Newt

“I don’t actually build oppositions; I build the next governing majority. I have no interest in being an opposition party.” – Newt Gingrich

It’s funny. I can remember a time not so long ago when I couldn’t wait for the Friday work day to be over, just to hit up a happy hour somewhere and enjoy 2 for 1 pints of Guinness with a good burger. This past Friday, while I still couldn’t wait for the work day to be over, it wasn’t to hit the bar…it was to hop on the computer and watch some of the speeches from CPAC. Mainly, there was one imparticular that I had only caught snippets of 140 characters at a time on Twitter, Newt Gingrich.

While I agree with most that conservatives need some fresh new faces, I’ll take a communicator and “idea factory” like Newt Gingrich over throwing any Republican over fifty against the wall to see if they stick. Especially when the former Speaker of the House has been reaching out to some of those fresh faces, as was written aboot in the New York Times of all places…

The breach here is plenty wide, and Gingrich is nothing if not politically agile. He has maintained, from his days in Congress, close relationships with colleagues who still serve in the House or who, like Kyl, have now moved on to the Senate. He has forged new alliances with leaders of the next generation as well – most notably Eric Cantor, the Virginia congressman who is minority whip, just below Boehner in the hierarchy. Then there is the group of senior aides that includes Paula Nowakowski, Boehner’s chief of staff, who told me she is barraged almost daily with what she calls Newtgrams – e-mail messages from Gingrich with lists of policy ideas, questions or advice on how to handle the caucus.

Another frequent recipient is Paul Ryan, a young Wisconsin congressman and Gingrich protégé known for burrowing into budget issues. Ryan told me he was opening presents with his children on Christmas when his BlackBerry buzzed with a question about the tax code. “He’s a total idea factory,” Ryan said. “The man will have 10 ideas in an hour. Six of them will be brilliant, two of them are in the stratosphere and two of them I’ll just flat-out disagree with. And then you’ll get 10 more ideas in the next hour.”

I’m all for finding new leaders…providing they have ideas and stand for something. This concept of finding “next Obama” I feel is just silly. It may have caused us to rush Bobby Jindal out to speak to “the big room” before he might have been ready. Experience matters, and while we may not have had a candidate last year who was able to articulate that, that should be our number one requirement over being a youngin’, just because that’s what the MSM keeps telling us.

This is not to say Newt should be our candidate in 2012. I’d prefer it if we stopped talking aboot 2012 altogether (though I sometimes break that rule myself). But while we look for new leaders, we don’t stop listening to the ones who have been in the battles before. If we as a party or a movement or whatever we are exactly don’t listen to a cat like Newt Gingrich, just because he’s not “new,” we do so at our own peril.

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