Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, who is considering a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, said Sunday that President George W. Bush is leading an administration that "is not functioning. It's not getting the job done."

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"Republicans need to confront this reality," Gingrich said. "The key question is: Is somebody prepared to stand up and say that the American people deserve fundamental change in Washington?"

"I've warned all last year that I suspected we were drifting into a catastrophic defeat," Gingrich said. "I don't see any other way to read '06 except it was a defeat. And if we don't have a serious, open discussion of where we are, I don't see how we're going to change."

Citing the war in Iraq, immigration policies and the response to Hurricane Katrina, Gingrich described Bush as "well meaning," but not able to deliver on policies and promises.

"Look, I think that he means very, very well. I think he's very, very sincere," Gingrich told Fox News Sunday. "But I don't think that he drives implementation and looks at the reality in which he's trying to implement things. And I think that's why you ended up with, 'Brownie, you're doing a great job,' when it was obvious to the entire country at Katrina that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had collapsed and was not capable of doing any job at that point."

"The administration has very, very high goals -- Democracy throughout the Middle East -- and very weak bureaucratic support for those goals, and the result is an enormous mismatch in just sheer implementation. And this is, in the end, a practical country. Americans want their government to work," Gingrich said.

Citing the current immigration bill making its way through the Senate, Gingrich said, "The base of this party is looking up going, 'What are we in the middle of -- why are we ramming through an omnibus Teddy Kennedy bill, and attacking Republicans who criticize it, and calling us,' for example, as one senator did, 'bigots, when all we're saying is this government couldn't possibly implement this bill?'

Gingrich was asked about criticisms he made of his party and the president in a recent edition of the New Yorker magazine: "Not since Watergate ... has the Republican Party been in such desperate shape. Let me be clear: 28 percent approval of the president, losing every closely contested Senate seat except one, every one that involved an incumbent -- that's a collapse."

Gingrich said in Sunday's interview, "Nothing that I said in The New Yorker disagrees with things I said as early as December of '03 when I talked about having gone off the cliff in Iraq, things I said all through '04 in trying to get the Bush campaign team to shift from attacking Kerry personally to forcing a genuine choice over values and policies, to concerns I raised in December of '04, January and February of '05, about how they were approaching Social Security reform, through what happened at Katrina.

"I mean, so what I said in The New Yorker may be compressed, but in fact, it is things that for the last three years I've talked -- I've warned all last year that I suspected we were drifting into a catastrophic defeat. I don't see any other way to read '06 except it was a defeat."

Gingrich said two Republicans in the 2008 field, Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani, and one prospective GOP contender, Fred Thompson, are capable of "offering a very bold, dramatic vision" that could appeal to the party's conservative voters. "These are solid people," said Gingrich.