There was some suspicion that Newt Gingrich (like, presumably, Donald Trump) would not take the official plunge (though, like Haley Barbour and, incidentally, Trump, he has been running in truth if not in the FEC’s eyes). Many pundits and prognosticators believed he was just running for the publicity.

And I’m not saying that isn’t the reason.

Like Barbour (who was the RNC chair during the Republican Revolution of ’94), Gingrich experienced rose to great prominence in the mid-nineties.

Barbour went on to have a renaissance, becoming governor of Mississippi (incidentally, defeating the candidate who employed me on his campaign, then Governor Ronnie Musgrove) and going on to become chair of the Republican Governors Association, taking that organization to new heights of influence and import.

Newt has had no such renaissance and has mostly lived off the remnants of the past glories.

Another source of Newt’s continued appearance of influence (I suspect it being more appearance than fact) is the class of Republican Representative elected to Congress in the Republican wave of ’94, which also swept Newt into the Speaker’s chair. Newt got much of the credit for the Republican ascendancy that began with that wave election.

Then Democratic wave elections in ’06 and ’08 sent many of those class of ’94 members back to private life.

The Republican wave election of ’10 not only saw some of the ’94ers lose in primaries, it also meant that memory and influence of that class replaced in prominence by the Tea Party class of ’10.

In other words, a Republican Congress dominated by members with no attachment to Newt and only vague recollections of him from fifteen year old newscasts and half remembered newspaper articles – and those articles and newscasts were, likely as not, about how he got politically and strategically spanked by Bill Clinton or his two (reported) affairs with legislative aides and a pair of messy divorces.

What this means, is that if Newt to keep any sort of influence – perceived influence on currents debates being the source of the former Speaker’s income – he has to go all in. He has to find a way to become relevant to a new generation.

As a man who craves money, power, respect, and glory, Newt currently faces the prospect of seeing his stores of all four drastically diminished in favor of a new generation of conservative leadership that has risen in recent years. He hopes that by joining the race, people will pay greater attention to him and that he will be able to join this new generation and vampirically extend the life of his prominence, media contracts,  and ability to raise soft dollars for his various non-profits (which are then mainly used to keep Newt in the spotlight).
P.S. – By the way, how is that Newt Gingrich got this reputation as being some sort of Republican/Conservative intellectual and idea man? What actual ideas has he had? I may disagree with them, they may frequently be devastatingly wrong (see: Iraq War), but there have actually been real conservative intellectuals and idea men (and women). Folks like William Buckley and Irving Kristol. But Newt? Let’s be serious.

The Atlantic put together a list of world’s 26 best cities for business, life, and innovation. The American cities that made that list are: Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago, San Francisco, New York.

Funny thing – 80% of the American cities on that list are from “blue” states, where high taxes, union, and regulation are supposed to be strangling business and innovation. Meanwhile, the only city in a “red” state is Houston. Florida and other Republican dominated state governments race to weaken or eliminate unions, cut taxes, deregulate, and end environmental protections. Meanwhile, supposedly “anti-business” cities and states dominate them in median income, Fortune 500 company headquarters, and other measures.

The word now is that Mitch Daniels will take advantage of Haley Barbour’s departure from the Republican field to begin running himself.

Before we delve into that, a word about what “running for president” now means. With the proliferation of varieties of campaign finance, one can run for much longer without actually “declaring” and opening a federal campaign account. In the past, it was a straight line from not running to what was called an exploratory committee to officially running. Now, various soft money accounts can be much easily used to drag the process out.

Haley Barbour never opened a federal, hard money campaign account for a presidential campaign. He never formed an exploratory committee. But he was running for president. He did so by forming a number of state based PACs to fund his travel and other campaign activities.

He was running and he looked at the response he was getting from voters and donors. He and his team pored over the crosstabs of polls.

He did that and he saw that he was losing. This early, losing doesn’t mean being behind the front runner. It means not seeing that path victory.

Barbour and his team couldn’t put together a path to victory for the unreconstructed brobdingnagian lobbyist. So he dropped out. But because he had been running in what is colloquially called the “invisible primary,” without having formed either of those two “official” campaign accounts, when he dropped out, he described it as a decision “not to run.”

Which is rank bulls–t.

He ran and he lost, that’s all.

There was some effort to correlate Barbour’s dropping out to Mitch Daniels moving to get in.

Most of what was put forward was also rank bulls–t.

Yes, Barbour would have tried to be the wise navigator of difficult economic policy concerns. But mostly he was going to try and make a good showing in New Hampshire and then try and roll up as much of the South as he could.

Mitch Daniels is of Arab-American descent and is uncomfortable talking about the hot button issues of social conservatives. Not exactly a cinch in a GOP primary in a Southern state, is he?

Supposedly, Barbour and Daniels are good friends. Daniels waiting until Barbour flunked out to start making moves to get in probably has more to do with the personal relationship between the two than any shared constituencies (including donor constituencies – Barbour’s donor base was the result of years of personal relationships and could hardly be transferred to someone else by just handing over his rolodex; it just doesn’t work that way).

Haley Barbour, my one-time nemesis, is not running for president.

Nate Silver says bluntly that this was almost certainly because he realized that he wasn’t going to win.

I can’t say he’s wrong, though I was also one of those who talked up his chances in my own small way. Mainly to point out that, whatever his flaws and missteps, he was, until the end, the best political strategist in the field.

Some folks are saying that this creates an opening for Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels to jump in.

That, my friends, is pure hogwash. Haley Barbour’s electoral strength was in the South. His other strengths were the above mentioned strategic mind and his deep connections to national donors.

While his political acumen could be lent to Daniels in the form of advice, that’s not the same as being one of the GOP’s finest political minds. And even if he handed Daniels his entire rolodex, Daniels couldn’t replicate to relationships Barbour formed with the donors and while Barbour might provide some help, he’s not going to singlehandedly raise tens of millions of bucks for a longshot primary candidate – not and risk pissing off more likely winners.