Finally, a candidate one can really hate

Not since Ronald Reagan ran for office has a candidate surfaced that Rico can really sink his teeth into: New Gingrich is running for president. Well, he's only hinting at running for president, but why else would he stick his political toe in the water if he didn't really want to run? Michael Shear has the story in The New York Times:

Is Newt Gingrich playing us all over again?
The former Republican House speaker took the stage at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University on Wednesday morning, calling for a return to conservative principles and limited government while hinting that he might run for president.
A frequent fixture on cable news shows, Mr. Gingrich told The Los Angeles Times that he would decide by March whether to make a White House bid, a period that should ensure more time on cable news shows.
Where have we heard this one before?
It was on 20 May 2007, that the Caucus traveled to Lynchburg, Virginia, home to Liberty University, to hear Mr. Gingrich give a speech in which he assailed the “radical secularists” and decried the “contorted logic” and “false principles” of advocates of secularism in American society.
At a news conference that day, Mr. Gingrich declared himself “totally uninterested in applying for a game show as if this were Bachelor or American Idol.” But before and after, his aides whispered that he was seriously considering running for president in 2008.
Four months later, in September of 2007, a handful of reporters traveled to a small college in Carrolton, Ga., for what Mr. Gingrich called an “ideas summit” that could, aides hinted, form the intellectual basis for a presidential run.
Mr. Gingrich had already said at the time that he would run if he received $30 million in pledges. But even as the ideas summit opened, Mr. Gingrich told reporters that he had decided against running for president.
The decision surprised even his advisers, who had scheduled a news conference to announce an exploratory committee and had built a Web site, NewtNow.org. In comments to reporters, Mr. Gingrich blamed “legal considerations” that would not let him run for president and lead his new group, American Solutions, at the same time.
“American Solutions is in the early stages, I think, of becoming a genuine national citizens movement,” Mr. Gingrich said then. “To walk out of it just as it’s getting launched struck me as absolutely irresponsible.”
So what’s changed?
American Solutions has now raised millions of dollars. And Mr. Gingrich has spent the last several months stumping for Republican candidates while occasionally creating controversy, as he did when he compared the backers of the Islamic center near ground zero to Nazis.
He may yet run for president in 2012. But the Caucus is pretty sure of one thing: We’re not going back to Georgia.