Newt Gingrich brought his presidential campaign to the San Diego Zoo. I do not think that his effort to win the giant panda vote will succeed, but this primary season has been very weird. Newt Gingrich makes campaign detour at San Diego Zoo - latimes.com
I'm a proud Democrat. I make my living as a field organizer for political campaigns. I think Newt's ideas are mostly crazy. That said, he does know zoos and has a great passion for them, same as many of us. I wouldn't mind touring a zoo with him. I wouldn't mind someone nailing him down and ask if the National Zoo should remove itself federal government funding for deficit reduction just to see him squirm a little. But he'd probably say something like he did about what is both of our other pet project, NASA, where private enterprise will happily pay for it.
Newt came to London some years ago, and he got terribly excited about the fact that it operates without any funding from either central or local government. Even if any US zoo fans are diehard Republicans, I suspect a Newt presidency wouldn't be in their interests if their local zoo got money from City Hall.
Non-political point, but I'm afraid that conservation has to keep an eye on current affairs. To pick an extreme example, if enough zoos had worried about the potential overspill of the war in Vietnam into Cambodia, we would quite possibly have saved the Kouprey.
