Newt Announced Monday That He’ll Be Announcing Wednesday
Speaking of which… Newt-mentum! Can you feel it?
CNN: “Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will announce his presidential campaign on Wednesday, his spokesman Rick Tyler confirmed to CNN. Gingrich, who has been exploring a presidential bid for several months, “will announce on Twitter and Facebook.” His first formal speech as a presidential candidate will be Friday at the Georgia Republican Convention. Gingrich has been traveling to some of the key early voting states as he has tested the waters trying to appeal to various constituencies of the party.”
In a way, it will be fascinating to watch Gingrich as an actual declared candidate for president, a status he has never enjoyed/endured before. Oh, he’s been mentioned as a possible candidate, off and on, for the better part of seventeen years now. He feels like a perennial candidate even though he’s never actually run before, which is a strange status to have.
At Outside the Beltway, Steven Taylor is a skeptic: “Quite honestly, I can’t decide how much this whole bit isn’t just keeping the brand alive (as opposed to actually running for office). In other words: Newt seems to be running to keep himself in the public’s eye and to help him, in the long run, sell books and provide a basis for being a TV analyst.”
We shouldn’t be surprised to see the New York Times kneecapping Newt before his official announcement, but here’s the opening sentence of their profile piece in today’s paper: “Callista Bisek’s friends from rural Wisconsin were stunned when, well over a decade ago, she confided that she was secretly dating an older, married man: Newt Gingrich.” Page A1. Welcome to the race, Newt!
Oh, and for those of you still steamed about his commercial with Nancy Pelosi, Politico would like to remind you of some comments that are unlikely to thrill you:“’I’d do a commercial with Al Gore,’ Gingrich said last May in an interview with the website Human Events. “My point is conservatives ought to be prepared to stand on the same stage and offer a conservative solution.”