> do you feel you spent the last 50 years bracing yourself for this week? >> in a sense. this is the -- not just this, then beyond that to the nomination and beyond that to the election. i spent 53 years trying to

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