Rich Lowry, “Run, Newt, Run! Gingrich 2008?,” National Review, 2006:

The old conventional wisdom about Gingrich was that we wouldn’t have him to kick around anymore. The new conventional wisdom is that he’s back, and he’s doing the kicking. Ousted by his own party after its losses in the 1998 midterm elections, Gingrich has reestablished himself as a party leader through sheer intellectual energy. He has had something intelligent to say about literally every issue of the hour, from health care to Katrina to the war on terror. “He has helped himself immensely — he’s all over the place,” says former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie.

Gingrich is partly benefiting from a beneath-the-surface conservative exasperation with President Bush. In 2000, Bush represented a break from Gingrich’s brainy, hyperpartisan, government-cutting conservatism, for something more personable, more bipartisan and more comfortable with government. After six years of Bush, many conservatives are ready for a no-holds-barred, limited-government brainiac again.

What thrills Republicans about Gingrich’s media appearances is the sense of intellectual mastery — that he has the arguments, along with the words, to beat all comers. And he hasn’t been shy about criticizing the Bush administration or the Republican Congress. This puts Gingrich in the enviable position of being a keen Beltway player, but one not associated with an unpopular GOP establishment.

Opinion is split about whether Gingrich will run for the 2008 presidential nomination, but no one doubts that he would love to. A GOP strategist says tactical considerations won’t loom so large in Gingrich’s calculations: “The only question for Newt will be, ‘Can I devise the message that will rouse the nation?’”

Gingrich is still in bad odor for many Washington insiders who remember his often self-indulgent, erratic four-year run as speaker. Grass-roots Republicans, however, don’t share their dismissiveness. “When you go out in the real world,” says Gillespie, “if Newt was there last week, they’re still talking about it.” If Gingrich ran, he would immediately raise the bar for the rest of the field, both in terms of policy and of rhetoric. “If you get him in front of an audience talking with other candidates, he’ll look the best,” says a Gingrich-friendly insider.

It’s hard to see any plausible path to victory for Gingrich unless George Allen and Mitt Romney fizzle, freeing up room for an anti-McCain conservative. But the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses are a conservative bastion. In 2000, even unserious candidates Alan Keyes and Gray Bauer combined for 23 percent of the vote. “I think he could do very well in Iowa,” says top Republican pollster John McLaughlin, “and you never know.”

[…]

Whatever happens, Gingrich stands to be the party’s most important intellectual table-setter. “Whoever wins,” says Gillespie, “is going to have spent a lot of time talking about what Newt was talking about.” There are worse places for the party to look for a renewed agenda. [my emphases]

…And Rich Lowry, “The Myth of the New Newt,” National Review, Dec 2011:

If Newt Gingrich is the Republican nominee, he promises to hound Pres. Barack Obama until he agrees to appear with him at a series of Lincoln-Douglas-style three-hour debates. This is a cutting-edge Gingrich proposal — that he has been making since at least 1992.

Back then, he was challenging Boston mayor Ray Flynn to Lincoln-Douglas debates on urban issues. Gingrich’s obsession with the clash between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in the 1858 Illinois Senate race isn’t new and interesting; it is a trope of his going back decades.

The “New Newt” surging in the Republican polls overlaps so significantly with the former version that the “Old Newt” should be suing for copyright infringement.

[…]

His volatility makes it impossible to make any statement about him as a general-election candidate with assurance. Will he enthuse the Republican base? Yes, right up to the moment he stops enthusing it with some jarring provocation. Will he beat President Obama in the debates? Yes, right up until he makes an ill-tempered comment that washes away all his impressive knowledge and brilliant formulations. Will he be the bipartisan healer, the partisan bomb-thrower, or the post-partisan big thinker? Yes, yes, and yes.

All that is predictable about Newt is that he is unpredictable, and, irresistibly, an election that should be about President Obama and his record will become about the heat and light generated by his electric performance. That’s the way it was as speaker, too. Eventually, he wore out his welcome in epic fashion. Benjamin Franklin said any houseguest, like a fish, stinks after three days. With the public and his colleagues, Gingrich became the houseguest who would never leave.

More than a decade after he was cashiered as speaker, he’s back on the basis of his superlative handling of the debates. He is better informed and has more philosophical depth than any of his rivals. Despite all his meanderings through the years, he knows how to win over a conservative audience as well as anyone. The debates have held out the alluring promise of a New Newt. But beware: The Old Newt lurks. [my emphasis]

That would be the old Newt that Lowry was keen should run — as a conservative in a conservative-light field — in 2008.

Today? Well, the non-existent Republican establishment — which, even if it did exist couldn’t possibly include National Review, could it? — certainly has changed its tune, following the lead of conservative opinion leaders like Karl Rove (a Bush I man, not a Reagan man) and Jennifer Rubin (erstwhile Berkeley liberal and Kerry supporter, now the voice of “conservatism” at the Washington Post) in advocating for Mitt Romney, perhaps the least conservative member in the remaining field of GOP presidential hopefuls (save Jon Huntsman, who is their fallback choice):

Just as heartening, the White House seems winnable next year, and with it a majority in both houses of Congress, so that much of this conservative consensus could actually become law. A conservative majority on the Supreme Court, a halt to the march of regulation, free-market health-care policies: All of them seem within our grasp. But none of them is assured, and the costs of failure — either a failure to win the election, or a failure to govern competently and purposefully afterward — are as large as the opportunity.

