From Thursday night’s Fox News All-Stars.
On whether President Obama’s policies are responsible for the weakness of the economic recovery:
So what we hear is when the economy is bad and Democrats are in power, the reason is structural … Of course, when Republicans were in power and we had the crash in `08, all we heard was it was the fault of policies of the Republican administration.
So let me apply the same standard. It is not as if the doldrums in the economy, the stalling of the recovery, is an act of God. A lot of it has to do — there are $2 trillion of money, corporate money, sitting on the sidelines. And the reason it is sitting on the sidelines is because of this incredible uncertainty — also not act of God [but] an act of Obama. He’s got a financial reform bill, of which … hundreds of pages of regulations are now being written. Nobody has any idea what’s going to be in there. You’ve got [the] health-care reform bill, thousands of pages of regulations, people have no idea what it’s going to look like.
And then, on one other area — the one area where you could really increase employment is in energy production. The country is waiting to exploit oil and gas, and employment would really respond there. It’s an area that already employs a substantial number of the population. And Obama and his administration, with its left-wing influence, have been holding all of that back. It’s not an act of God. It’s not structural. It’s the policies of this administration. …
Obama comes in with a mandate to fix the economy. Instead he decides he wants to change America, change its finances, change health care, change energy with cap-and-trade. … He decided this is a time — with the country on its back and the people demoralized as a result of the crash of ’08 — in which he can change America. That is not what the country needed.
On the mass resignation of Newt Gingrich’s senior staff:
It has to do with the way that Newt was running his campaign — or not running it. You know, they [in the staff resignation announcement] spoke about a difference of views about the direction of the campaign. I think “direction” is the wrong word. It’s about the seriousness of the campaign.
Newt is a guy who’s a guy of ideas, and I think his view was he’ll do this all out of studios. … He can shine in debates, he’ll do the videos, he’ll do the Internet, but he doesn’t want to go out there shaking hands. He’s shaken a zillion hands in his lifetime, and I’m sure that’s not what he wanted to do.
So he hasn’t appeared on the scene. He’s been on vacation, and he thinks he can do it Newt-lite. And I think he’s got a staff who believe it is utterly impossible in this day and age. …
Is the Gingrich presidential campaign finished?:
It’s over, but he’s staying in.