Via the San Francisco Examiner, here's Newtie making a fool of himself again:
"If, in mid-October, it's quite clear that one or more of the current candidates is strong enough to be a serious alternative to a Clinton-Obama ticket, you don't need me to run," the former House Speaker said at a breakfast sponsored by the American Spectator. "If it becomes patently obvious, as the morning paper points out, that the Democrats have raised a hundred million more than the Republicans, and at some point people decide we are going to get Hillary unless there's a radical change, then there's space for a candidate," he added. "So you'll know by mid-October one of those two futures is real."
This isn't the first time Newt has played Hamlet about running "for the good of the country." Back in 1995, Time magazine reported on his not so private musings:
Politics abhors a vacuum, and Newt Gingrich last week was feeling its tug. Even before Senate majority leader Bob Dole's uninspired performance during Wednesday's televised forum in New Hampshire for G.O.P. presidential candidates, Gingrich had phoned key Republicans around the country and wondered aloud whether he should launch his own bid for the White House. Already on the previous Saturday, over dinner at the Connecticut home of Henry and Nancy Kissinger, Gingrich had fretted about Dole and launched into a detailed analysis of his own presidential chances.[...]
He has also bragged that Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson and Massachusetts Governor William Weld have urged him to run, and he believes an announcement would activate thousands of his supporters nationwide.
As we all know, that nomination went to Bob Dole, who didn't exactly set the country on fire. But the grandiose Newtie, who often compared himself to people like Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle, had to face the fact that 80 percent of Republicans didn't want him to run. I suspect it'll be about the same number this time.
Poor Newt. The savior nobody ever wants.
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