[…]

We fear that to nominate former Speaker Newt Gingrich, the frontrunner in the polls, would be to blow this opportunity. We say that mindful of his opponents’ imperfections — and of his own virtues, which have been on display during his amazing comeback. Very few people with a personal history like his — two divorces, two marriages to former mistresses — have ever tried running for president. Gingrich himself has never run for a statewide office, let alone a national one, and has not run for anything since 1998. That year he was kicked out by his colleagues, the most conservative ones especially, who had lost confidence in him. During his time as Speaker, he was one of the most unpopular figures in public life. Just a few months ago his campaign seemed dead after a series of gaffes and resignations. […]

[…]

Gingrich is not the only candidate whom we believe conservatives should, regretfully, exclude from consideration for the presidency. Governor Perry has done an exemplary job in Texas but has seemed curiously and persistently unable to bring gravity to the national stage. Republican presidential candidates have not been known for their off-the-cuff eloquence in recent decades, but conservatism should not choose a standard-bearer who would have to spend much of his time untying his own tongue. Representative Bachmann’s rise early in the primary season reflected the public’s hunger for sincere conviction; her later descent, following among other things her casual repetition of false anti-vaccine rumors, its desire that conviction be married to judgment. Representative Paul’s recent re-dabbling in vile conspiracy theories about September 11 are a reminder that the excesses of the movement he leads are actually its essence.

Three other candidates deserve serious consideration. Governor Huntsman has a solid record, notwithstanding his sometimes glib foreign-policy pronouncements; his main weakness is his apparent inability, so far, to forge a connection with conservative voters outside Utah. Governor Romney won our endorsement last time, in part because some of the other leading candidates were openly hostile to important elements of conservatism. He is highly intelligent and disciplined, and he takes conservative positions on all the key issues. We still think he would make a fine president, but time and ceaseless effort have not yet overcome conservative voters’ skepticism about the liberal aspects of his record and his managerial disposition. Senator Santorum was an effective legislator. He deserves credit for highlighting, more than any other candidate, the need for public policies that topple barriers to middle-class aspirations. Weighing against him is a lack of executive experience.

As Republican primary voters consider their choices, they should ask themselves several questions: Which candidate is most likely to make the race turn on the large questions before the country, and not his personal idiosyncrasies? Which candidate is most likely to defeat Obama? Who could, if elected, form an effective partnership with Republican leaders and governors to achieve the conservative agenda?

Why, the architect of Obama’s socialize medicine crusade — and if not him, Obama’s appointment as Chinese ambassador! (Though it sure was coy to throw in Santorum and his “lack of executive experience,” wasn’t it?)

At a time in our nation’s history when the juxtaposition between legal conservatism / classical liberalism — with its insistence on constitutionalism, equality before the law (as a means to equality of opportunity), individual sovereignty, and the promise of beating back aggressive encroachments of a post-constitutional federal leviathan and its administrative state — and the Marxist “progressivism” of the New Left Democrats — with its move toward a centrally-planned, client-state economy run by a permanent ruling class and its cronies in a kind of liberal fascist precursor to the more fully-implemented democratic socialist states that are right now crumbling all over Western Europe — couldn’t be more stark, our DC-wired “conservative” opinion leaders have been intent, since early on in the process, to marginalize any truly conservative candidates in order to push the kind of polished, “pragmatic” career Republican politicians who, because they always err on the side of bigger government (under the rubric of “compassion”), have helped move the country ever leftward.

In fact, I think it fair to ask if our putative conservative opinion leaders even know what conservatism is any more — so intent are they to find an “electable” Republican and regain the reins of power in DC.

Their records are out there for all to see. Their endorsements and recommendations — be it for backing Boehner compromises, or dumbing down conservatism to the point where Mitt Romney or Jon Huntsman could even conceivably be considered standard bearers — are very public and mostly unapologetic.

And yet, no matter how many times they prove themselves wrong or unreliable or demonstratively willing to eschew conservatism in the name of some ever new “pragmatic” moment where the “purists” and “Hobbits” are told they must “compromise,” we as their target audiences still go back and look to their counsel, as if they continue to speak for us through ghosts of conservatism past.

Conservatism and the GOP not only no longer synonymous, but worse still, the GOP establishment is much closer intellectually with contemporary progressives — advocates for an efficient, big government-run state managed by a capable ruling class — than it is with constitutional conservatives, who wish to see government significantly weakened, and the government returned to the people.

Which is why after 2012, it’s time to break with the GOP. I don’t believe it can be reformed — or even has a desire to be reformed.

If it did, we wouldn’t be drifting consistently leftward, and we wouldn’t be where we are now as a country — on the brink of bankruptcy, with the conditions for a democratic socialist takeover already largely in place, be they in our language, our educational institutions, the courts, or under the direction of the administrative state and its czars.

(h/t Mark Levin)

****
update: I’m not sure when it happened, or even how, but at some point many of my positions became consonant with those of Rush Limbaugh. Who’d have thunk it?