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Tavis: I'm always pleased to welcome former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to this program. The influential Republican is now a best-selling author and frequent political analyst for Fox News Channel. His most recent book is 'Winning The Future, A Twenty First Century Contract With America.' Mr. Speaker, nice to have you on the program.

Newt Gingrich: Great to be back. Good to see you.

Tavis: Glad to see you again, happy belated New Year to you. So tomorrow night's the big night for the President. Your expectations? State of the Union?

Gingrich: Well, I think he'll probably be very positive. I think he'll try to outline proposals on healthcare, which I think will be his biggest domestic proposal. I suspect he's going to say something about energy independence and things we need to do to get ourselves freer from places like Venezuela and Iran. And I suspect he's gotta deal with Hamas and with Iran and what's going on in the Middle East.

So it'll be probably a pretty long speech, and an effort on his part to sort of get back on track. He had, 2005 wasn't a particularly good year for him, and I think he's trying to find a way to get back on offense and describe things in a positive way.

Tavis: Let me pick some of those things apart right quick before I get to some other news I wanna get to. Let me start with healthcare, since that is what we're hearing is going to be the centerpiece of his speech. You've written about this, you've talked about it. What ought the President say about healthcare?

Gingrich: Well, we founded the Center for Health Transformation to make three arguments. First that we wanna center on prevention and wellness. We wanna take care of you to minimize your getting sick, not wait till you need to go to the emergency room with acute care. Second, you gotta really recenter it on the individual.

If you're gonna take care of diabetes, you're gonna take care of the problems that you have, you're gonna take care of heart disease, then the patient has to be right at the center of this. And it can't just be that your boss paid for it, your doctor did it, and you're passive. So it's a very different model. And third, it's gotta be electronic.

You live in an age where people have credit cards and cell phones with cameras, and ATMs to get cash worldwide. We have to bring health into the same modern era to make sure that people have accurate information in a timely way with electronic health records, electronic prescribing. I hope the President's gonna outline that kind of future.

Tavis: What about the notion, which you've written about and talked about, of universal healthcare? Everywhere I go, I'm hearing more and more people talk about the fact that we really have gotten to a place now, not just where we need to do something about healthcare, but this notion, however you defined it, of universal healthcare for every American.

Gingrich: Well, I think we ought to find a way so that every single American has an insurance policy. I'm against a European style, single payer bureaucracy. I think that would lead to a very mediocre system. But I'm in favor of using tax credits and vouchers in a way to help the working poor, the people on Medicaid, those who are temporarily unemployed, to help everybody be able to afford health insurance.

And I think that requires some significant changes. But I do think it's doable, and I think that it would be a much better system if every single American had health insurance.

Tavis: Speaking of Medicaid, one of the things I hear everywhere I go, nobody understands this new system. How disastrous has it been, or is it?

Gingrich: Well, I think the Medicare part D is not going to turnout to be a disaster. I think they had the usual launching problems the first 30 or 60 days, but my guess is that you'll find by Easter, virtually everybody's got their drugs, everybody's back in the system and it's working. It just has an initial startup problem.

I think Medicaid is a much bigger problem. Medicaid is administered by the states. There are 50 totally different Medicaid programs, 51 if you count the District of Columbia. And they're a mess, and they're very expensive, and they don't, in many cases, the medicine's not very good. And so I think you're gonna see very profound effort to rethink and to develop a new model to replace the Medicaid program we inherited from 1965.

Tavis: And so the President, to your earlier point, moving on, cannot step to this podium in the well of the House tomorrow night, and not address issues of national security. Obviously, he staked his presidency on it, so let me just pick a few things apart if I can, get your thoughts. First of all, the elections in the Palestinian territory. Hamas. Your thoughts.

Gingrich: Well, I think first of all, Hamas defeated the Palestinian Liberation Organization because the PLO was totally corrupt and had failed to deliver. I do think Hamas now faces a moment of truth. Are they prepared to live in peace with Israel? Are they prepared to try to govern the Palestinian territories?

Or are they going to remain a terrorist organization? If they're going to remain a terrorist organization, we have no choice but to help cut them off from all funding, isolate them totally, and break their capacity to function. Because you can't expect a country to have a neighbor next door who gets up every day planning to kill you.

