Newt Gingrich tells Illinois Republicans he’s the only one who gets it

Newt Gingrich wanted to show up in the Chicago suburbs Wednesday with two new reasons Republicans should make him their presidential nominee: Alabama and Mississippi.

Instead, with two more losses and no momentum boost, he stuck to an old standby: He’s the smartest guy in the race. Putting himself in the company of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan, he argued that he is the only candidate running in the GOP contests who gets science and technology and who knows how to employ it to revolutionize the federal government.

“The thing that I find most disheartening about this campaign is the difficulty of talking about positive ideas on a large scale,” he told several hundred people at the Northwest Suburban Republican Lincoln Day Dinner. “Because the news media can’t cover it and, candidly, my opponents can’t comprehend it, and the result is you can’t have a serious conversation.”

That’s why Gingrich said he was staying in the race, even though he has won just two states: Georgia, home of the district he represented in Congress for two decades; and its neighbor, South Carolina. “I believe it actually matters to have a candidate focused on ideas and a candidate focused on solutions and not just the usual politics,” he said.

Gingrich, a former House speaker, offered some now well-worn examples of the federal government’s failures, notably its inability to match the credit card companies in their ability to detect fraud. “That’s just willful avoidance of the modern world,” he said, “by bureaucrats who believe in a paper-based, 9-to-5 system that is just utterly and totally incompetent, so you have a bureaucrat with paper competing with a crook who has an iPad.”

Washington, Gingrich said, requires a fundamental overhaul. “The systems of governance that we have inherited are decaying,” he said. “You now have interest groups so powerful that democracy is simply a shadow event.”

Not mentioning his opponents by name, he said: “The level of effort it would take to change the system is beyond the imagination of most elected officials and beyond the imagination of most candidates, and that’s where we are.”

Gingrich spent the most time laying out one idea: allowing more extensive use of ever-advancing drilling technology to reduce gas prices to $2.50 a gallon, create jobs, make the United States energy independent and raise enough in royalties to pay off the federal debt.

But he also added another one: research in brain science. He said major advances in autism, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and mental health were on the horizon.

“It may well be the best single investment we make,” he said, suggesting it could lead to dramatic healthcare savings. But noting that his proposal to colonize the moon drew derision, Gingrich said: “It requires having the vision to establish large goals and it requires the courage to get up and risk being ridiculed.”