The spokeman for the former speaker of the house says Newt Gingrich will not seek the presidency, report from CNN. Gingrich had previous said he would run if he could find a commitment of $30 million dollars. Apparently that did not look like it would happen.

Fred Thompson’s roll-out into the primary race is already being reported by the media and through comments by pundits as less than exciting, to be nice, and former Speaker Gingrich is talking more and more like he may enter the race.

In an interview with the National Journal Gingrich says democrats right now have 80-20 odds of winning the presidency in 2008 and that none of the Republicans at the moment are offering “change” in a way that many Americans want. In the past Gingrich had called the Republican candidates, sans Thompson, “pathetic” bunch “of pygmies”.

A tantalizing tidbit from the interview on 2008 is “The most tempting thought about running next year is the idea of debating Senator Clinton. That would be fun.” Gingrich goes on to say “She is actually much more centrist than MoveOn.org. She is much tougher on military affairs than [her party’s] Left. She is more rational, and I have very great respect for her as a hardworking professional. No Republican should think she is going to be easy to beat. But I have watched her now for a year be gradually pulled to the left. Her husband was too clever to do that.”

So is he really thinking about running or just giving the media runaround?

Robert Novak has a two-part scoop concerning Fred Thompson this week. Part 1 is that Thompson will officially open his campaign with a video that will surely spread throughout the Internet and Part 2 that non other than Newt Gingrich, who is rumored to be considering a bid himself, gave the actor/former Senator the idea.

The larger implication of Novak’s scoop is that Gingrich may well be a part of any Thompson run. The sad part about the story is that Thompson or any Republican needs to be told to put a video online. Most of the Democrats opened their campaigns with online videos as well as speeches and the idea, at this point, just seems like commonsense for anyone running and wanting to court the younger generation.

Well New Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House & much rumored potential candidate has a lot to say and its not very positive.

On the GOP Field he says the candidates are a “pathetic” bunch “of pygmies”.

On Chris Matthews and the Republican debate he held “You’re watching an utterly irrelevant, shallow television celebrity dominate everybody who claimed they want to lead the most powerful nation in the world. These are not debates, these are auditions. By definition, the psychology of an audition reduces the person auditioning and raises the status, for example, of Chris Matthews.”

On the current format of the debates he said he is unwilling to “shrink to the level of 40-second answers, standing like a trained seal, waiting for someone to throw me a fish”.

On John McCain “The guy who had spent the most on consultants is on the verge, I think, of dropping out of the race, right after he collects his FEC [Federal Elections Commission] money.”

On columnist Robert Novak “Sometimes he’s right and sometimes he’s just venomous….He was once a good reporter, he’s now just a personality.”

On Al Gore “[Not] in touch with reality. … The advertisement for his movie was the most viciously anti-animal advertising that I’ve seen in a long time. They had these little penguins walking on sand. It was terrible.”

On Michael Moore “I find Michael Moore so despicable I can’t imagine looking at a movie by him. It would be like looking at a movie by Goebbels.”

He says the following about running:

If, in mid-October, it’s quite clear that one or more of the current candidates is strong enough to be a serious alternative to a Clinton-Obama ticket, you don’t need me to run,” the former House Speaker said at a breakfast sponsored by the American Spectator. “If it becomes patently obvious, as the morning paper points out, that the Democrats have raised a hundred million more than the Republicans, and at some point people decide we are going to get Hillary unless there’s a radical change, then there’s space for a candidate,” he added. “So you’ll know by mid-October one of those two futures is real.”

One thing you can never fault Newt Gingrich on is not having ideas, the man is full of them. They aren’t ALWAYS the best of ideas, but they are ideas none-the-less. Two I found intriquing recently were on completely different topics.

The first was on his belief that Republicans will face massive losses, including the presidency, in 2008 if they continue to run stand by the president. This is interesting to someone watching the race for any number of reasons and you can take from it what you like.

The second is his plan for using government. While many of the Republicans during the debates scorned the government for spending money on research and other high priced items and using a leave the market to decide policy Newt sees things a little different. For instance Mars.

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This is from the rather interesting and odd files.

2004 Presidential Candidate & Democratic Senator John Kerry “debated” potential 2008 Presidential Candidate & Republican Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich on Global Warming today. Redstate has the story with a disappointed conservative POV.

Gingrich apparently started his speech by supporting and endorsing the book written by Kerry with his wife on the subject. He then conceded that Global climate change exists and that it is man made, a point that many on the conservative Republican side dismiss and an admission that made any real “debate” as far as I can tell nonexistent in the room. Apparently some differences in how to achieve the objective were mentioned but two people who agree on a topic with only slight variations on how to achieve a goal isn’t very debate-like.

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Former House Speaker and rumored ‘08 candidate Newt Gingrich has said candidates personal lives should not be an issue in the election. Of course Mr. Gingrich recently revealed that he had an ongoing extra marital affair during his time as speaker and so his position isn’t much of a surprise.