Dawn of a Newt Age

Will Gingrich lead the GOP out of the wilderness?

By David Corn, Mother Jones

Who's the big Republican winner emerging from the gop's decisive defeat in November? It's not Sarah Palin (future as a presidential contender highly doubtful), Mitt Romney (now a political nonentity), or the party's point men in Congress (smaller, weaker caucuses). Amid the wreckage, the guy standing tallest in gop-land is a fallen powerbroker whom some had written off as a has-been: Newt Gingrich. Yes, the silver-haired conservative whom liberals loved to hate—the bomb-throwing backbencher whose Contract With America helped him gain a Republican majority and the House speakership in 1994—is back as a (if not the) Grand Old Man of the party. "Newt," says his former aide Rich Galen, "is the Republican intellect in chief."

During the 2008 campaign, Gingrich and an organization he founded, American Solutions for Winning the Future, put into play perhaps the year's only winning policy issue for Republicans: "Drill Here, Drill Now" (which became the McCain/Palin mantra "Drill, Baby, Drill"). And in the months of quiet desperation following the election, he has once again become one of the most quoted Republicans in Washington. Conservative columnist Robert Novak dubbed Gingrich the "Moses, or Reagan" who could lead the party out of the wilderness. "Newt has the unique ability to turn dense political thinking into what people can immediately understand—whether they agree with it or not," says Galen, now a consultant and pundit.

After the election, Gingrich was mentioned as a possible candidate for party chairman. But he declared he was not interested—that instead he wanted to develop a "tri-partisan" approach to politics and policy that would unify Democrats, Republicans, and independents. Tri-partisan? It sounded as if Gingrich were ready for a round of "Kumbaya."

(More here.)