You know something is wrong when our free speech laws are effectively a boon to President Ahmadinejad and a ban on President Gingrich.

Ahmadinejad’s American adventure needs no more mention here, but suffice it to say that the whole affair happened in defense of “freedom of speech”, yet that same freedom’s restrictions, which don’t apply to someone like Ahmadinejad, will keep former House Speaker Newt Gingrich from running for president.

It’s not ironic, it’s just sad — and it needs to encourage a concerted call to the American legislature that something is indeed wrong with the chokehold the McCain-Feingold law has put on political free speech.

Gingrich was mulling a run for the White House after watching the Republican Party stray from its cost-conscious, value-centric roots. He was about to launch a Web site to try to raise the $30 million he felt was needed for a presidential campaign when he was informed that his candidacy would endanger the nonprofit status of his American Solutions for Winning the Future organization.

American Solutions is Gingrich’s idea engine; its very purpose is to get everyday Americans involved in finding solutions to some of the country’s most vexing issues. Dialogue and public brainstorming are staples of Gingrich’s theory that the private sector, run by citizens, are nonstop producers of solutions the government simply can’t (or won’t) figure out.

Gingrich’s point is that private citizens and their endeavors are part of the “world that works”; the government is clearly not. An example he likes to use is that anyone using FedEx or UPS can track a shipment from its point of origin to its recipient, yet the government simply cannot locate some 12 million people inside its own borders.

Gingrich’s exclusion from the field of presidential candidates because of American Solutions means that he cannot run precisely because he is helping solve the country’s problems without turning a profit.

“He had to make a choice between being a citizen-activist, raising the challenges America faces and finding solutions to America’s problems, or exploring a potential candidacy,” Rick Tyler, Gingrich’s spokesman, told Politico.

This should raise so many red flags you’ll think you’re in the middle of a Chinese national pride parade.

For one, it tells us that the most important prerequisites for the highest office in the land are cash, money, and cash money.

What matters is cents, not sense.

Well, sense is what Gingrich has aplenty, and it’s what we need in a president. But McCain-Feingold would open Gingrich up to all sorts of penalties for his efforts on behalf of American Solutions while running for president. What McCain-Feingold does, in this case, is legislate the supposed unfairness of Gingrich speaking for American Solutions, because it would also give his candidacy exposure.

Conveniently, Republican John McCain and his Senate friends in the Democratic Party, such as Mrs. H. Clinton and B. Hussein Obama, didn’t have a problem with being a representative of the people in the United States Senate — voting on any law they want and putting their own names on mountains of gratuitous resolutions — and running for president at the same time.

McCain would likely make an excellent president for a number of reasons, but his lack of foresight in “reaching across the isle” for this bill hurts his own party and his standing within that party. What’s more, it hurts the American voters, and Gingrich’s candidacy is quite a pricey bit of legislative collateral damage.

But long before the bill’s effect on the 2008 elections became clear, Reason magazine pleaded for the bill to be “fixed” in time for the 2004 elections.

The magazine article, written by Jonathan Rauch and published on Oct. 7, 2004, starts out:

“Now it is official: The United States of America has a federal bureaucracy in charge of deciding who can say what about politicians during campaign season. We can argue, and people do, about whether this state of affairs is good or bad, better or worse than some alternative. What is inarguable is that America now has what amounts to a federal speech code, enforced with jail terms of up to five years.”

The article went on to recite some of the more peculiar examples of the bill’s frustrating code.

It mentions conservative activist David Hardy, who was told by the FEC he could not advertise for his gun rights documentary during the pre-election season. Yet, it allowed a Republican group to promote the anti-terrorism efforts of congressional Republicans because no candidate was referred to in the ads.

The article’s most frustrating example was a case in July 2004 when an anti-abortion group in Wisconsin tried to encourage citizens to contact the offices of Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl and tell them to “oppose the filibuster” of conservative judicial nominations.

Feingold was up for re-election, so the ads did not tell people who to vote for, they did not mention political parties (both senators are Democrats), and did not mention the senators’ positions on the issue addressed in the ad. Nevertheless, the ads were forced off air in August of that year until after Election Day.

The group’s then-executive director said this:

“They’ve taken away our speech rights in just giving information on candidates, and now they’re taking away our lobbying rights. Congress is in session, there are legitimate issues before the Congress, and the public has a right to know about them.”

While the bill targets “soft money” contributions effectively, most Americans’ opinions on the role of the almighty dollar in our elections haven’t changed. What has changed, however, is what can be said in public by or about an elected official who is running for re-election; too, the law runs red-tape circles around incumbents’ challengers and their supporters.

In recent elections, Senator McCain has registered some impressive victories over his GOP rivals; this year, his defeat of Gingrich almost assuredly means that neither of them will serve as our next president.

Because of his class status and values, Gingrich most represents the average American. Because of the McCain-Feingold law, the average American will be underrepresented in office yet again in 2008. Because of Gingrich’s preternatural ability to lead and unite, it is all too likely that McCain-Feingold means the American voter will also be underserved in 2008 and beyond.

So, no President Gingrich. But we may have President McCain. Americans would gain a lot if that is the outcome, but would gain even more if President McCain introduced the nation to Secretary of State Gingrich.

Now that would be an American solution.