A Place to Stand

  It has been announced that Newt Gingrich is announcing his candidacy for President today (that's politics).

"Be sure to watch Hannity this Wednesday at 9pm ET/8pm CT," he posted. "I will be on to talk about my run for President of the United States"

Also

"Gingrich has been befuddling political analysts since he first won Georgia’s 6th district in 1978.


Long regarded as a backbencher, Gingrich is widely credited with the “Contract with America” — a mission statement of sorts that propelled Republicans to the House majority in 1994 for the first time in four decades.

Touted as a strategic genius in the wake of that election, Gingrich quickly wore out his welcome within the party — losing a game of political chicken with President Clinton over the budget in late 1995/early 1996 and leaving office entirely after his predictions of Republican gains in the 1998 election proved incorrect.

“If you added up all the IQ scores of all the other GOP presidential candidates, they might equal the IQ of Newton Leroy Gingrich,” said one unaligned Republican consultant granted anonymity to speak candidly about the Georgia Republican. “This is an extremely mixed blessing. Not only does Newt have a huge range of knowledge, experience, and ideas, he also has the huge ego to match.”

That dichotomy is the essence of Gingrich the politician and has led many people who follow his career closely to think of him as two people: Good Newt and Bad Newt.

Good Newt can wow a crowd with the depth and breadth of his knowledge — on virtually any topic.

Bad Newt disappears down intellectual rabbit holes while speaking, losing the crowd in the process. He also tends to go for a rhetorical grand slam when a single will do. One example: His suggestion that President Obama had a “Kenyan, anti-colonial” mindset."
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  So the good news is he is very intelligent and the bad news is that he looks like he is very intelligent. Perhaps intelligent leadership might be a welcome innovation.

    I have written previously in support of him, and of an alliance with Sarah Palin. His biggest problem seems to be that as a 3 time divorcee the Christian right don't like him and that he was driven from office by false ethics complaints but false mud sticks nearly as well as the real stuff. Palin is solid on family values and, having been subject to similar but even more obviously false ethics complaints, in none of which she was ultimately found guilty of any wrongdoing but still cost enormous amounts. That is why her endorsement would be so valuable.

    He, like her, is in favour of improving America's energy supplies, by building nuclear plants an drilling. This is absolutely vital if the American economy is to be allowed to grow and something Obama has, in practice though he has occasionally pretended, been absolutely opposed to.

   Gingrich has also been in favour of space X-Prizes (and non-space ones) since long before any other politician had ever heard of them. Most of them still haven't. Almost all of ours still haven't and our government has deliberately decided not even to think about them. If Palin supports him, must be virtually a certainty to get the Republican nomination without an acrimonious Primary fight and extremely likely to beat Obama.

    UK politicians will, yet again, be shown to have no vision whatsoever and simply involved in "managing decline" - something which, with the probable exception of Thatcher, they have managed to successfully achieve for the last 67 years.