Once again, the press is wondering if Newt Gingrich has Presidential ambitions:
Newt for president?
Newt Gingrich, the conservative former Speaker of the House, didn’t rule it out tonight in Ashland, before he was to address a packed house of 650-plus at Randolph-Macon College.
“Callista and I will look seriously and we’ll probably get our family totally engaged, including our two grandchildren, probably in January, 2011, Gingrich told reporters during a sit-down interview before last night’s speech.
“We’ll look seriously at whether or not we think its necessary to do it. And if we think it’s necessary we’ll probably do it. And if it isn’t necessary we probably won’t do it.”
This topic was also broached in Matt Bai’s New York Times Magazine piece on Sunday:
“I think I’m closer to Benjamin Franklin than to George Washington,” Gingrich told me. “I’m a contributor to my country and to my times. If it turns out that there’s a moment when it makes sense to run, then I’ll run. But if I end up never being able to run, then it won’t devastate me.”
Politicians say things like this all the time, albeit without the grand historical references; rarely do they mean it. But I had the sense Gingrich actually might. He never craved retail politics the way his nemesis, Bill Clinton, did. (Such is the oddity of the speaker’s job that a person can gain national power and never be elected by voters outside a single district in Georgia.) For Gingrich, it’s about the theories and the strategy and the ideas, and for a decade, nobody wanted to hear them. Now Bush is gone, Tom DeLay is staving off jail time, John McCain is playing out the string in the Senate and the leaders of a doleful party look to their last great thinker for some inspiration. For Gingrich, that might well be enough.
As I noted when he decided not to run in 2008, Newt would make an interesting addition to any Presidential race but he simply has too much baggage to make an effective nominee, especially in a year when the GOP has to run against an incumbent who very well could be as popular then as he is today.
