I am not ‘running’ for president. I am seeking to create a movement to win the future by offering a series of solutions so compelling that if the American people say I have to be president, it will happen. ~Newt Gingrich

Put in a slightly different way, this might be seen as an attempt at some kind of republican self-deprecation (“I do not seek high office, but if the people require my services I will do my duty,” etc.), but in Gingrich’s mouth what should be a statement of utmost humility becomes instead a kind of revelry in his own world-historical significance. 

It’s nice to see that time and failure have not worn down Gingrich’s megalomaniacal sense of his own genius.  I would hate to think that magnificient failures in political leadership would deter someone so self-absorbed from pursuing ever greater power.  If it had, it might suggest that people were beginning to learn from the Republican follies of the last 10 years. 

When handicapping contestants for the GOP nomination in ’08, I don’t even think about Gingrich.  It isn’t because he won’t be running for President creating a movement to win the future, but because nobody wants to belong to his movement or live in the future won by someone like him.  Some candidates will go nowhere in the primaries; Gingrich will just spin around in circles until he collapses.  Some people enjoy reading columns or listening to radio shows done by people who rave about WWIII (or IV or V).  But most people tend not to place these raving preachers of doom in a position of power where they can make WWIII a reality.

Gingrich espouses the successful tactics of the “let the voters come to me” school of electioneering:

While other potential competitors like Arizona Senator John McCain, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney build staff and hire consultants, Gingrich revealed to Fortune that he plans to create a draft-Newt “wave” by building grassroots support for his health care, national security and energy independence ideas – all of which he has been peddling to corporate audiences over the past six years. “Nice people,” Gingrich says of his GOP competitors. “But we’re not in the same business. They’re running for president. I’m running to change the country.”

Elsewhere, I have said that John McCain is dangerous, and he is.  But Gingrich is downright pathological.