Fortune Magazine has an interview this week with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who reveals quite alot about what exactly he’s planning for the 2008 Presidential race.
WASHINGTON (Fortune) — Even a crisp Guinness stout can’t chill the note of exasperation coming out of Newt Gingrich’s mouth. “You still don’t get it, do you?” he asks.
The subject is the 2008 presidential race and whether the former speaker of the House will run. The news is that Gingrich is running, but not on any official campaign trail.
The radical realist who defied conventional wisdom 12 years ago by stealing the House out from under the noses of entrenched Democrats now plans a surprise attack for the presidency. “I’m going to tell you something, and whether or not it’s plausible given the world you come out of is your problem,” he tells Fortune. “I am not ‘running’ for president. I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the American people say I have to be president, it will happen.” So he’s running, only without yet formally saying so.
While other potential competitors like Arizona Senator John McCain, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney build staff and hire consultants, Gingrich revealed to Fortune that he plans to create a draft-Newt “wave” by building grassroots support for his health care, national security and energy independence ideas – all of which he has been peddling to corporate audiences over the past six years. “Nice people,” Gingrich says of his GOP competitors. “But we’re not in the same business. They’re running for president. I’m running to change the country.”
As I’ve written before, of all the potential candidates for the Republican nomination in 2008, Newt Gingrich is the one that interests me the most. Intellectually, he is so far above the likes of John McCain and Bill Frist, that there really isn’t any comparison. And, unlike many other candidates, he seems to be the only one talking about the future of the country in a way that shows he really cares about it.
Newt’s plan is different from the traditional Presidential campaign, but then Newt Gingrich has never been a traditional politician:
In December, Gingrich will launch a 527 group, called “American Solutions for Winning the Future,” that will enable him to raise and spend unlimited money on behalf of this effort. In January, he will conduct a strategy meeting with advisers. By next fall, he’ll decide whether to make a bid official – a late start by any recent historical standard.
It’s a strategy that would be considered far-fetched if this were any other candidate. But Gingrich has to be taken seriously. Polls place him third in the GOP presidential nomination race, behind Giuliani and McCain. And a recent internal GOP poll recently put him second, and ahead of McCain.
Given a choice between those three — McCain, Giuliani, and Gingrich — my clear preference would be the former Speaker of the House. McCain is unacceptable for reasons I’ve discussed before, an Giuliani, while a September 11th hero, while having been a great Mayor of New York, just doesn’t have the level of experience on a national level that a Presidential candidate needs.
Is a President Gingrich a long shot ? Perhaps, but we’ve had many unlikely President’s in our history and, given the likely crop of candidates available in 2008, we could do a hell of alot worse.
Well, he’s got my vote… He’s the only Republican who has been mentioned that I would gladly pull the lever for (so far I like Giuliani, but I don’t know enough about him yet).
What impresses me about Gingrich is to see him give a speech. He isn’t throwing out talking points. He isn’t speaking in platitudes. And even more importantly, these days, he’s not reflexively blaming the Democrats. He’s simply explaining why things are broken and how they need to be fixed. And his solutions make sense.
It may doom his presidential bid, but he’s a “big idea” guy. And as he says, “real change takes real change.” We can’t fix the government with little patches, we need a serious overhaul. I think he’s about the only person who can actually force that to occur. In current Washington politics, I think he may be the only person who wants it to.