israel. >> and analysis of president obama's speech to a pro-israeli lobbying group with house intelligence committee members. i'm candy crowley. and this is "state of the union." in a mitt romney and rick santorum battled it out in michigan, newt gingrich went south to his old so stomping grounds in georgia. he was the congressman from the 6th district there for more than 20 years. 76 convention delegates up for grabs in georgia, more than any other super tuesday state. looking to jump-start a campaign that hasn't won a state since mid-january, gingrich is pressing hard with a plan for $2.50 a gallon gasoline, double barrel blasts at republican rivals and the president and superlative predictions. >> i believe we have a chance, a very real chance to win a historic election of landslide proportions carrying control of the senate, increased votes in the house and decisively defeating the left for the first time since 1932. >> i spoke to nut gingrich earlier this morning. let me start with that comment you made in ohio about the possibility of a landslide victory of historic proportion taking over the senate and the house and the white house. if we kind of review where we are at the moment, we see the president strengthening. his numbers are better. we see this week two seats that republicans really had pretty much counted on in terms of picking up or retaining going by the wayside, thus, making a republican senate harder to get. what brings you the kind of optimism that makes you predict a landslide victory for republicans? >> well, we lived through this in 1980, and in the end issues matter, and reality matters. the fact is that ronald reagan didn't pull ahead of jimmy carter until september. when he did pull ahead of them, he ultimately carried more than frankin d. roosevelt against hoover in 1932, and the reason is people take stock. the price of gasoline is becoming a genuine crisis for many american families. if it continues to go higher, it will crater the economy by august because people will have no discretionary income, and, as a result, the president's going to go into the fall with very expensive gasoline, a weakening economy, a disastrously bad policy in the middle east and a trillion dollar deficit. i think that's a pretty big burden while he's waging war on the catholic church and apologizing to islamic extremists. i think that's a pretty heavy burden for the president of the united states to carry for re-election. >> i want to -- first obviously you will have to get the nomination in order to take on president obama. and i wanted to remind you of something you said january 17th. you were talking about both rick perry, who was still in the race at that time, and rick santorum. you were leading them both in the gallup polls at that time, and here's what you said. >> so i'm respectful that rick has every right to run as long as he feels that is what he should do, but from the standpoint of the conservative movement, consolidating into a gingrich candidacy would, in fact, virtually guarantee victory on saturday. >> we are now at a point where rick santorum has more delegates than you do in the delegate forecast. he's leading in the national polls. i wonder if you think it's -- and, by the way, his top adviser is asking you to get out so you can consolidate the conservative vote. >> sure. >> what's your reaction? >> well, you can tell his top adviser -- tell his top adviser i'm taking rick santorum's advice. he stayed in. he was running fourth in every single primary. suddenly he went -- very cleverly went to three states nobody else went to, and he became the media darling and bounced back. we have had a steady closing in the gallup poll between santorum and me every single week now for the last two weeks. i'm very confident that in the larger state that is going to vote tuesday, georgia, which has more delegates than any other state, we're going to win a very, very decisive victory. we've going to do pretty well, i think, in tennessee and oklahoma and ohio and a number of other states, and i'm happy to continue -- i have basically a big solutions campaign, proposals like a personal social security savings account for younger americans, and, you know, i think santorum gets out of the industrial states and gets into states where having voted against right to work, having voted for davis/bacon on behalf of unions to cause billions of dollars of extra payments by the government. having voted for every single minimum wage the union has asked for, i think he has a much harder time when we go outside of places like michigan, so this is going to be a long nominating process. >> apparently no one seems ready to get out, least of all you. let me turn you to some of the issues that you brought up at the beginning. you've been quite critical of the president for apologizing for the accidental burning of the koran by some u.s. personnel in afghanistan. it's caused obviously riots in the streets, the deaths of some americans. i wanted to play for our listeners and for you the president's explanation of why he apologizes given to abc's bob woodruff. >> the reason that it was important is to save lives and to make sure our troops who are there right now are not placed in further danger. >> do you think it has improved it, your apology? >> it calmed things down. we're not out of the woods yet. >> mr. speaker, as president, would you not issue an apology if you thought it would save american lives? >> if the commander in chief apologizes in a setting like this where, remember, the korans we're describing were defaced by islamist radical prisoners, they were defaced by them, it would have been pretty easy to have said i certainly hope every cleric in afghanistan is going to condemn the defacing of the koran by these extremists. when the president of the united states says i apologize, he is basically taking on blame now. what happens -- >> no, wait, lots of people apologize for accidental things. lots of people -- you bump into someone, you say, i'm sorry. it's not