And so, I think Hamas now is out in the open. They have an opportunity to grow up and to play a real role that's very positive. Or they have an opportunity to throw it all away, stick with their terrorist position. In which case, I think something has to be done about them.

Tavis: How does the Bush administration get away with, specifically Secretary Of State Condoleezza Rice, how do they get away with waking up the day after, as it were, and Monday morning quarterbacking and saying well, we miscalculated on this one. We shouldn't have been so anxious to support these elections. Do they get away with that?

Gingrich: No. I think supporting the elections was the right thing. But I think the problem you have in places like Gaza is that the people with guns intimidate and coerce people without guns. And we have to understand, this is gonna be a long, hard struggle to defeat the terrorists.

Whether it's terrorists in Iran, terrorists in Iraq, terrorists in Amsterdam, in London, in Paris, in Madrid. This is not going to be an overnight process. And I think we do tend to underestimate how long and hard this is gonna be.

Tavis: Okay, so that issue notwithstanding, I wouldn't debate you on that issue, it's a long, hard fight. Long, hard slog. I got that. How does this administration, in your view, get away with continuing, if we wanna use the word, to miscalculate? We miscalculated on WMDs; we miscalculated on the elections with Hamas coming out on top.

I could run a litany of things you'd know as well as I do. How do they continue to get away with being the administration that runs this country on all kinds of issues where we keep miscalculating, as it were?

Gingrich: Well, I think it's a real challenge for the administration, frankly. I think when you look at the failure of government in Katrina, for example, here at home.

Tavis: Another miscalculation. (laugh)

Gingrich: Here's a case where the city of New Orleans failed, the state of Louisiana failed, and the federal government failed. And yet, I haven't seen the scale of change that you and I would expect to see after a failure that's that big. So I do think we're at a crossroads here that is partly the Bush administration, partly the Republicans in the House and Senate, partly the Democrats, who aren't coming up with any new ideas, either. But we need to confront how big these challenges are, and how bit the changes are going to have to be.

Tavis: Okay, Iran. Since we're on national security. I paraphrase you here, but you suggested on another talk show not long ago, some time back, that you think what we're facing in Iran is as critical, as dangerous, as facing Hitler back in '34. Do you stand by that?

Gingrich: Yes, Ahmadinejad, who's the current president of Iran, it's a dictatorship, has said publicly he wants to defeat the Anglo-Saxons, and he wants to eliminate Israel from the face of the Earth. Now, I have every reason to believe he means exactly what he says. I don't think this is rhetorical language. I think the Iranian dictatorship has seen itself as at war with the US from 1979 to today.

They seized American hostages in the embassy in '79. They killed American Marines in Beirut in 1983. Prior to 9/11, more Americans have been killed by Iran than by any other countries since the Vietnam War. And I think Ahmadinejad represents a clear, vivid statement of their desire to defeat us. And I think that we need to confront that, and we need to design strategies to block the Iranians from getting nuclear weapons.

Tavis: We had an expert on this program just a few nights ago who suggested that maybe we need to tone down the rhetoric where Iran is concerned, in statements like yours, for example, comparing him to Hitler might be a bit much, given that even our own government estimates that if they could, in fact, produce a nuclear weapon, they're 10 years away from doing that. Maybe we need to tone down the rhetoric and use some diplomacy here.

Gingrich: Well, let me say first of all, you just pointed out a minute ago these guys have been wrong. The same CIA we now said was wrong about WMD, we're now saying we trust them on Iran. I don't have any reason to believe they know what they're talking about.

Tavis: Point well taken. (laugh)

Gingrich: Second, if somebody says to you, I want to defeat you, and I want to eliminate your ally from the face of the Earth, I think responding to that is not exactly an irrational position. I think when Ahmadinejad gave the speech I just described, he was standing behind a poster that showed a ball falling that had the Israeli flag on it.

But what most newspapers didn't cover was the bottom of the poster was the floor with a shattered American flag laying on the floor. And he then walked around front and looked up; this was paid for by the Iranian government. In October, the Iranian government ran a nine minute children's cartoon designed to recruit terrorist bombers. We think of our kids watching cartoons that are funny, or they're adventure stories, or they're Spiderman.

