GAIL COLLINS: Ah Newtie, We Hardly Knew Ye

NYT

Newt Gingrich isn’t running!

The former House speaker, who once shut down the federal government because Bill Clinton gave him a bad seat on Air Force One, has decided that his extremely promising candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination will have to be nipped in the bud due to the tyranny of campaign finance reform.

“The McCain-Feingold Act criminalizes politics,” he growled to George Stephanopoulos, launching into an explanation about how the law would have cruelly required him to sever his ties with a political advocacy group in order to run for the most powerful job on the planet.

Who said campaign finance reform wouldn’t accomplish anything?

But, look, here comes Alan Keyes! The former Reagan administration official and career loser-of-elections seems to have snuck into the race while nobody was looking. There he was, in the Republican debate at Morgan State University the other day, appearing absolutely the same as he did in 2004, when he suddenly popped up in Illinois just in time to lose the Senate race to Barack Obama.

Before his unhappy collision with McCain-Feingold, Newt Gingrich had apparently surveyed the field and decided there was room for one more recovering womanizer among the front-runners. Keyes must have checked out the second tier and detected the need for more unelectable right-wing candidates who are obsessed with abortion.

The front-runners, as is now well known, all ditched the Morgan State debate, even though it was the only one focusing on African-American issues, so they could spend the time raising money before the quarterly reporting deadline. The ones who came were either driven by their concern for the feelings of the black community or because they had no money to raise and getting to be on television is the whole point of their candidacy. I debate therefore I am.

“Well, the main reason I’m here is because I was invited,” said Representative Ron Paul.

The Republican second tier has come to resemble a middle-aged singing group. You only see them en masse and require helpful hints to remember their names. There’s Mike Huckabee (the nice one), Sam Brownback (the curly-haired one), Tom Tancredo (He Who Rails About Immigrants) and Duncan Hunter (the one who looks like the sheriff in a 1950s B-movie). Paul, who looks like a cranky rancher in the same movie, is the libertarian congressman who usually performs the useful function of complaining about the war in Iraq so everybody else can leap in and defend it.

We certainly do not want to disrespect the hopeless candidates who have been responsible for so many good times over the long, long presidential campaigns of yore. Keyes perked up the 2000 proceedings considerably when he threw himself into a mosh pit and bodysurfed to the tunes of Rage Against the Machine. It’s possible that the day Gary Bauer fell off the stage during a pancake-flipping contest in New Hampshire was the highlight of the primaries. Given the extremely large crowd of hopeless candidates this time around, I think we have every reason to believe that sooner or later somebody will fall off something again.

The problem for Republican voters is that as time goes on, the main candidates are beginning to resemble the hopeless ones more and more.

Fred Thompson’s campaign peaked the day before he officially announced. Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney are spending most of their time taking back everything they said during their previous political careers. And John McCain has gone so ga-ga that he told a Web site devoted to spirituality that he would not be comfortable with a president who didn’t share his religious beliefs. No wonder Newt thought, for one brief shining moment, that he might have a shot.

The political parties find themselves on two different tracks this year. Democratic voters are resentful because Hillary Clinton seems to be wrapping things up so fast. (It’s only October! The negative ads haven’t even come out yet!) Meanwhile, the Republicans have more than their share of candidates, but on many days not a single one of them seems like somebody you could reasonably nominate. The Democrats used to give their unsatisfactory lineups names like The Seven Dwarfs. What would you call this crowd of Republicans? The Legion of Doom?

The front-runners are all at least two entirely different politicians, and no voter can possibly avoid hating one version. John McCain, the maverick reformer, is now the Superhawk friend of Falwell who thinks Christianity is in the Constitution. The Rudy Giuliani who fought for gun control is now the guy who learned from 9/11 how important it is for Americans to pack heat. (Coming soon: Rudy explains how 9/11 taught him that homosexuality is wrong.) And you could fill an auditorium with all the Mitts we’ve got running around out there.

There is, however, only one Fred Thompson, and he appears to have been stuffed by a taxidermist.