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.