Replies

Newt is what everybody else is not. He is a thinker, a visionary. He doesn’t look at next week or tomorrow, he looks out 50 years or so.

He is a historian and knows well the mechanisms that were at work shaping events of the present. He is able to extrapolate trends over long intervals and visualize the results.

For that reason he can not win. People can’t keep up with his thought and find excuses for destroying him.

History is a process, not an event

There are two reasons one runs for President. First is one wants to be president and thinks one has a chance. The second is to influence the presidential debate, which is a debate about broad national policy.

The latter is why Ron Paul ran I presume. And he was quite effective. He got a lot of money, sold a lot of books, and folks who think that whole parts of the feral gubmint could be shut down discovered that they were not lone kooks and that a lot of others feel the same way.

I would like to think that reason 2 is why Newt would participate. He does not actually stand a chance.

The chief problem is not that Gingrich has been through two divorces and is married to a woman with whom he was having an affair while married to his second wife.

If he wants to run as a Democrat this would be a resume enhancement. It will hurt if he runs as a Republican. Add to that...

Scazzafava... Pelosi... Lack of leadership during a government shut down...

These things jump up without thinking much about it. He would turn off enough people like me to guarantee an Obama win.

If he wants to help the country let him do so as a conservative spokesman even if there is an element of opportunism in any such effort by Gingrich. He would make a terrible President.

Someone here made a comment that Newt can't handle power. I think that's a very astute observation. He also share a quality with Clinton a lack of adult maturity. Apparently Clinton is self aware enough about that personal flaw to allow himself to have “handlers” to control his propensity toward “bimbo eruptions”. Newt apparently didn't have that self awareness to allow himself to have that “problem” managed.

Also another huge mistake Newt made in trying to rehabilitate himself politically was he didn't leave the Washington DC area. In this modern age of easy access to communication you don't need to stay in DC. That in my mind set the ground for the rest of his “political gaffes” with conservatives. By staying in DC he was absorbed into the beltway establishment culture and became “establishment GOP”. He did things that looked reasonable to the “DC culture” but moronic to real conservatives it made him look completely out of touch with the conservative movement. This was a movement that was changing dramatically in its relationship with its establishment leadership, it was going from a top down movement to a bottom up movement. (A healthy change in my opinion!) Newt missed all that by staying in DC. It's sad that radical conservative “bomb thrower who in his congressional career had made some statements about the need to empower people and decentralize government power became as hidebound as the bureaucratic establishment he once criticized.

Newt should have gone back to Georgia and tried to win a state wide office like Governor and gain some management experience. Then maybe the Senate, he needed to show he could appeal to people outside the narrow confines of a congressional district. He didn't do any of that, he probably thought after being Speaker of the House he was above all that. (As a historian he should have thought of John Quincy Adams!)It's also possible that deep down he thought that going back to Georgia and run for state wide office was too much a risk, he could lose! (Nixon lost and came back!) If that's the case then deep down he doesn't have ths the stones to be president.

Dear Newt:

You go along with Big Green. You favor amnesty. Republicans neither like nor support you as a presidential candidate.

Go open a bed & breakfast or give cruise ship lectures. We’re busy trying to save the country from Obama.

Signed,

Reality