unheard of to do that, and so what i'm wondering is -- >> would you like to hear my answer? >> i would, but let me just -- >> wait a second, would you like to hear my answer before you -- i know you -- go ahead. >> i just wanted to get back to the question, which was, if you thought it would save lives, as the president said he did think this apology would help protect americans, wouldn't you do the same? >> i don't believe that the president saved lives by what he did. i believe the president set a terrible precedent of a commander in chief not standing up for american troops. i think he should have called karzai and said, you know, it was karzai's soldier who killed those first two americans. have we heard any apology from the afghan president for his soldier killing young americans? no, and i think that this one-sided policy -- obama went around the world apologizing. this excuse of his is baloney. he has apologized so many times around so many countries, it is, frankly, embarrassing to have a president who thinks that apologizing for the united states is a good policy. i don't believe the president of the united states has an obligation to apologize, and i think the commander in chief has an obligation to step up and say, i am proud of our troops, i think our troops are doing the best they could to help afghanistan, and, frankly, if the afghans don't want us there, we don't need to be there. but the idea that we are apologizing while religious fanatics kill young americans, i think, is reprehensible, and i think the average american think it's just profoundly wrong. >> mr. speaker, i have to move you along to a couple of other issues. one of them is about the president's commitment to israel. he said in an interview with "the atlantic" recently, "every single commitment i have made to the state of israel and its security i have kept. why is it that despite me never failing to support israel on every single problem that they've had over the last three years, there are still questions out there about that?" do you doubt the president of the united states' commitment to israel? >> of course. >> why? >> you have secretary of defense panetta pounding the table and saying, come to the table and then uses curse words and repeat it, come to the table lecturing the israeli government in public during a period where rocks were being fired into israel from gaza. you have the president's new budget, which cuts aid to israel for its ballistic defense shield, and have no evidence that the president is prepared to take steps to stop iran from getting nuclear weapons. they talk, and the iranians build. they talk, and the iranians build. we're being played for fools. you have every evidence this administration is desperately trying to get the israelis not to preempt, and, frankly, an israeli prime minister faced with the threat of nuclear arms in iran is going to preempt. they cannot -- no israeli prime minister could responsibly allow the iranians to get nuclear weapons because israel is such a small country, it is so compact, that two or three nuclear weapons would be the equivalent of a second holocaust. >> secondly, i have to ask, you have called the president opportunistic for calling the young woman at the center of a controversy involving rush limbaugh and contraception, the availability of it in health care, limbaugh called the young woman a slut and prostitute. in fact, she is a law student at georgetown law. can you tell me what you think of rush limbaugh in this whole case? >> i think he's indicated himself. he made a mistake, and i think he did the right thing. as you point out earlier, but, again, let me draw the distinction, he isn't commander in chief. his apology didn't do anything worldwide. it didn't put any blame on the united states. he did the right thing. i'm glad he did it. that issue ought to be behind us. >> he is seen as kind of a spokesman for the republican party, though, and it hurts the party, wouldn't you think? >> oh, come on, candy. i know everybody in the media is desperate to protect barack obama. that's silly. the republican party has four people running for president, none of whom are rush limbaugh. one will end up as the nominee. that person will be the republican spokesman, and i don't think any of the four of them were involved in this controversy at all. >> former house speaker newt gingrich, thank you so much for joining us. >> thank you. coming up, congressman ron paul, down but determined to push on. >> i do not know exactly, exactly what will come out of the pain. we do know that the strategy of building up delegates is a pretty sound position to have. 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[ male announcer ] the citi thankyou card. redeem points for travel on any airline with no blackout dates. joining me from the super tuesday state of alaska, congressman and presidential hopeful ron paul. congressman, thank you for joining us. i want to start out on a couple of issues in foreign policy where you differ the most from your republican colleagues. the president will meet this week with prime minister netanyahu of israel. if you were the president, and the prime minister sat down and said, i want you to know that we are prepared to bomb iran because we want to keep them from developing the aptitude for having nuclear weaponry, what would your response be? >> well, first thing, i'd like to stay out of their business. i'd like to let them do whatever they want. i don't want to interfere with what they need to do for their defense, and i don't want to interfere with israel when they want to have peace treaties, but if i were forced to give my personal opinion about it, i would say, you know, it doesn't make any sense to bomb a country that is no threat to anybody just because they might get a weapon and try to point out that containment worked pretty well with the soviets, and they had 30,000, and they were rather ruthless people killing millions and millions of their own people, and we stood them down in the cold