FOR CONSERVATIVES, who have traditionally valued their grand theorists more than their campaign consultants, the buildings that house Washington’s premier think tanks are like a second set of grand monuments, symbols of a movement built on brash ingenuity. The Cato Institute, headquarters of the nation’s libertarian academy, occupies a stunning steel-and-glass tower on Massachusetts Avenue, boasting the kind of light-filled, contemporary opulence you would expect to find in Silicon Valley. The American Enterprise Institute displays a tasteful logo outside its longtime offices on 17th Street, where some 200 employees and 90 scholars confront the issues of the day a few blocks from tony Dupont Circle. And several blocks from the Capitol stands the beast of them all, the almost mythical Heritage Foundation, with its $60 million budget and eight-story complex, complete with housing for 60 interns, two auditoriums and two broadcast studios. Heritage is the Parthenon of the conservative metropolis, the names of its founding donors inscribed on the lobby wall for history to remember.

Talk to despairing Republicans in Congress these days, however, and you will hear little reverence for these brainy institutions, which one senior aide recently described to me, acidly, as a bunch of “moribund blogging societies.” Twelve years of Republican power in Congress — along with eight in the White House — seem to have had the effect of sapping the vitality and antiestablishment moxie from the movement’s venerable policy centers, which now spend a fair amount of time holding wonderfully esoteric brown-bag lunches about pharmaceutical prices or the British economy while, just down the street, conservative lawmakers are huddling together for warmth.
These days, to hear Republicans tell it, the conservative movement’s intellectual and strategic thunderbolts seem to be emanating, instead, from an undistinguished box of a building on K Street, amid the city’s famed corridor of lobbyists. In unmarked office suites scattered across separate floors, some 35 employees divide their duties among a consulting group, two insurgent policy centers, a documentary-film production company and a public-relations firm with only one client. That client would be the man who sits atop this emerging center of opposition, the once-defeated revolutionary who, like Che or Tito, is best known by a single name: Newt.
When most of the nonpolitical world last paid attention to Newt Gingrich, about a decade ago, he was stepping away from public life shrouded in the kind of ignominy that seemed to shadow all the sordid politics of his era. Having delivered House Republicans from decades of suffering in the minority, and having reigned for a brief time as one of the most powerful House speakers since the early part of the 20th century, Gingrich followed the same steep trajectory back down to near irrelevance. Politically, he was badly outflanked by a masterful and more pragmatic Bill Clinton; on a personal level, he was undone by petulance and hypocrisy, whining about his status on Air Force One after a state funeral and carrying on an extramarital affair while impeaching the president for lying about sexual transgressions. He became, in the public mind, a mop-haired caricature, the man depicted on the front page of The Daily News as a crying infant.
But while the last 12 months or so have been almost unimaginably dismal for the Republican Party, it has been a pretty great year for Newt. Last spring, as gas prices soared, Gingrich expertly employed the combination of an Internet appeal and some cheerleading from Sean Hannity to popularize his new slogan for increased domestic oil production — “Drill here, drill now, pay less” — and delivered to Congress a petition with more than a million signatures in support of more drilling. That campaign stiffened the resolve of Congressional Republicans, who had proved maddeningly inept at harnessing the tools of modern communication in the way their former leader had; they dug in on the issue and ultimately forced Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats into a rare surrender. (Even John McCain felt the need to change his position on drilling, leading Republicans to turn their entire convention — “Drill, baby, drill!” — into a pep rally for ExxonMobil.) In September, an emboldened Gingrich goaded influential House Republicans into revolting against Bush’s bailout plan for the banks. Gingrich’s book “Real Change” recently spent 11 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list.
Now, as Republicans on the Hill begin to awaken from a November beating that left them semiconscious, Gingrich finds himself, once again, at the zenith of influence in conservative Washington. It is a fortuitous collision of man and moment. Having ceded the agenda to a Republican president for the past eight years (and having mostly obsessed over White House scandals for much of the decade before that), Republicans now find that they have strikingly little to say that isn’t entirely reactive — or reactionary. “It was like ‘The Matrix,’ when Keanu Reeves wakes up and his eyes hurt because he hasn’t used them,” David Winston, a pollster for House Republicans, told me recently, talking about the 2006 election that relegated Republicans to the minority for the first time since 1994. “We just didn’t know how to do ideas anymore.” Whatever else you think of Gingrich, he has always been considered a prospector in bold and counterintuitive thinking — floating ideas, throughout his career, that have ranged from giving every poor child a laptop to abolishing the entire concept of adolescence.
As it happens, Gingrich is also the only guy alive who can actually claim to have led a beleaguered Republican House minority back to power. During the years when Tom DeLay and Karl Rove ruled Washington, conservatives wondered what they had to learn from a has-been who had been forced from power; now they wonder if he might have just a little more magic left under that schoolboy shock of white hair. “If you said to me that I could only consult with one individual, and my job was to bring the party back, Newt Gingrich would be the guy,” says Frank Luntz, the pollster who has worked with Gingrich going back to the 1994 Contract With America, the 10-point agenda that Republicans waved around on their way to the majority. “This guy would be the perfect ‘Behind the Music’ story, because he was on top, and then he lost it all, and now he’s back and bigger than ever. It’s perfect.”
It’s also a little strange. Barack Obama ran for president, you’ll recall, on the idea that the politics of the ’90s — if not the policies that brought about unbridled prosperity — could finally be put behind us. But the ’90s, it turns out, are not so easily dispatched. Much of Obama’s own administration has been culled, perhaps necessarily, from the ranks of those who fought alongside Clinton during those dark years when they and Gingrich’s army fought wars of attrition over the budget and impeachment: Rahm Emanuel, Leon Panetta, Hillary Clinton herself. And now here comes their old adversary, back from the political dead, just to make the whole thing seem like some retro reality show — “Battle of the Aging Boomers.” Last time around, of course, Democrats got the best of their encounter with Newt. Republicans have to hope that Gingrich, an avid military historian, has learned a thing or two about how to regroup.
ON THE NIGHT OF OBAMA’S INAUGURATION, Frank Luntz organized a dinner at the Caucus Room, one of those classic Washington expense-account places, with about 15 Republican congressmen and senators, including some in the leadership. Their ears still rang with the jeers of Obama supporters on the Mall, whose taunts, aimed at George W. Bush as he sat placidly through the proceedings, had ricocheted loudly off the walls of the Capitol — it was a final indignity on a day that felt something like a funeral. Dinner was well under way by the time Gingrich arrived, but he proceeded to hold forth for hours, rallying the Republican troops who sat rapt in their chairs. Gingrich was fascinated and impressed by Obama’s address (“Those could have been our words,” he told the group), and he advised them to laminate it and keep it close by, so that they could hold the new president to his pragmatic rhetoric. He urged them to go after the nomination of the incoming Treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who had been one of the architects of the bailout plan Gingrich found so odious and who was now in trouble over unpaid taxes.
The next day, at Geithner’s confirmation hearing, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate and one of the dinner guests that night, ripped into Geithner, calling it “incomprehensible” that the nominee for Treasury hadn’t known whether he had fully paid his income taxes while he was at the International Monetary Fund. At a Republican retreat two weeks later in Virginia, Peter Roskam, an Illinois congressman who also attended the dinner, showed up with laminated copies of excerpts from Obama’s inaugural address and handed them out to his colleagues.