Two days after hinting he wanted to try for the White House, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich decided he would not run for president, his spokesman said Saturday.I guess having one thrice-married adulterer in the Republican field was enough.
Rick Tyler said Gingrich realized he couldn't run a political action committee -- his American Solutions group -- and form an exploratory committee to run for president as well.
"He will continue to bring the American people solutions to the challenges America faces through American Solutions, not as a candidate for president," Tyler said in a telephone interview.
To be honest, I would have loved to have Newt Gingrich in the race, if only for the amazing stuff he comes up with, such as men being better equipped to be soldiers because they can lie in a ditch and not get a yeast infection while they're hunting giraffes. Whereas Hillary Clinton wants to give every newborn a $5,000 savings bond, he wanted to give all the homeless people laptop computers. And don't forget his famous hissyfit about having to sit in coach on Air Force One while flying back from Rabin's funeral in Israel. He was so ticked off he shut down the government not once but twice. Talk about an ego; his latest ploy was that if people gave him $30 million, he'd run. Well, I guess that didn't work out so we're stuck with Rudy, Fred, Mitt, and John McCain. Drat.
Oh, speaking of campaign hijinks, John McCain says the Constitution establishes America as a Christian nation. (I didn't know that. Did you? Perhaps he means that other Constitution.) Meanwhile, a fundraiser for Rudy Giuliani's campaign was behind the initiative in California to attempt to change the state's counting of electoral votes from winner-take-all, as most other states do it, to proportional, which could be seen as an attempt to rig the election towards the GOP. Apparently they don't trust their own candidates to win fair and square, so they have to game the system. At any rate, the initiative died for lack of interest and money.
And you thought the 2008 campaign was going to be boring. Even without Newt Gingrich, it's already gone past that.
