Newt Gingrich has announced that he will not run for the Republican nomination for president in 2008. It would have cut into his apparently wildly profitable speech-giving.
“Newt is not running,” spokesman Rick Tyler said. “It is legally impermissible for him to continue on as chairman of American Solutions (for Winning the Future) and to explore a campaign for president.”
Gingrich decided “to continue on raising the challenges America faces and finding solutions to those challenges” as the group’s chairman, Tyler said, “rather than pursuing the presidency.” …
American Solutions, a tax-exempt committee he started last October, has paid for Gingrich’s travel and has a pollster and fundraiser on staff. The outfit has raised more than $3 million, mostly from two benefactors who each gave $1 million: Sheldon Adelson, chairman and chief executive of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., and North Carolina real estate developer Fred Godley.
Gingrich makes hundreds of speeches each year, many paid. He will not say how much he charges, and neither will the Washington Speakers Bureau, which books him. But some clients have said they paid $40,000 for a speech.
So there will be no last-minute savior on the GOP side. And on the Democratic side, still no final word from Al …
Gingrich would have been nothing more than a side-show if he had entered. Too bad, it would have been amusing….
Gingrich has alot of great qualities but he would have been a drag on the whole nomination process. Anyone who is totally unelectable should stay out for the good fo their own party.
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(Hear that, Hill?)
At least that is what polls show for what it’s worth.
is much more important than a Presidential run. It has the opportunity to transform american politics and life. It transcends party.
…certainly helping to transform Gingrich’s bank account.
Please say yes. Otherwise I’ll be very worried about you.
… as representing George Jetson’s GOP.
He is the smartest candidate they’ve got. Probably also part of why he’s not running.
-There was no way he wouldve been the nominee before Fred Thompson and certainly no way now
-Personal baggage and he is a wonk and intellectual whereas the party prefers pre packaged folksiness to intelligence in its nominees
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That said Gingrich had in fact some really interesting ideas that will no longer be discussed because he wont be in the race, also even his bad and downright dangerous ideas are quite amusing.
Newt won’t run for the same reason Condi Rice won’t. At heart they are academics, authors, philosophers. Which makes me think.
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Who would you call a progressive PHILOSOPHER? Not an operative like Kos, but a thinker; a person who tries to lay down an explaination of philosophy? Other than Mario Cuomo, I’m kind of drawing a blank.
No. She was a fairly successful academic on the Soviet Union, and then she became an administrator, with a few stints in politics, before
selling outgoing over full-time to BushCo. She’s no philosopher, and doesn’t claim to be one, AFAIK.<
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Gingrich’s pretensions to philosophy are amusing, but little more than that. He’s a pol through and through — though he talks a good game.
…as I asked – who are Progressive phiosophers?
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On my side, I would add George Will, Bill Bennett, Barry Goldwater, and Bill Safire.
You are asking this question of people who fancy themselves as the erudite and the elightened.
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In their eyes, Condi grew hair on her knuckles the day she declared as a Republican, regardless her life of accomplishment. And forget about Newt (the beast!).
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Interesting, how they reflexively attack your examples rather than proffer any of their own.
..from a shallow well.
that this is going to be a totally non-constructive conversation. So I choose not to continue it. All best wishes to you.
You have my email, if you wish.
I apologize for my indelicate observations.
Please, carry on as though I had never entered the conversation.
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Now, will you (can you?) respond to PP’s direct question?
Ugh.
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On our side, Habermas and Rorty.
Rorty is dead.
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Habermas is old (80s?) and maybe retired, but to call his philosophy liberal is probably a stretch. I’d call his philosophy blindingly complicated, but liberal? Not really.
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Those are your liberal “thinkers”?
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To add to the above referenced names, add William F. Buckley and Andrew Sullivan.
I’d be very surprised if Andrew Sullivan regarded himself as a political philosopher — or even W.F.Buckley.
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“Philosopher” does not mean “someone who can write in broad generalities”. After Kant, Hegel, Sartre, and Heidegger, you cannot expect to find philosophers in the easy reading section of the bookstore.
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As I took a course from Rorty, it’s hard for me to think of him as dead. He has certainly spawned a large literature about his thinking. I doubt Sullivan or even Buckley has achieved that, but I’m unlikely to want to read books about the thoughts of W.F.B. so I’m likely to be wrong there.
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To be fair, Rorty eventually eschewed philosophy.
You’ve read Jacques Derrida, Hilary Putnam, W.V. Quine, and John Rawls. Right? Wrong?
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This stuff usually pops up in academic journals, but there are at least these two books that indicate within modern philosophy, his work inspires lively interest and debate:
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Rorty and His Critics
Rorty: Critical Dialogs
…he was an untenured instructor in history at two obscure colleges in Georgia. Nobody would have ever heard of him were it not for C-SPAN, which broadcast his late night speeches to an empty House chamber.
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He’s glib. But he’s sly enough to have feathered his nest pretty well with one segment of the population.
“It seems to me that the regulative idea that we heirs of the Enlightenment, we Socratists, most frequently use to criticize the conduct of various conversational partners is that of ‘needing education in order to outgrow their primitive fear, hatreds, and superstitions’ . . . It is a concept which I, like most Americans who teach humanities or social science in colleges and universities, invoke when we try to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic, religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own . . . The fundamentalist parents of our fundamentalist students think that the entire ‘American liberal establishment’ is engaged in a conspiracy. The parents have a point. Their point is that we liberal teachers no more feel in a symmetrical communication situation when we talk with bigots than do kindergarten teachers talking with their students . . . When we American college teachers encounter religious fundamentalists, we do not consider the possibility of reformulating our own practices of justification so as to give more weight to the authority of the Christian scriptures. Instead, we do our best to convince these students of the benefits of secularization. We assign first-person accounts of growing up homosexual to our homophobic students for the same reasons that German schoolteachers in the postwar period assigned The Diary of Anne Frank. . . You have to be educated in order to be . . . a participant in our conversation . . . So we are going to go right on trying to discredit you in the eyes of your children, trying to strip your fundamentalist religious community of dignity, trying to make your views seem silly rather than discussable. We are not so inclusivist as to tolerate intolerance such as yours . . . I don’t see anything herrschaftsfrei [domination free] about my handling of my fundamentalist students. Rather, I think those students are lucky to find themselves under the benevolent Herrschaft [domination] of people like me, and to have escaped the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents . . . I am just as provincial and contextualist as the Nazi teachers who made their students read Der Stürmer; the only difference is that I serve a better cause.”
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I must read more of this fellow!