That 90s show

The run-up to the Republican presidential primaries has been peculiar Mitt Romney apart,more and more unlikely candidates have entered and flamed out of the fray from early talk of Donald Trump to Michele Bachmann,from Rick Perry to Herman Cain. And yet,as straw polls from Iowa suggest,the race may now have narrowed further,to a match between Romney and,in some ways,the strangest candidate of all Newton Leroy Gingrich.

During his stint as speaker of the US House of Representatives,he polarised American politics,working on so-called wedge issues until they became insurmountable,shocking old-style Republicans with his savage methods. He helped the Republicans win a massive Congressional victory in 1994,and announced a grandiose Contract with America,a policy blueprint that they wielded against the Clinton administration. Despite his adversarial relationship with Clinton,he also tactically cooperated with him to balance the federal budget,and for welfare reform. However,for all his supposed mental heft,Gingrich was considered virtually unelectable because of his own unorthodox personal choices,and hypocrisies. He grilled the Democrats relentlessly over alleged corruption,but was turfed out over his own ethics scandal. He led impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton over the Monica Lewinsky episode even as he was having his own extra-marital affair. After he resigned from the House in 1999,he has been preoccupied with the policy circuit,consulting gigs,books and TV shows.

So what makes Newt Gingrich a real possibility now? He shares some of the Tea Partys sentiments but his past record still haunts the campaign,and he is too out of touch with the Republican establishment. But if he does make it,given that Gingrich is the closest Republicans have to a philosopher-politician,his face-off with Barack Obama should make for an energising contest of ideas.