MY COLLEAGUE Lexington has pointed readers to this column by Conor Friedersdorf, in which the author describes "why President Gingrich would fail at every reform he attempted". Mr Gingrich, it is argued, is never satisfied with simple policy improvements, he must always reinvent or completely transform whatever it is he is trying to change, which is most things. These large-scale projects are often unrealistic, and otherwise politically impossible.

This reminded me of a New York Times Magazinearticle from June, written by Andrew Ferguson, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard. In the piece Mr Ferguson says he has read through all 21 books written by Mr Gingrich. At the time this seemed like a pointless endeavour, as Mr Gingrich was registering about 5% support in the polls. But looking back, Mr Ferguson's conclusions seem in line with those of Mr Friedersdorf. "Gingrich's vagueness was always a problem, but the books show something more: a near-total lack of interest in the political implementation of his grand ideas—a lack of interest, finally, in politics at its most mundane and consequential level," writes Mr Ferguson.

Not only is Mr Gingrich not a problem-solver, he is a problem-aggrandiser. "Reading the Gingrich catalog, you get used to intimations—or are they threats?—of Armageddon," says Mr Ferguson. Every problem is a huge problem, in need of a grand solution, and fast! The Economist is sometimes mocked for often saying that a country or institution is "at a crossroads". But this is a metaphor that Mr Gingrich owns. Per Mr Ferguson:

As a result, he wrote in “To Save America,” “we stand at a crossroads: either we will save our country or we will lose it.” “America today,” he announced in “Real Change,” “is at an extraordinary crossroads.” In a revised edition of “Winning the Future,” he phrased our predicament like this: “America is the most energetic, resourceful and innovative nation in the history of mankind. But we are at a crossroads.” Moreover, he said in “Saving Lives and Saving Money,” “we find ourselves at a crossroads.” The choice between these two roads diverging in a yellow-bellied wood is always stark: a question of “whether the United States as we know it will cease to exist.”... And then, just when my stack had dwindled to nothing and I felt the thrill of liberation, the mail arrived with my preordered copy of Gingrich's latest book, “A Nation Like No Other.” I thumbed through it. “The election of 2012,” Gingrich writes, “will bring us to an historic crossroads.”

More troubling for Mr Gingrich's supporters, at the end of these roads (or, at least, the ones Mr Gingrich chooses to walk down) are big-government solutions. As David Brooks writes today, the candidate "has no Hayekian modesty to restrain his faith in statist endeavor. For example, he has called for 'a massive new program to build a permanent lunar colony to exploit the Moon's resources.' He has suggested that 'a mirror system in space could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for nighttime lighting of the highways.'" Practical solutions to America's problems these are not. But heck, they're a lot more interesting than, say, putting LED bulbs in street lights. My colleague calls it "brilliant nonsense". Quite right.

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