Matt Bai’s profile of Gingrich in the Times Magazine is worth a read. It’s as accurate and unbiased a take in the mainstream press on a conservative as I can remember. Best quote:
“Most Republicans are not entrepreneurial,” he lamented to me. “They’re corporatists. They like the security and the comfort of a well-thought-out, highly boring boardroom meeting in which they do a PowerPoint once. And it worries them to have ideas, because ideas have edges, and they’re not totally formed, and you’ve got to prove them, and they sound strange because they’re new, and if it’s new how do you know it’s any good, because, after all, it’s new and you’ve never heard it before.”
The most cringe-inducing bit, on the other hand, is when Gingrich says he is more like Benjamin Franklin than George Washington.