Newt Gingrich in CR

Went out to the airport Monday afternoon to get a glimpse of the Republican "idea candidate" for president.

Former House speaker Newt Gingrich is called that a lot in the media. He's the guy with the big brain and the big bag of policy plans. He has a crackling aura of intellectual energy, I hear, which helps keep his mop of white hair in place, even in the wind whipping across a tarmac.

That's his best asset, according to his backers. But in Iowa, "idea" candidates have a less-than-ideal record.

Steve "Flat Tax" Forbes flashed and burned in 1996 and sputtered in a 2000 comeback. Phil Gramm was the wonky U.S. Senate economist with his name on big budget reforms, but he started fast and fizzled out. Dick Lugar, the thoughtful foreign policy expert, was never much of a contender.

Democrats flirted with Bill Bradley, the bespectacled thinking man's candidate. But Al Gore thumped him. Who knows how ideas candidate Paul Tsongas could have done here if Tom Harkin hadn't made his vanity run in 1992.

The hopefuls who generally do well in Iowa are either effort candidates who move here, wear well and rise, or front-runners who weather the gauntlet.  George W. Bush was a front-runner. Mike Huckabee was an effort candidate who set up shop and won over caucus-goers one small group at a time. They had policy ideas, you gotta have 'em, but that was not their main appeal.

Many candidates have heard a frustrating refrain, "I love his/her ideas, but I'm supporting somebody else. I just don''t think he/she can win."

It's likely, barring a surprise, Gingrich is going to hear that, too.

But, really, for an ideas candidate, his proposals were fairly conventional. Maybe there's hope for him.

He did have one intriguing idea on immigration that was new to me.

 He's considering the concept of local citizen review boards, which he compared to draft boards, that would play a role in decidingwhich illegal immigrants had ample community ties to remain here legally and which ones would be deported. Clearly, such a plan could have flaws and pitfalls, but I like the central idea of a person being able to make a case locally that they should be allowed to stay. How many times have we seen stories where local communities rally around a family being targeted by federal immigration officials? Many.

So that's interesting, certainly more thoughtful than build a wall and deport 'em all. And Gingrich seems to see "local control" as a solution to many issues, including health care reform.

I'd feel better about his sincerity if it wasn't for the fact that he directed big bucks toward the effort to oust three Iowa Supreme Court Justices. I guess local people should make local decisions only when Gingrich doesn't need to build credibility with evangelicals wary of his divorce collection.

Otherwise,  he sounded like a fairly standard GOP hopeful.

Gingrich would eliminate the tax on capital gains, make the Bush tax cuts permanent and slash the top corporate tax rate from 35 to 12 percent, arguing that companies like GE who now work hard to avoid paying any taxes will simply pay the lower rate. It's also possible, even probable, that they'll also find a way to avoid the lower rate.

The tax cuts, he contends, will lead to growth and take people from food stamps and to the workforce. He didn't say much about spending cuts, and he doesn't like Paul Ryan's plan for turning Medicare into a private voucher program. Instead, he'll form a commission to ask the American people what they want to do with Medicare.

I bet what he'll hear is we want it to remain in place and would rather not pay one dime more for it than we do now. We can be really unreasonable sometimes. Better kick in that intellectual crackle. 

"America only works when America is working," Gingrich said. OK, well, that's a start.

Gingrich would turn the Environmental Protection Agency into the "Environmental Solutions Agency," which would be less regulatory, and likely less protective. He'd revamp the Food and Drug Administration so that it would put great medicines on the market faster. He likes ethanol, but not those "newspapers back east " who he predicted will surely pan his defense of coal and oil. I say we burn straw dogs for energy.  

He drew applause for vowing to repeal health care reform, and explained that, although he may have once talked nice about an individual health insurance mandate, he thinks much differently now... (that support for it is  political suicide in the GOP?) Some Wall Street Journal reporter got it all wrong, he said. What is it with these eastern papers?

He also got applause for promising to eliminate all of Obama's czars on day one. Although I don't think they'll still be hanging around.

In fact, Gingrich says he'll set up a website to solicit ideas for executive orders he could sign on his first day in office. And, sometime, between his inauguration and lunch, he plans to have an order-signing frenzy. His Secret Service code name will be "Hand Cramp."

Gingrich wants us to emulate Germany's manufacturing economy and adopt Ireland's corporate tax rate. And we should negotiate trade deals like the Chinese, who negotiate for entertainment, he said. And we should copy the plans for that big 'ol job machine in Texas, which almost was another country.

But we need an American foreign policy that doesn't defer to the United Nations, a line that drew applause and has been drawing applause from Iowa Republicans for decades. And in another classic line, Gingrich said this election will be critically important to the future of the country. Again?

And, in other news, Gingrich has a book coming out soon, called "A Nation Like No Other." Spoiler alert, it's America. And his wife is publishing a children's book, "Sweet Land of Liberty," featuring Ellis the Elephant.

 So what do you think of the ideas candidate?