Non-Stop Newt Is Too Busy to Run

The Energizer Bunny of American politics has too much on his plate to campaign for the White House. "The presidency is a minor post on the scale of change I'm describing," he tells the Washington Post.

But a moment later, he sounds like Alfred P. Doolittle (in “My Fair Lady”): "I don't have to be president," he says. "I'd be willing to be president."

Gingrich is an assembly line thinker-—if you don’t like one theory, another will be right along. “He has a new idea every five seconds," says Tom DeLay, a former House colleague and no admirer. “He's trying to appeal to everyone and cover up who he really is--which is typical of Newt."

But then, DeLay is still facing money-laundering charges while the object of his scorn is, according to the Post, running “a multimillion-dollar enterprise that keeps three dozen camp followers gainfully employed and Gingrich earning what he terms ‘adequate’ income in the seven figures.”

If he gives in and decides to run, there will be some explaining to do, even to conservatives, about shutting down the government in 1995, impeaching Bill Clinton for office sex while carrying on an affair in his own and, later, having to pay a $300,000 fine by the House ethics committee. But if anyone can, the voluble former Speaker of the House is the man.

If not, Gingrich will settle for being Benjamin Franklin: “He didn't think he was less than Washington or Jefferson. He was deliberately eclectic and deliberately complex, and happy to be so. He was pretty interesting. If you had told him, 'If you could have been simple, you could have been president,' he would have said, 'That's pretty stupid.'"