Is Newt stupid or does he just think we're stupid?

So, surprise, surprise. Newt Gingrich is not going to run. I've always thought that he was showing a little leg simply to keep people interested in him. He got reporters to keep interviewing him and to buy his books. I seem to remember his doing the same thing in 1996. And Gingrich, being the big mouth that he's always been, even admitted that this is what he was doing.

Gingrich joked with FOX News more than a year ago that his flirtation with a White House run was in part to sell books and give lectures, and to focus the debate on his issues.

And yet pollsters kept putting him into their surveys and some acted as if he was still a plausible candidate.

So he announced yesterday that McCain-Feingold was preventing him from running because he found that he couldn't keep working with his group American Solutions while raising money to explore a presidential bid.

campaign finance reform law indicated he could not continue as head of his American Solutions organization and still search out his chances for a White House run.

"I had to make a choice," he said. "American Solutions is in the early stages of being a genuine citizens movement. To walk out on it just as it was getting launched was irresponsible. It's far more important than exploring prospects for the presidency."

Sudden announcement

The decision came suddenly, and it countermanded preparations already under way. The press release setting the location where the Gingrich exploratory committee's formation was to be announced was issued Friday.

Gingrich said he had already suspended his commentary contract with Fox News and earlier in the week had speculated about basing his national campaign in Atlanta.

"We weren't playing a game," he said.

So he's asking us to believe that he was seriously considering running for president, but hadn't talked to an election lawyer to find out the ins and outs of raising money? Even after he'd gone on TV last week and said he would run if he could raise $30 million dollars. Sure. And it's just a coincidence that he makes his announcement after he had a series of workshops in Atlanta for his America Solutions group. And he then decided that he would ignore the supposed demand for his candidacy because this citizens group so needs him? Please.

If we are supposed to take him at face value that he hadn't looked into the law and he was seriously considering a run - then he was incompetent. And if he expects us to believe that he was that incompetent and still a believable presidential candidate then he really has a low opinion of the Republican electorate's gullibility.

Newt Gingrich has interesting ideas and defends his positions well. However, his days as a politician are over. Fairly or unfairly, he has way too many negatives to be a viable candidate. For me, it was downhill fromthe Crybaby headlines. Add in his cheating on his wife during the impeachment proceedings and I lost all interest in him as a leader. As a commentator, perhaps, but he always seems to have ulterior motivations in the way he's so ready to criticize Republicans and cozy up to Democrats as if by so doing he can win his way back into the affections of the Washington elites.

Doesn't he realize he has all sorts of forks in him to testify to how done and over with he is? For a man who prides himself on looking towards the future, the irony is that his political fortunes are so 20th century.