Candidates of 2012-Newt Gingrich

Many consider Newt the biggest brain in the GOP. Certainly, there is no surfeit of Republican intellectualism since the death of William F. Buckley, but Newt? He is a prolific author, having written 26 books to date but some believe he is only in the race to keep the Gingrich brand in the public eye, just an attempt to increase his book sales. He is a frequent reviewer at amazon.com as well, his specialty being military history. Politically, he has painted Democrats, particularly President Obama, as “left-wing radicals” who lead a “secular socialist machine”. He wrote that “The secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did.” Yikes!

Former Speaker of the House, his last act as an elected official was to resign over the shame of his party losing 6 seats in the 1998 election, the worst performance in 64 years for a party that didn't hold the presidency. Ah, simpler times. Newt has had a somewhat variable personal life; he has switched from Baptist to Catholic and from wife to wife. Currently there’s the issue of his high dollar account at Tiffany’s; this is hardly consistent with the frugal image Gingrich is trying to project.

A few weeks ago his campaign staff resigned en masse, following Newt’s inexplicably timed luxury Mediterranean Cruise. I took this opportunity to depict one possible view of Newt’s reaction. OK, so it’s an unlikely scenario, I’ve never let that stop me before. There were questions about the future of his presidential campaign less than a month after it was launched. I strongly suspect Gingrich won’t be the candidate for the GOP for 2012 or ever.