National Journal's Linda Douglass spoke with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., for the May 9 edition of "National Journal On Air." This is a transcript of their conversation.

Q: I want to welcome former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. He is also a novelist, and we're going to hear a little bit about that. Welcome, Mr. Speaker.

Gingrich: I'm delighted to be with you again.

Q: Thanks so much for joining us. So let's talk a little bit about the column that you wrote on your Web site this week saying that the Republican Party may be facing a catastrophic election in the fall. Why?

Gingrich: Well, when you look at [the fact that] the Senate Republicans in 2006 were zero for six in incumbent re-elections. You look at the loss of Speaker [Dennis] Hastert's seat in Illinois. You look at the loss last Saturday in Louisiana in a seat that we've held for 30 years. You look at the current polling numbers, and it's clear that the American people want the Republican Party to be more oriented towards solving problems, cutting spending, making the government work, rather than just politics as usual. And it's clear from what we've seen in polling data, and what we've seen at actual election results, that the country doesn't think that the Republicans have gotten the message yet.

So my concern is to suggest very bold, very specific changes. I'm delighted that today Congressman Paul Ryan has introduced a bill which would both create a gas tax holiday over the summer and pay for it by setting up a one-year moratorium on earmarks, so that the money would come straight out of the politicians' side, rather than out of the American family's. And I think that's the kind of bold step that begins to move us in the right direction. I think the Republicans need to take a lot of steps like that to get back into consideration by the public.

Q: Well, you say that there is a gap between John McCain's brand of independence and the Republican brand, and that that's not going to help the Republicans running for Congress in the fall. What do you mean by that?

Gingrich: Well, I think John McCain right now is doing dramatically better in polls against Senator [Barack] Obama and Senator [Hillary Rodham] Clinton than the Republican Party is doing in polls. And what that says to me is that you could have an election where people decided that Senator Obama was too far to the left, and they ended up electing Senator McCain, but then they also elected the congressional Democrats. So that's what happened for 40 years between 1954 and 1994. We fairly often elected a Republican president, but we kept the Democrats in charge of the House and Senate.

So I think unless the House and Senate Republicans take steps to improve their own desirability, and unless they are seen as having reformed, they shouldn't expect that a victory for John McCain is necessarily a victory for the congressional Republicans.

Q: But I guess the question is, are you saying that there is any kind of a difference on substance or ideology between McCain and the Republican brand?

Gingrich: Well, I think it's fair to say that McCain has clearly been more pro-reform. He's been more anti-spending and anti-earmarks. He has been more committed to the environment, and he has a reputation as a maverick who does his own thing and keeps his own counsel. So people see John McCain as not just another Republican candidate. They see him as a unique individual who is actually more trustworthy and has more respect than the Republican Party as an institution.

Q: You know, I talked last night with an elected official who is for McCain, who said that he believes McCain is going to move the Republican Party more toward the center, into a more moderate place, away from the conservatism of the past several years. Do you agree with that?

Gingrich: I think McCain is going to help create a new center-right majority. But I think if you look at the speech he gave this past week on judges, if you look at his position on spending -- in many ways Senator McCain is very conservative, but he's a maverick conservative. He's a populist conservative. He's not lockstep with the Bush Administration. And I think people like that. I think they like having somebody who follows his own counsel and who does what he believes in.

Q: How easy or difficult do you think that Barack Obama would be to beat for John McCain, assuming that Obama is going to go on to be the nominee?

Gingrich: I don't think we know yet, because I don't think we know whether we're going to get a fabulous performer who is the new John F. Kennedy, or whether we are going to get the most liberal Democrat ever nominated who becomes the new George McGovern, Michael Dukakis. I don't think we know enough about Senator Obama to know which of those two is going to be the nominee.

If it turns out that he really is the most liberal member of the Senate, and it turns out that he really does have the vulnerabilities that that implies, then he could get beaten very, very badly. If, on the other hand, it turns out that he transcends his past, and people conclude that none of that matters, then he could win by a surprisingly big margin. I think it's literally up in the air which Barack Obama's on the ballot in October.

Q: What do you think about the generational difference, as what will clearly be -- if those two run against each other -- a key issue?

Gingrich: Well, I don't know if it's a key issue if people decide that Senator Obama's just plain wrong. Saying that we have this nice young guy who is wrong and unreliable and doesn't understand foreign policy will not be to his advantage. But on the other hand, if people decide, you know, he really does understand, then I think he has a very high likelihood of winning. But I don't think automatically -- I mean, people can look at the two and say, you know, John McCain spent five years in a Vietnam prison camp, served his country from Annapolis as a Naval officer, has done the right things to understand what America needs to do, and I would rather take my risk with his mature judgment than with an inexperienced first-term senator who has an awful lot of weird, left-wing friends.

Q: Let's move on to the subject of your novel, which sounds very interesting. You've written another novel now -- which is amazing, given how much other writing you do -- about Pearl Harbor. Tell us a little bit about the plot.

Gingrich: Well, "Days of Infamy" builds on the novel we wrote last year called "Pearl Harbor." And the essence of it -- Bill Forstchen and I write active history and we look for new ideas, new approaches, and we ask ourselves the question: Under what circumstance, what change that was practical and realistic and reasonable, would've made a really big difference?

And in the case of "Pearl Harbor" and "Days of Infamy," we replaced the Japanese Admiral [Chuichi] Nagumo, who was timid and was a destroyer-and-cruiser admiral who believed in hit-and-run tactics, and we replaced him with Admiral [Isoroku] Yamamoto, who was the head of the combined fleet -- their smartest strategist and aviation specialist, and a man who believed in gambling -- and who had won money in poker in the U.S. and money in roulette in Europe. And we said, what if he had been in charge of Pearl Harbor? What would he have done to exploit the victory on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941? And we lay out a dramatically more dynamic and aggressive Japanese attack to show that we were actually at risk of having a much more serious problem than the one we got into.

Q: Just a final political question for you, then I'll let you go, Mr. Speaker. It must be frustrating for you to watch your fellow Republicans in Congress not be able to at this point raise their own popularity. Who do you blame for this pickle that you think they are in?

Gingrich: Well, I think it's a collective problem. I think that the Reagan revolution that existed through the Contract With America and through my period as Speaker was a unique moment -- that the Republican Party for 64 years before that had had a minority mindset, and had done things that didn't involve aggressive reform and aggressive leadership. And I think they collectively reverted to that both in the administration and in the Congress. They reverted to not really taking head-on and aggressively finding reforms that would bring Americans together and that would unify the country.

You know, the Contract With America, Linda -- the largest one-party increase in vote in American history in 1994; the Reagan revolution carried, you know, 49 states in 1984. There were opportunities to really bring us together, and I think that that sort of got lost by the wayside.

Q: Well, we always love to hear from you, Mr. Speaker -- that is, former Speaker Newt Gingrich, the author of the Contract With America, which certainly was seen to have contributed to those Republican victories, and he is also the author of "Days of Infamy," a novel about what could have happened at Pearl Harbor. Thank you so much for joining us, Mr. Speaker.

Gingrich: Thank you.