You know what the next big stohy is going to be?" Newt Gingrich asks. We've been talking about what lies ahead, and how the media will probably fail to predict it. Gingrich has already scoffed at my wishful prediction that the next big story might be: "The Odd Couple—Newt and Bill Get Together to Solve Some Problems." How naive. The next big story would be something else: "That I'm a professor," he says impishly. Pause. Quizzical look from reporter. "Ideas matter." Go ahead, call him grandiose, working an old con: look at me, the only guy on the Hill (other than Pat Moynihan) who actually reads serious books. Call him a history abus-er, hiring a (dumb) polemicist as historian of the House, and routinely twisting the early history of the republic to make it seem as if the founders were men of great piety. (How closely did he read those books?) Call him just another hyperactive politician who in the end may turn out to be more interested in the idea of power than the power of ideas, who takes the plowshares that cultivate ideas and turns them into swords to stab Democrats.
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