Mr. Ideas is back

"[I]f [only] they'll just tell me about an idea rather than an idea about the need for ideas," complained Matt Yglesias, about people who talk about the need for ideas while contributing none. Someone who has never ben accused of being short on ideas in his political life is Newt Gingrich, and it seems almost certain at this point that as we lumber towards the 2008 primary, Newt's hat will be in the ring.

Writing at Townhall, Mary Katharine Ham comments:

The young man who founded Emory University’s Young Republicans club in then-heavily Democratic Georgia under the banner of belief in “personal freedom, limited government, the federal system, the law, and capitalism,” had risen in the 30 intervening years to break a Democratic chokehold on Congress that existed a decade before his own political quest even began ... If the problem was properly selling the ideas inside the Contract With America to the American public, then Gingrich has spent the last 10 years working as a veritable traveling salesman for them ... And, he’s good at it. He has ideas—the real, concrete kind, the kind the Dems haven’t seen since they started spending all their time mustachioing Bush portraiture in new and inventive ways—and he articulates them well.

Meanwhile, Newsweek interviews Newt, and after he talks about some practical and policy challenges, including his take on this fall's elections, asks him point blank about 2008:

I'm actually pretty direct about it. I'm going to talk about ideas and talk about solutions. There will not be a vacuum of ambition and there won't be a vacuum of competence. But if next October it's clear that we can create a national movement that would be like the Contract, then I'd be interested in running. What really matters is to recognize the challenge of the next 20 years. I think this is the biggest challenge we've had as a country since April of 1861. I think we do not realize how hard this is going to be or how big it's going to be. And so I'm going to try to spend the entire next year and a half—from now until October of '07—laying out a strategy for winning the future and laying out a series of policies, much the way I did with the Contract. And then see what the reaction to it is. It's really going to be focused on the ideas—the notion of trying to create a grassroots movement that would radically change Washington, not just preside over it.

I'm still not quite sold, but I'm in the store browsing the product literature and mentally balancing my checkbook. I think the big concern has to be that I just don't know that he's electable (if Presidential elections consisted of voters carefully listening to the ideas of each candidate, he'd be a shoe-in...Dare to dream), but I do agree with Newt on a lot of things, and it would be nice to have an ideas President (lately, I must admit, dissatisfaction with the Bush administration has lead me to sometimes catch myself thinking that it would be nice to have a President who's got an idea). To me, the GOP is the party of Ronald Reagan, of Antonin Scalia, of George F. Will, and, yes, of Newt Gingrich - intelligent people with big ideas about important subjects, and who are sceptical of the ability of government to remake people (and the efficacy of trying). To be perhaps a little unfair, while I join Steven Kielt's recent comments, in addition (allow me some rhetorical lattitude), I want a President who reads books. If one can discard his personal indiscretions, I'm a natural Newt constituent, but we'll have to see how the race develops. And I'm not going to take any crap from him about "the sanctity of marriage," either. He should run; people should listen to him and take him seriously; if we think he can win, he should be on the ticket.

Update: Gingrich and - of all people - Tom Foley talked on an AEI panel today about how Congress is broken at the moment, reports the WaPo. It's an interesting story, although I still maintain that Dana Milbank is the second worst writer currently employed in Washington (bested - or rather, worsted - only by Justice Kennedy). A tiring writer to read.