Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich says his ideas are so big that the news media can’t cover them and his opponents can’t comprehend them.

Speaking at the Northwest Suburban Republican Lincoln Day Dinner in Springfield, Illinois on Wednesday, the former House Speaker explained that he was staying in the race because “democracy is simply a shadow event floating on top of the power of the interest groups.”

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“The level of effort it would take to change the system is beyond the imagination of most elected officials and beyond the imagination of most candidates,” Gingrich remarked. “The thing I find most disheartening about this campaign is the difficulty of talking about positive ideas on a large scale. Because the news media can’t cover it and, candidly, my opponents can’t comprehend it.”

The candidate went on to lament that his party refused to see the “extraordinary opportunities” that his presidency would provide.

“We could provide for the American people such a dramatically better future that it’s almost unimaginable,” he said. “Our political system is so methodically and deliberately stupid.”

“The wilful avoidance of knowledge, it’s astonishing. One of the reasons I ran for president, I spent years trying to convince the Bush administration that if they acquired modern technology with the health system then they would save lives and save billions of dollars.”

President Barack Obama’s health care reforms, which Gingrich has vowed to repeal, would also force states to make sweeping changes to technology infrastructure, like upgrading Medicare eligibility systems, building health care exchange networks and adopting electronic health records.

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Watch this video from CStevenTucker, uploaded to YouTube on March 14, 2012.

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(H/T: MSNBC)