Newt’s gravity

Just when former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) appeared increasingly likely to jump into the presidential race, he has bowed out.

For a few weeks before his Saturday announcement, he dropped heavy hints that he was a likely candidate, talking, for example, about the need for $30 million to fight an effective campaign. It is not clear whether others in the race regarded Gingrich as a threat, but none will have been disappointed to hear that he is not.

What tipped Gingrich, officially, against running was the discovery that he could not legally launch an exploratory committee while remaining head of his tax-exempt political organization, American Solutions for a Winning Future, which he launched a year ago.

But if he genuinely believed he could win the nomination and the presidency, he would surely have listed the end of his connection to American Solutions among a host of major changes to his life. The fact that this was the proffered reason for not running suggests he did not regard his possible candidacy in ’08 as a serious bid for victory.

So what was it? It was, perhaps, an effort to establish himself as a likely candidate in 2012 when, as he points out, he would be younger than Ronald Reagan was as he set off successfully down the path to the White House.

Gingrich has said he expects a Democrat, probably Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.), to be the next president; he recently put the Democrats’ chances at 80 percent. Why would any Republican jump in believing that?

Democrats will have been out of the presidency for eight years by next November, there is an unpopular Republican incumbent in the White House, and most analysts, including Gingrich, believe the GOP is going to take a drubbing.

A Republican presidential win in 2012 seems likelier, as Gingrich must have recognized back in January when everyone else was getting into the race. And he must have calculated that a flirtation with a run this year would set him up nicely as a possible contender and party savior four years down the road, without the trouble, expense and humiliation of a doomed candidacy four years too early.

Time is a great healer. Clinton’s baggage from the 1990s made it impossible for her to run for the White House in 2000 or even 2004 (even though the presidency was always her evident goal). But she is now the favorite.

So also, perhaps, with Gingrich. A few years ago, following his scandal-plagued exit from Congress, no one would have taken him seriously as a presidential contender. But these days, his candidacy raises interest rather than mockery. By 2012, a year likely to be more promising for Republicans than 2008, time may have done its work and cleansed his track record.

And in that time, too, Gingrich has the chance to make himself the GOP’s man of big ideas. That’s the positive campaign. And the negative? He also doubtless recalls that he thrived once before by attacking a Clinton. He is well aware that he could enjoy playing against the same foil again.