I’ve always kind of assumed that former House Speaker [tag]Newt Gingrich[/tag] was dipping his toes in the presidential waters as an ego-driven vanity exercise. He didn’t seem to believe he could win a national campaign, but he enjoyed a) hearing the sound of his own voice; b) ample attention; c) selling books; and d) a major platform from which he could share his ideas. By publicly toying with the notion of a presidential campaign, Gingrich could revel in all three.
When push came to shove, it’s not as if [tag]Gingrich[/tag] would actually go through with this, would he? Lo and behold, Gingrich doesn’t seem to be kidding.
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 [tag]president[/tag], it will happen.” So he’s running, only without yet formally saying so.
Gingrich will apparently wait to form an exploratory committee, and will instead launch a 527 group, called “American Solutions for Winning the Future,” that will enable him to raise and spend unlimited money on behalf of his drive to talk about how great his ideas are. He said he’ll decide by next fall whether to officially throw his hat into the ring, which would be a fairly late start.
Reading over his interview with Fortune, Gingrich’s unparalleled ego is on display. He compares himself to Abraham Lincoln. He insists he’ll be a reluctant candidate, spurred by a “Draft Newt” campaign, which he will, oddly enough, personally create. On his GOP presidential rivals: “They’re running for president. I’m running to change the country.”
But the closer I look at Gingrich’s hopes, the more I return to my original question: is he serious?
Newt Gingrich, if memory serves, was run out of Congress on a rail. His tenure as Speaker was marked by ethics investigations, legally dubious hardball tactics, and abandoned principles. He shut down the government at one point, in part because he didn’t like the way Clinton asked him to depart Air Force One from the back instead of the front. At the height of his notoriety, Gingrich’s national approval ratings mirrored those of Nixon shortly before he resigned. In 1987, many of his fellow House Republicans, convinced that Gingrich had lost it, unsuccessfully tried to secretly depose him.
And then there’s the not-quite-incidental question of his personal life.
But the most notorious [adulterer] of them all is undoubtedly Gingrich, who ran for Congress in 1978 on the slogan, “Let Our Family Represent Your Family.” (He was reportedly cheating on his first wife at the time). In 1995, an alleged mistress from that period, Anne Manning, told Vanity Fair’s Gail Sheehy: “We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, ‘I never slept with her.'” Gingrich obtained his first divorce in 1981, after forcing his wife, who had helped put him through graduate school, to haggle over the terms while in the hospital, as she recovered from uterine cancer surgery. In 1999, he was disgraced again, having been caught in an affair with a 33-year-old congressional aide while spearheading the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.
Who knows, maybe Gingrich’s presidential campaign will make progress. Republican primary voters are a notoriously wacky bunch, and in June, Gingrich even managed to win a straw poll of Minnesota GOP activists.
That said, it’s hard to imagine any scenario in which Gingrich excels, right?