Republican Newt Gingrich is blaming campaign finance laws from keeping him from running for president.

The former House of Representatives speaker, who led the 1994 Republican revolution that brought his party to power in Congress, had been hoping to generate enough interest in a prospective candidacy to push him into running.

In the end, he decided not to run. He explained why in an article written for the conservative group Human Events. 

He is in charge of a non-profit organization called American Solutions that he hopes will become an agent for bipartisan change in the United States, figuring Americans are fed up with partisan warfare in Washington.

But to run for president would have meant stepping down from American Solutions, he said, blaming “current, misguided and destructive campaign finance laws.”

“If I had decided to explore being a candidate, it would have become necessary to sever my relationship with American Solutions to protect it from false allegations of being used as a devise to promote the feasibility of my candidacy, which is not permissible under the law,” he wrote.

Stepping down from the organization would have left American Solutions “without a leader and therefore extremely vulnerable to failure,” Gingrich said.

Gingrich said the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law needs to be repealed because it “makes it almost impossible for middle class candidates to raise money and which is rapidly moving us towards a plutocracy in which only the rich can compete for office.”

Lest anyone think Gingrich is giving up on politics, think again. His decision was “not a step away from active citizenship.”

He said his organization needs three or four years to develop a “new generation of solutions” — which would take him until, oh, about the time of the next campaign for the presidential election in 2013.

– Photo credit: John Gress (Gingrich at the Iowa Straw Poll in Ames, Iowa)