Ever the Speaker

More than eight years after leaving public office, Gingrich has been astonishingly successful at maintaining his 93 percent name recognition. The downside of his fame, of course, is that more than half the electorate -- a daunting 53 percent in a recent Zogby poll -- say they'd never vote to put him in the White House.

"Newt would have a very hard time winning the nomination and a harder time winning the general election -- he's got too much baggage," says a prominent Republican officeholder and former associate who is fond of Gingrich and doesn't wish to criticize him publicly. "Newt is a great idea man, but he's also a man who leaves no fault unspoken. He tried to be the predominant power in the American government from the position of speaker of the House -- because he never got to be the predominant power by being president -- and he got a bloody nose for doing that.

"The left spent hundreds of millions of dollars demonizing Newt in the 1996 election cycle alone. In a 40-minute speech, Newt comes across as an impressive, thoughtful guy. But you take four seconds out of that speech and you can make him sound like a nut case, like a radical, like his eyes glow in the dark. When you're subjected to that kind of treatment for four years, it's hard to recover."

Initially sent reeling by Gingrich's "Contract With America" juggernaut that overturned 40 years of Democratic rule, Clinton ended up deftly outmaneuvering him. The speaker was portrayed by the White House as an egomaniac who shut down the federal government out of personal pique -- he'd whined to reporters that the president had snubbed him on Air Force One during a trip to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's funeral -- as an ogre who attempted to strip deserving citizens of Medicaid and other entitlements, and as a motor-mouth who talked so loosely about so many hot-button issues that even his own lieutenants advised him -- in the immortal words of Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) -- to "shut up." After the 1998 election, Gingrich was forcibly retired by his fellow Republicans. "In the Chinese tradition," Gingrich says, "I'd lost the mandate of Heaven."

Gingrich acknowledges his baggage problem, but thinks it might not be fatal. "The question is, is it a glass jaw or a harpoon?" he says, trying to assess whether the damage is temporary or shattering. "If it's a harpoon, you take it out and it heals."

Of Lincoln and Franklin

Traipsing around the Mall for four hours while lugging his wife's camera equipment -- Callista is honing her photographic skills so she can take pictures for a planned coffee-table edition of "Rediscovering God in America" -- Gingrich proves to be an entertaining, often surprising, conversationalist.

"In fourth grade, I wanted to be a movie director, so I read all sorts of books on how to make movies," he confides. And when did he drop that idea? "I haven't," Gingrich answers. "I just haven't gotten around to it." (Or, as Norma Desmond put it in "Sunset Boulevard": "I am big. It's the pictures that got small.")

He started the day with a full-dress policy speech at the American Enterprise Institute, sweepingly titled "The Next Governing Majority and the Transformation of American Politics and Government," and spent the rest of it in meetings, phone calls, an interview and taping his staff-written radio commentaries. Long after sunset, his verbal powers have not deserted him.

The man loves to talk -- whether about Walter Isaacson's "terrific" biography of Einstein, his fascination with dinosaurs and paleontology, his admiration for Russell Crowe ("probably our best actor"), the sheer fun he's had collaborating with William Forstchen on alternative-history fiction like their latest, "Pearl Harbor: A Novel of December 8th," his newfound enjoyment of golf, inspired by his athletic wife, or his hero-worship of Abraham Lincoln.

"Where did Newt go?" Callista asks at the Lincoln Memorial when it's time to trek to the next site. She shrugs and carries her tripod down the memorial's many steps, and eventually this reporter finds her missing Sherpa standing alone in front of the marble-etched Gettysburg Address, reading it aloud. When he finishes, he's clearly moved. He produces a handkerchief, removes his glasses and wipes his eyes.

"Lincoln's cadences are a combination of Shakespeare and the King James Bible," Gingrich says. "He may well have been the best wordsmith ever to be president. I find it very humbling. I'm routinely reminded of the gap between him and the rest of us."

Like the current president? Gingrich rolls his eyes.

"It's breathtaking! You can imagine -- given my respect for the power of language -- what this is like. The key to leading a free people is to be able to communicate with them. And if you can't do that, you cannot lead. It's just that simple."

It's almost midnight, and Gingrich is sounding less and less like a future candidate and more and more like a guy who can't stop reaching under the sneeze-guard and loading his plate with tasty morsels from the all-you-can-eat intellectual buffet.

"I'm actually pretty happy trying to develop a new generation of solutions," he says. "I think if I can find a way to do that in a way that's real, not just an academic exercise, put that on top of the 'Contract With America,' getting the majority in the House and helping the Georgia Republican Party, that would be a pretty good run. I think the Benjamin Franklin analogy is the best analogy. Franklin enjoyed being Franklin. He didn't think he was less than Washington or Jefferson. He was deliberately eclectic and deliberately complex, and happy to be so. He was pretty interesting. If you had told him, 'If you could have been simple, you could have been president,' he would have said, 'That's pretty stupid.' "