If a community agitator can get elected President then anything can happen.
Let's not forget Newt was SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE, already 2 heartbeats away from the presidency. If it's good enough for the founders, why not the voters?
There's almost no one who's even tried to argue that Newt isn't qualified or capable of being president. In fact people have long been expecting him to run for president, and many expecting him to win, since the '90s. This is less of a longshot candidacy than Obama, Clinton, Reagan, Santorum, Romney.... Have there been any governors who became president after having never even run for reelection once? Clinton won 5 terms. Reagan and Bush won 2 terms each. And they were all popular when they left the governorship, unlike Mittney.
“There’s almost no one who’s even tried to argue that Newt isn’t qualified or capable of being president. In fact people have long been expecting him to run for president, and many expecting him to win, since the ‘90s.”
http://uprootedphilosopher.blogspot.com/2011/10/time-mag-man-of-year-1995.html
Time Mag Man of the Year - 1995
Monday, Dec. 25, 1995
NEWT GINGRICH’S WORLD
By LANCE MORROW
“LEADERS MAKE THINGS POSSIBLE. EXCEPTIONAL LEADERS make them inevitable. Newt Gingrich belongs in the category of the exceptional. All year—ruthlessly, brilliantly, obnoxiously—he worked at hammering together inevitabilities: a balanced federal budget, for one. Not so long ago, the idea of a balanced budget was a marginal, we’ll-get-to-it-someday priority. Other urgent work needed doing: the Clintons’ health-care program, for example, which would have installed elaborate new bureaucratic machinery. Today, because of Newt Gingrich, the question is not whether a balanced-budget plan will come to pass but when.
Gingrich has changed the center of gravity. From Franklin Roosevelt onward, Americans came to accept the Federal Government as the solution to problems, a vast parental presence. Ronald Reagan preached that government was the problem, but his Administration focused mostly on the Evil Empire; it did not overturn the grand centralizing legacy of New Deal and Great Society. Newt Gingrich wants to reverse the physics, make American government truly centrifugal, with power flowing out of Washington, devolving to the states.
....
IF GINGRICH WERE TO RUN for president, of course, he might be applying for a job inferior to the one he has created for himself as Speaker of the House. Whatever his fortunes in the polls and in the hands of a special counsel to the House ethics committee, Gingrich has the American genius for reinventing himself.
Justice Holmes judged that Franklin Roosevelt had a “second-class intelligence but a first-class temperament.” Newt Gingrich has a first-class intelligence that fires through a strangely refracted temperament that is not exactly second-class but agitated and sometimes grandiose enough to make Americans nervous. He has proved himself an impresario of leverage in using Congress to change America, a sort of hothouse genius. Americans may discover in 1996 whether Gingrich can evolve outward—as a truly popular leader in the open air.”