I have been hoping for this moment all year long, but it looks like it may be coming soon -- a Newt Gingrich presidential bid.

In an interview with National Journal this week, Gingrich would not rule out a run for President this cycle. And in an interview with The Washington Times he seemed to almost be leaning towards a run. Take a look:

Newt Gingrich is moving closer to a presidential nomination bid in a severely divided Republican Party.

"I will decide based on whether I have about $30 million in committed campaign contributions and whether I think it is possible to run a campaign based on ideas rather than 30-second sound bites," the former House speaker told The Washington Times yesterday.

When someone begins talking about the type of money it would take to run a campaign ("$30 million") and the way a campaign might look (one "based on ideas rather than 30-second sound bites"), they're not exactly quieting speculation that they will run. In fact, that type of talk is expressly indicative of someone at least seriously planning for the possibility of a run -- even if, as The Washington Times writes, "Mr. Gingrich is careful not to commit formally to a run."

And as I've written before, there could be little better for the Democrats than Newt Gingrich as the GOP presidential nominee. ABC News/Washington Post polling during Gingrich's tenure as Speaker of the House showed that the Georgian's approval rating never topped 41 percent while his disapproval rating reached as high as 65 percent. More recent polling shows that the American public truly dislikes Gingrich, with a CBS News poll from April putting his favorable spread at 16 percent positive and 43 percent negative, and Gallup polling from a month earlier showed that 29 percent of the public views Gingrich favorably while 49 percent views him unfavorably. For those who talk of Hillary Clinton's potential problems with unfavorable ratings around 40 percent (which I don't foresee as being excessively problematic) Gingrich's near-50 percent unfavorable numbers suggest he's about as unelectable as "serious" presidential candidates come.

So at this point, I can't quite imagine much I'd rather see than a presidential run by Newt Gingrich -- except for Gingrich ultimately being successful at securing the Republican nomination, naturally.

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I've been under the impression for quite some time that Newt Gingrich would eventually announce that he is indeed running for the presidency in 2008. If his latest appearance on ABC's Good Morning America is any indication, Newt certainly isn't shying away from stoking interest among the politics-watchers in his potential candidacy.

Newt Gingrich for president? It could happen.

In an interview with Diane Sawyer on "Good Morning America," the former Republican speaker of the House said there was a "great possiblity" that he would run for president.

He will make that decision sometime in the fall. Sawyer noted that previously Gingich had only said he was "thinking about" a run for president.

[...]

Gingrich took time to assess the field of declared candidates and said he wan't happy with the current contenders.

There's an extent to which I don't want to become excessively giddy about the potential that Newt Gingrich will be the Republican presidential candidate in 2008. After all, stranger things have happened in American politics than a disgraced former House Speaker who admitted having an affair while persecuting a sitting President for doing the same being elected President. Perhaps not much stranger things have happened, but certainly stranger things have happened.

That said, I'm still looking forward to a run by Newt. The Georgian, of course, is remarkably unpopular for someone who has been out of office for nearly a decade. If you look back at his numbers from his time as Speaker, it becomes apparent why Americans still have such a poor impression of Newt. According to polling from The Washington Post and ABC News, Newt's approval rating as Speaker never topped 41 percent, though it dipped as low as 26 percent. His disapproval rating capped out at 65 percent -- Bush territory -- and averaged about 52 percent (with his median disapproval coming in a point lower).

The Democrats are already in a fairly strong position to retake the White House in 2008. Certainly, the political climate can change and the Democrats can squander this opportunity. But currently, the Democrats are crushing the Republicans in terms of fundraising and a generic Democrat beats a generic Republican in a presidential matchup by 19 points (.pdf). Given his unpopularity among the American people, perhaps Newt Gingrich is just the Republican candidate to lose to the Democratic presidential nominee by that 19-point margin...

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Taking a look at the recent polling out of New Hampshire as well as non-scientific polling of conservative bloggers it's difficult not to come away with the impression that Newt Gingrich would be a formidable candidate for the GOP presidential nomination next year. Even considering the fact that Newt's numbers are not especially good among the electorate as a whole -- in fact, his negatives outweigh his positives by a substantial margin -- for conservatives within the Republican Party who believe that they do not have a horse in this year's race, the former Speaker does fit the mold of the down-the-line conservative Republican well, so much so that he polls third in much of the national and statewide polling on the race for 2008 among Republicans, putting him well within striking range of the current frontrunners for the GOP nomination, John McCain (who the base mistrusts for a number of reasons) and Rudy Giuliani (who is on the wrong side of at least one too many social issues). And Newt knows all of this. So it should come as no surprise that he is beginning to put plans together for a run for President. Nina Easton has the story for Fortune (via Political Wire).

And this year, as he throws warm-up pitches for a 2008 presidential campaign, hoping that his big ideas, combined with his grass-roots popularity, will produce a "draft Newt" movement, even his most ardent loyalists doubt he can pull it off. "He's a better Moses, leading the party out of the wilderness, than he is a King David, running the show," says Frank Lavin, a veteran of Republican administrations who now serves as commerce undersecretary.

[...]

Gingrich's own epiphany about a presidential run dates back three years, when he picked up Harold Holzer's "Lincoln at Cooper Union." The book tells the story of how Lincoln's lengthy 1860 speech in New York City - an intellectually rigorous rebuttal of slavery's legal grounding - wowed the Eastern establishment and transformed a gawky, badly dressed Western politician into a leading presidential candidate. Gingrich saw himself in this story of the underestimated outsider making good, despite the seeming hubris of comparing himself to Lincoln, and it now underpins his unorthodox quest for the presidency.

[...]

Gingrich has in mind a different strategy, which was reported exclusively by Fortune on CNNMoney.com last November. For the next nine months Gingrich intends to promote sweeping solutions to difficult issues of the day - particularly health care and national security - and then, like Lincoln in 1860, see if the call comes.

While such other GOP candidates as Senator John McCain, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, and former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani are hiring consultants and building donor networks, Gingrich has formed a tax-exempt advocacy group to raise money and promote his policies. He will wait until September - the eve of primary season - to announce whether he has the support to make it official.

Before we move forward, I will admit that there are reasons to believe that Newt will not, in fact, make the plunge into the race come September. For one, he just penned an Op/Ed on Iraq for The Wall Street Journalalong with Giuliani, hardly the type of move one would typically make hand-in-hand with a potential competitor. What's more, Newt has been raising big bucks for his 527 organization, including a $1 million check from a casino executive, a move that might not play well with the base. And, perhaps even more importantly, just as Newt has seen polling that shows he has a realistic shot at the GOP nomination so too has he likely seen polling that shows he would be a longshot for the White House, with more Americans disliking him than not.

That all said, it's awfully difficult to turn down a run at the presidency if this is your best -- and probably only -- chance at winning. And as a man deeply interested in American history, Newt understands that this opportunity comes only so often for only so many people, that to say no this time would likely close the door on his career in elective politics for good. On the balance, I think Newt will get in after weighing all of this information, and it's going to be really bad news for Giuliani and McCain. And though I think the Democrats would be even better off if Newt were the GOP nominee than someone like McCain, Giuliani or a Sam Brownback (not that I think the Democratic nominee can't beat each of them, because I do), it's not at all difficult for me to see Newt Gingrich as the 2008 Republican nominee for the presidency.

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