war. so i'd try to calm it down a little bit, but, quite frankly, i don't think we should tell israel what they should do or shouldn't do. >> speaker gingrich is a -- former speaker gingrich, as you may have just heard, said he thinks the u.s. has been played for fools by iran, that -- accused the president of doing nothing to try to contain iran's nuclear ambitions if, indeed, they have them. as we know, the president has tried to gather world opinion to force iran to stop what nuclear development it's doing. we also know that he's been at the forefront of sanctions. do you think the president has failed to do anything about this, or do you in general go along with what he's done? >> well, no, i think he gets too much involved. i think sanctions give motivation for them to want to have a nuclear weapon. everybody around them, we have 45 bases around them. we can demolish them within an hour, so -- and the worst thing sanctions do, and the republicans and the democrats both support it, republicans -- the other republican candidates, they just want war even more. but the whole thing is there's a lot of dissension in iran, and we should encourage it by not interfering. once we get involved or threaten to bomb them, they -- it becomes nationalistic. everybody joins the ayatollah and ahmadinejad, and so there's a blowback, unusual circumstances, you know, unintended consequences, so, yes, our people, whether republicans or democrats, are well intended, but they don't realize how much damage they do by not accomplishing what they want and causing more harm to us. so our military personnel right now are very adamant not to be involved in the bombing of iran. it makes no sense whatsoever to our military personnel, to our cia. nobody who's supposed to be in the know right now, even though they're much more interventionist than i am, says it makes no sense whatsoever to encourage or bomb iran right now, and that certainly would be my position. >> may i ask you, do you think the president was wrong to apologize for the accidental burning of the koran in afghanistan? the president said he did it to try to protect u.s. soldiers. as you heard, the former speaker thinks it was a bad idea. >> now, i don't think it's wrong, but it's pretty much irrelevant, but i think the republicans condemning it are a little over the top too. you know, in '08 some of our soldiers in iraq took the koran and used it for target practice, you know, just to humiliate the muslims in that country. ronald reagan apologized, and what is so terrible about that, it might calm things down. i would -- i'm personally more apologetic for invading countries who never did anything to us and occupying, disrupting it, causing thousands of deaths of our own people and causing hundreds of thousands of refugees. this is the thing that i feel sad about, what about the pictures of torture? weren't they every bit as bad? i mean, this is what incites the hatred. this is what we have to try to understand, but, you know, i thought mcnamara was rather astute when they asked him after he wrote his memoirs about the mess he caused in vietnam, because he had all these second thoughts, and they said, well, don't you think you should apologize or you want to apologize, you know, to the american people and to the world? he said, what good is an apology? if you make mistakes and you see this and stir up enough trouble, why don't we change our policy? that's what he said. we should change our policy, so if we have a policy going on in the middle east that is begging that we apologize now and then and others condemning it because they don't think we should apologize, i think we should reassess our foreign policy, and that is what i think we are not doing, and that is why i am quite different than the other candidates and the president that american people i think are sick and tired of this war and the wars going on over there. we're going broke. we ran off a debt of $4 trillion in these last 10 years fighting these wars that were not legitimate and that we were not attacked. they were not declared, and the american people by a majority now want us out of there. >> let me turn you to a domestic issue. i'm sure you know tornadoes have hit a wide swath of states, particularly in the midwest, about ten states. the damage is enormous. you have frequently been critical of fema, the federal emergency management agency, and the federal money that is given to some of these home owners and those that are also -- other victims of storms like this. is there a role for federal money in helping all of these citizens get their lives back together? >> not really because it's not authorized, and there is no such thing as federal money. federal money is just what they steal from the states and steal from you and me. so there is no federal money unless you say, well, they can print it and cause internal problems, but to say you don't support federal money doesn't mean you don't care about people, because fema is inefficient. i've lived on the gulf coast, and i got re-elected constantly by criticizing fema because of people who had to put up with fema after the hurricanes had nothing but frustration and anger with them and to point out, well, they might give you a home, yeah, they bought a lot of trailers for katrina, you know and it's just so wasteful, inefficient. but, you know, the guard units and other things within the states certainly are there. the people who live in tornado alley, just as i live in a hurricane alley, they should have insurance for doing this. but under major emergencies, natural disasters, if there is a need, you know, for getting some help such as the military to come in, that is not a tragic violation, but to say that any accident that happens in the country, send in fema, send in the money, the government has all this money, it's totally out of control, and it's not efficient. there's a much better way of doing this and helping it. the fema, i was constantly told by the people of my district, they just get in the way. the