The Party Needs Gingrich’s Vision Let Him Stay Humility Only Adds To Leadership.

In his first term as speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich was memorable - smashing at traditions, tossing off one-liners calculated to inspire new thinking about government and society, kicking off a new way of governing, reveling in controversy.

In his second term, if he has one, Gingrich could grow up and become downright powerful.

If Republicans are wise, they will give him the chance.

Detractors say Gingrich is a goner. Now that he has admitted wrongdoing, they say, he can’t lead. He’ll be too busy fending off attacks.

Not necessarily. Attacks are a part of this job. Now that Gingrich has admitted he’s as human as all the rest of the capital’s power brokers, he would have to establish a new style of leadership. One tempered with humility.

Pitted against a president with massive ethical problems, a speaker with muddy shoes would leave the Beltway’s partisan dagger carriers in a stalemate: Either alienate the country with a two-sided bloodbath or acknowledge mutual imperfections and get on with business.

Gingrich has defined what that business is. That - not his lapse in the use of non-profit corporations to promote political ideas - is the real reason he is attacked so fiercely. Gingrich has a knack that can only be called leadership: He names problems the Establishment created and ignored, names them in ways that provoke national debate and then postulates radical solutions. The GOP has no one else quite like him and has not implemented enough reforms to trade him for some lower-profile compromiser.

Some reforms Gingrich champions are worth a fight: Stop piling federal debt on future generations; replace the welfare culture with an “opportunity society” based on self-reliance, charitable volunteerism, education and entrepreneurship; save Medicare and Social Security from financial collapse; shift power from the federal government to states and communities; and replace command-and-control federal regulation with incentives for good citizenship.

These are ideas Gingrich promoted in his controversial college class. They’re ideas many Americans now embrace. Even Bill Clinton had to espouse conservatism to win re-election.

Flawed politicians have good ideas and can make good laws. It’s an old story - the story of democracy itself.

, DataTimes MEMO: For opposing view see headline: GOP needs leader full of integrity

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