Gingrich doubts GOP victory

Newt Gingrich said yesterday any Republican will have a tough time winning the White House next year because even Republicans are down on their party.
"To win in 2008, Republicans will have to make a clean break" from failures in Iraq, Hurricane Katrina and border security, the former House speaker said.
The Republican Party's presidential candidate has to be willing to stand up and say, "Katrina didn't work," Mr. Gingrich told reporters over breakfast at the Hay-Adams Hotel, a block from the White House.
"If we nominate anyone who hasn't done that, [we] have very little likelihood to win," he said.
He spoke of New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as the likely Democratic standard-bearer.
"It is wrong to make this a personality problem [because President] Bush can't change the federal bureaucracy — the Congress has to do that," he said at one point, then added:
"Senator Clinton's goal this year should be to pass fundamental personnel reform with Bush because when she becomes president — if she becomes president — she is going to find she has all the same crippling systems that Bush has had."
But Mr. Gingrich also said Mr. Bush's "stay the course" approach to the Iraq war won't work, and that the United States should be smarter and more unpredictable in managing the conflict, which he said is merely a "battle in the larger war against the irreconcilable wing of Islam."

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