LOOKING TO '12: NEWTIE

One of the GOP's 2012 aspirants is former House speaker Newt Gingrich, originally of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and thereafter of Georgia.

He is the Lenin of the Repubs' revolution of 1994, the year they proposed their Contract With America, took over the Congress, and Newt-ered the Clinton administration.

His real first name is Newton. His Pennsylvania Dutch surname he got by adoption; his birth parents were named McPherson. He taught political science and at one time favored Nelson Rockefeller for president. But he has long since been reliably reactionary.

He is astute and able. Yet, probably because of emotional factors, he seems clueless about the present Republican moment. Privately he must be contemptuous of the inflamed amateurs who are upsetting everything and everyone; to him they are the froth and not the beer. But today there is no beer. And their upheaval can't be managed from the top down.

His instinct has been to keep moderates in the party. The "big tent" ideal is right for someone who wants to save the GOP from itself (a suicide mission), wrong for someone who wants to be the presidential choice.

And Newt wants to be president. This is his only chance because of his age and his waning relevance.

What he'd have to do is egg on the blood purge and then, once nominated, dazzle the voting public with big new, imaginative (though right-wing) ideas to make them forget how offensive and mean the party has become and how dark and twisted some of his own complicated persona is.

Newtie-toot-toot could do it. He could do it better than anyone. He is a big-concept thinker.

But something is always seething in him, and sometimes it comes to the surface in wrathful ultra-partisanship. He has that demonic, Nixonian element.

There are things that enrage him. He hates the hippies, for example, who anyone would think were just exercising the freedom he says he believes in. But to him any male who doesn't wear a necktie during the day and worship money is at best a parasite and probably a commie.

Newt has had some bad publicity. Scandal cost him his speakership, and he has a history of cheating on wives and sexual opportunism. Again, he would have to distract people from all that.

His best move would be an expedient religious conversion to appease the Religious Right. He could join some far-right mega-church with a crypto-gay pastor; then he can boast of having seen the error of his ways and being a new man, while continuing to serve Mammon.

And it's come-to-Jesus time with the teabaggers, as well. To woo them, he had better lose his insider vibe. In the fall campaign he can offer his years and his experience as evidence of gravitas.

And he had better quit glowering and take off some weight so as to lose those jowls.

My instinct says this is someone to fear in power, not because he is Macchiavellian, which he is, and not because he is a rightist true-believer, which he also is, but because he is unstable and has all that irrational anger in him.

These days, within the Republicult, that last attribute could golden, if he can use it and not be used by it.