You recently said about Newt Gingrich: “He’s just one of the worst people I know of who didn’t commit violence on somebody.” Did he kill your dog?

He transformed American politics from one in which people presume the good will of their opponents, even as they disagreed, into one in which people treated the people with whom they disagreed as bad and immoral. He was a kind of McCarthy-ite who succeeded.

It’s looking as if Mitt Romney will win the Republican nomination. Because he was governor of Massachusetts, some of his Republican opponents have been trying to tar him as a heterosexual, Mormon version of you.

There’s no question that Romney ran against Ted Kennedy as kind of a liberal, and he ran for governor as a centrist. But as he governed, he moved further to the right. Massachusetts’ new gaming commissioner, Steve Crosby, said: “Some politicians get Potomac Fever when they’re in office. When Mitt Romney was governor, he got Potomac Ebola Virus.”

You told this newspaper in 2003 that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “are not facing any kind of financial crisis.” I bet you regret that.

I have been mislabeled as a big advocate of low-income home ownership over rental. But I was too optimistic about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

On Election night 2008, you said, ecstatically, “This is the country telling Republicans, ‘You know what, you guys are full of. ...’” How do you feel in retrospect?

It did not work out as well as I thought. The recession was deeper, and it took us longer to deal with the 2008 crisis. The political price we paid for health care was far greater than I anticipated.