The New York Times today features Newt Gingrich as their cover boy in the Sunday Magazine, with the focus on his continuing prominence in Republican and conservative circles. Newt has always been an interesting character, and with the total void of leadership and ideas in today’s Republican Party, Gingrich has managed to reestablish himself as a leader, with continuing influence on the elected Republican leaders in Congress. But even Gingrich acolytes know that he is scattershot with his ideas, rarely focusing on one area for very long. And Gingrich, in the story, fancies himself as a modern day version of Teddy Roosevelt and Robert La Follette, reformers with a progressive bent. The story contrasts that with his thoughts on challenging stale Republican orthodoxy, and how his actions seemingly fail that comparision.

And yet, at the same time, Gingrich pointedly declines to do what Roosevelt and La Follette did, which is to directly confront the Republican orthodoxies of their day. Those reformers demanded their fellow Republicans make a choice between ideas and ignorance. By contrast, Gingrich doesn’t really challenge any core ideological precept of the Bush era — only the strategy of “base mobilization” that underlay it. Nor do the last several months of economic calamity seem to have ignited in him any of the populist fervor that energized an earlier generation of progressives. His main remedy for the financial crisis has been to repeal the Sarbanes-Oxley law that Congress passed to step up regulation after the Enron scandal; Gingrich claims such accounting rules as “mark to market” are needlessly crippling banks and small businesses. In other words, his prescription for the runaway financial industry is to regulate it less — a position that hardly sounds like a departure from Bush, let alone progressive or insurrectionary.

The story points to the continuing pain of the Republicans, as they struggle to fashion a coherent agenda. I believe that Democrats should take some delight in having Newt back to kick around again. Bill Clinton picked him clean when Gingrich went to war with him over the budget, and Gingrich as the focal point of the Republican Party offers a big juicy target to Democrats everywhere. The only better (and bigger) target is Rush Limbaugh, who continues to drive the Republicans towards the abyss. Newt’s speech to CPAC is attached here. He launched a pretty good attack on the New York Times as he opens. He must have forgotten that he was the New York Times Magazine coverboy this week.

Read the Magazine story here.