Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, counting on Republican primary voters to show a preference for experience over a fresh face, will formally enter the 2012 Republican presidential nomination race this week.
Mr. Gingrich, 67, used Facebook and Twitter - social media that didn’t exist when he was House speaker from 1995 and 1999 - to tell the world that this time he means it. In the last presidential election cycle, Mr. Gingrich gave every indication he would join the nomination battle until suddenly changing his mind.
“I will be on [Fox News on Wednesday] to talk about my run for president of the United States,” he wrote on his Facebook page.
He will also speak Friday to the Georgia Republican Party convention, aides said.
And Mr. Gingrich will not have to share the spotlight this week with Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, who had been rumored to be preparing an announcement for Thursday on his presidential-race intentions.
But Mr. Daniels told The Washington Times on Monday that there “won’t be any announcements Thursday … or this week. We’re just going to have some fun and raise some a lot of money for the ’Party of Purpose,’ as we call the unique Indiana GOP that has brought so much positive change to our state.”
Mr. Gingrich will compete in a Republican field heavy with governors and former governors. His pitch likely will be that his probable competitors - Mr. Daniels, and former Govs. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota and Mike Huckabee of Arkansas - cannot claim his experience in dealing with federal issues, such as deficit spending, wars, entitlements and trade issues.
Nor can any of his probable rivals, as he can be expected to point out, claim anything like his success in politics since his first election to the House in 1978, two years before Ronald Reagan won the presidency. His rise from House Republican backbencher to a leadership post and the House speakership after the 1994 Republican revolution came as a result in part of his turning his party into a conservative fighting machine.
Under the Georgia Republican’s tutelage as leader of the Conservative Opportunity Society in the House, the GOP went from polite country-club politics to roughing up Democrats as “corrupt” overseers of “the welfare state” and over the “corrupt left-wing machine in the House.”
After years of Democrats attacks, he resigned from both the speakership and the House in 1999 after an electoral defeat for his party in 1998 and a reprimand over misleading investigators in a probe of a college course he taught. The probe itself found no wrongdoing.
Mr. Gingrich has a solid and loyal base among a large number of conservatives as he has worked steadily, using profitable groups he founded, to spread his ideas over the past decade.
But he also faces considerable skepticism among some social and religious conservatives over past marital infidelities.
During his life outside electoral politics, however, he settled down to what appears, after two troubled marriages, to be a happy union with this third wife, Callista, who co-produces - and appears with him in - documentary films, including “A City Upon a Hill,” on the subject of American exceptionalism, which was released April 29.
• Ralph Z. Hallow can be reached at rhallow@gmail.com.
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