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I can overlook flaws in the candidate I support, even though I won’t ignore them when we are discussing candidates. I’d vote for Gingrich (heck, I came without hours of endorsing him when he looked like the only guy left worth voting for in Virginia) — but I see him as pretty flawed, and hardly a sure thing to win an election anyway. And up until 2 months ago, that was the majority opinion here at FR as well, Gingrich getting the laugh-treatment when his name came up.

One wonders the response had those laugh-treaters read this passage:

The last decades of the 20th century were a transformative period for American society, driven in large part by technological change. As the information age reached its height, traditional institutions of society often found themselves breaking down or struggling to keep up with the pace of change. Government was affected as much, if not more, than the rest of society.
This line of thinking was encapsulated by Alvin and Heidi Toffler in their best-selling book The Third Wave. According to the Tofflers, the first wave was the agricultural revolution, which led to feudal-style social systems. The second wave was the industrial revolution, which produced "mass society" in its socialist and capitalist versions. The third wave is the postindustrial society, built around information and technology. The Tofflers warned that the new age required new institutions of governance.
No one embraced this idea with more enthusiasm than House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who led the Republican takeover of the House in 1994. Gingrich referred to The Third Wave as "the seminal work of our time." He made the book mandatory reading for newly elected Republicans. This book says the U.S. Constitution "is increasingly obsolete, and hence increasingly, if inadvertently, oppressive and dangerous to our welfare." Therefore, it should "die and be replaced" (Emphasis mine.---BD.)
Gingrich is almost universally associated with opposition to big government. But that was not actually the case. Gingrich rhetorically criticised big government. And it served his enemies and the Clinton administration to portray Gingirch as slashing government programs. The Gingrich-inspired "Contract with America" was generally seen as a call for smaller government, although it did not actually call for cutting a single government program. (The closest it came was a call for zero-baseline budgeting.) (Emphasis mine.--BD.)
Actually, Gingrich opposed bureaucratic government---inefficient government---not big government per se. As Gingrich said in 1994, "government plays a huge role" in society and "anybody who believes in the American Constitution ought to believe in a fairly strong government." He went on to say that he has "no particular beef with big government." Or, as he said more recently, if the bureaucracies can be reformed and made more efficient, "the country could get excited about the opportunity to make government work."
That is not to say Gingrich and his followers would not like to see a smaller government. Many changes they support would indeed reduce government bureaucracies. But in the end, Gingrichism means "recognising that even a relatively small federal or state government will be much bigger than anything the founding fathers could have dreamed of." (Emphasis mine.--BD.)
. . . [His] belief in technology has led Gingrich and his disciples along three basic paths. First, they believed that government institutions needed to be reformed to make them more efficient. Most were built under an outdated "second wave" ethos. They would have to be updated for the new "third wave" technological age. Gingrich-style conservatism was about bureaucratic reform and technological innovation, not about shrinking government or individual liberty.
. . . Make government institutions efficient and all else will fall into place. "As a country we can give people better lives through better solutions by bringing government into conformity with the enterpreneurial systems they are experiencing in the private sector." The issue is not how big government is or how much it spends; it is whether we have "the systems architecture that would spend it intelligently." Traditional conservatives want the government simply to do less. But Gingrich and his fellow technophiles believe that the right systems architecture will enable the government to provide "greater goods and services at lower and lower costs."
This attitude gave Gingrich conservatism its appearance of optimism. Rather than being against big government, Gingrich could be for reform. "We need to move from a 'no, because' to a 'yes, if' approach to government policy." Former representative Vin Weber, one of Gingrich's followers, has also sounded the call for reforming government, rather than cutting it:
Conservatives have to do better than simply bash government. We have to lead the way toward reform of government. We need to look at the whole of government and think about how to empower the consumers of government benefits, rather than the bureaucracy. Conservatives who simply look to abolish agencies are going to be disappointed, but conservative reformers still have an open field.

Thus one could say of Gingrich's conservatism, "while this view did indeed see the federal government as the source of the many of the nation's troubles, it did not hold that the problem was federal power as such. Change those wielding federal power, and the power could be harnessed to the ends of conservative reform."
. . . Gingrich once called for abolishing the Department of Education, but he has since become an enthusiastic supporter of federal government involvement in education. He endorsed President Clinton's plan for the federal government to finance 100,000 new teachers and called for the government to provide Internet access to all Americans and computers to every four-year-old. He has proposed paying students for taking difficult math and science courses.
Energy policy is another area where Gingrich and the technophiles support massive government intervention . . . He would support a host of public-private partnerships, investments in alternative fuels, and conservation measures. Almost anything goes, as long as it involves new technology.
While Gingrichites correctly understood the failures of traditional welfare programs, they sought to reform not end them. "The old phrase 'conservative opportunity society' always envisioned a reformed welfare state," Weber notes. A Gingrich welfare state included government-funded orphanages and "parental training" centers for single mothers. He supported the Medicare prescription drug benefit and has joined with Hillary Clinton to call for the government to develop a national health care database.
In some ways, Gingrich-style technophilia may seem to be a much smaller movement than (others within the conservative movement). It is, with a few exceptions, largely based around one man. Yet, Gingrich has had and continues to have enormous influence over the intellectual development of both the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Given the disillusionment among Republicans with the current level of congressional leadership, nostalgia is increasing for the Gingrich era.
. . . But far from leading conservatism back to the philosophy of Reagan and Goldwater, Gingrich's ideas for a technocratic, efficient, and bigger federal government have helped drive it toward the big-government conservatism that dominates today.
. . . Gingrich has been riding a wave of nostalgia for the Republican Revolution of 1994. The recent Republican Congress was so incompetent and so inclined toward big government that 1994 looks like the golden age. But Gingrich was not and is not a small-government conservative . . . Indeed, listening to Gingrich, one gets the distinct impression that he doesn't care how big government grows---as long as it uses computers.
---Michael D. Tanner, from "From Oxymoron to Governing Philosophy: The Roots of Big Government Conservatism," in Leviathan on the Right: How Big Government Conservatism Brought Down the Republican Revolution. (Washington: Cato Institute, 2007; 323 pages, $22.95)

Lest we forget, too, that by 1997-98, Gingrich was busy lecturing those in the House who weren't exactly ready to go along with him on Droopy-Drawers Clinton's spending hikes (after all, what the hell fun is it to have a budget surplus the Republicans painted him into abetting and even let him take the credit for getting if you can't go wheeeeeeeeeeeee! at every three-card monte stand on the pipe)---indeed, Gingrich was even pushing for a little bit more than even Droopy-Drawers was asking!---that they just didn't get the Big Picture . . . and lo! come the 1998 Congressional elections, those Congressmen who didn't fall into line under Gingrich's bark actually kept their seats. (They merely told the home folks they were voting no way, no how, no chance, and why, reminding the home folks they weren't elected in the first place to join Clinton's Drunken Sailor Club . . . and the home folks responded accordingly.) It's entirely possible that the uprising that forced Gingrich off the Speaker's perch had as much to do with that budget issue as with anything else that numbered his days with the gavel in his mitt.