RETURN OF NEWT. Mark's post below on Newt Gingrich gives me an opportunity to link to this piece I wrote on him last year.
Since publishing his book, Gingrich has been barnstorming the country, particularly the early primary states, warning of worrying portents for a misguided Republican Party. �Tom DeLay�s problem isn�t with the Democrats,� he growled, �it�s with the country.� When The New York Times asked him about Bush�s fiscal policy and the growth of government, he bluntly replied that �Republicans have lost their way.� He�s swinging to Bush�s right on immigration, God, and education, all the topics that excite the conservative base. He�s running, basically, as a radical conservative, just as he did in 1994. Meanwhile, conservatism has become weak, soft, blurry, and undefined. Bush has ignored its principles, DeLay has betrayed its ethics, and the Republican Party has confined itself to radicalism abroad, letting the domestic front drift towards ever-larger government and more expansive entitlements. The moment is ripe for, well, a revolutionary.[...] [That's why] his new book is as much James Dobson as Ronald Reagan, as much Bob Dornan as Barry Goldwater. It�s classic divide-and-conquer. Grab the disenchanted, dissatisfied portions of the conservative movement, promise them the revolution that they�ve always wanted, and then swarm the primaries. And nobody in modern politics can promise a revolution like Newt Gingrich, the only contemporary political figure to have led a successful one. The question is, can he pull off a second?
--Ezra Klein
