What can you say? Newt was Newt. Inspiring, brilliant, creative, visionary–you know all the Newt adjectives. They all applied. The audience loved him. He’s such a balm at a time when the GOP seems bereft of ideas and principles. He delivered a riff about de-salinization, desertification and environmentalism at the end of the Q&A that was brilliant, hilarious, and could not possibly have been delivered by any other politician in the United States. He has a big upside if he gets in the race. The problem, of course, is whether, at the end of the day, he strikes people as plausibly presidential, despite all his many talents.