Gingrich’s ideas bold and refreshing — perhaps too much so to get implemented

I want to issue a warning in case Newt Gingrich gets in the race for president: I find the guy infinitely fascinating. As you all know, the Newtster is gearing up for some big September announcement about running or not running, but he is currently paying scientific attention to the Fred factor and just how much the Thompson candidacy is shaking up the race. More on that later. …

In today’s Washington Post Gingrich penned an editorial that distinguishes him from the rest of the field with the exception, perhaps, of Sen. John McCain. In it he argues that his party must ask more of itself and more of voters, and that the next president must truly dismantle the dominance of interest groups strangling our government. In his piece Gingrich refers to the success of his latest hero, Nicolas Sarkozy, president of France. The truth is so much better than fiction — after France became a Republican punching bag Gingrich is now preoccupied with a new French president. If this is the third time I have seen him talking about Sarkozy he must speak of him often. Gingrich says, “Sarkozy had the courage to campaign on the theme that the French will have to work harder.” Gingrich criticizes American politicians for losing the will to change or at best being “hostage to advisors who don’t have the will to change.”

Gingrich is challenging his party to return to small-government principles that brought the GOP victories, say for example, in the 1994 Republican revolution led by Gingrich. He said in 2006 Republicans paid not only for failing to run the system effectively, but for failing to develop a new system and not even knowing what ailed them. “Citizens had to choose between a left enthusiastically raising taxes to run failing bureaucracies and a right passively attempting to avoid tax increases while bureaucracies decay and policies fail around it.”

Maybe Gingrich isn’t admitting that the government response to Hurricane Katrina or its stewardship of veterans care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center were inadequate, but it sounds like he thinks so. His message is clear: that government should indeed be small, but that what’s left of it needs to work. He believes his party must want to change and that the next president must be willing to change almost everything. It’s classic Gingrich — big, bold and hard to imagine. But it sure is refreshing.