They had a nine minute recruiting cartoon for children in Iran, to become terrorists. And I think we just ought to take seriously a country that is actively trying to get nuclear weapons. That has now admitted they lied to the International Atomic Energy Agency for 18 years. And that says publicly they want to defeat us and destroy Israel. I think the odds are pretty high he means it.

Tavis: Let me shift gears, come back home and domestically, the filibuster has been busted. The Alito vote will happen tomorrow morning. If all goes as predicted, he will be confirmed. He may be on the front row with the Supreme Court tomorrow night for the President's speech, for all I know. Your thoughts about Mr. Alito?

Gingrich: Well, I think he is a very solid, respectable conservative. He's a man who believes that the US Supreme Court should not be making Constitutional law. It should be interpreting law that was passed by the Congress and the President. And I think he's part of a process of rebalancing the court from what had been a very long streak of liberalism that moved towards a very activist, interventionist kind of court.

I don't think that he is a threat to the freedom and safety of Americans. I think sometimes my liberal friends get a little excited. But I think it's kind of healthy to have the court rebalanced, and I think it's a tribute to President Bush that in the middle of all these other problems, he nominated somebody, this is his second nomination that'll be accepted, and I think that's a significant achievement.

Tavis: You honestly believe, look me in the eye and tell me as an African American I should not be concerned by his record, or lack thereof, on Civil Rights? As a woman, I'm not a woman, but as a woman, I shouldn't be concerned about his record?

Gingrich: No, I don't think you should at all. No. But look, we live in a world where people who are liberals looked and said, "Why should I trust Clarence Thomas to protect African Americans?" Because after all he can't really be Black because he's a conservative. Since he's a conservative, he must be secretly White.

In that kind of world, I can't give you any answers. But everything I know about Judge Alito is that he is going to be a solid enforcer of the laws that exist. The laws as they exist I think are designed to protect people's rights. And I think he will do that.

Tavis: We'll debate Clarence Thomas on some other show. I ain't got time, in a minute and 30 seconds, to debate you on Clarence Thomas. (laugh) With all due respect. That said, 'Winning The Future, A Twenty First Century Contract With America,' it was you and your brilliance over 10 years ago now that put the Republicans back in power. You happy with what you did? 'Cause your party seems to be in disarray in the House. Is there a culture of corruption here?

Gingrich: Well, I'm happy with what I did. I think they better get back to being serious about reform. I'm not happy with what we've seen over the last six or eight months, and I think that people like Abramoff, the lobbyist, are traitors to the cause and are people who deserve to go to jail, and should go to jail.

Tavis: Yeah. You at all concerned about your party in 2006, the midterm elections?

Gingrich: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think we are the party of reform, and any Republican who thinks that if you give people enough pork you're gonna get reelected needs to switch parties. Because the Democrats are the natural party of big government. We're the natural party of working taxpayers. We expect our members to go to Washington to change it, not just to send us back pork.

Tavis: So in 30 seconds, does Hillary have a real shot in '08?

Gingrich: Absolutely. Senator Clinton is...

Tavis: You just saying that, or you believe that? (laugh)

Gingrich: No, look, Senator Clinton is a very smart, hardworking person who is married to the, to the best politician in America today. Bill Clinton is a genius at figuring out how to organize power. Now, the two of them are...

Tavis: You didn't do bad, man.

Gingrich: No, I didn't do bad, but I'm just saying, look, I think I know the lead, right?

Tavis: Yeah, okay. (laugh)

Gingrich: This couple is calmly and methodically laying the base for her to be the Democratic nominee. And I think the odds are probably three out of four she'll be the Democratic nominee. And then the question will be whether or not we can find somebody to beat her.

Tavis: You heard it from Newt Gingrich. (laugh) Former Speaker Of The House. 'Winning The Future, A Twenty First Century Contract With America,' his new book. Mr. Speaker, it's always nice to have you on the program.

Gingrich: Great to be with you.

Tavis: Up next, from the ABC series 'Commander In Chief,' speaking of politics, the Chief Of Staff, at least on television, actor Harry Lennix. Stay with us.