To Renew America.

• Author: Miller, Matthew

Test your understanding of the Republican revolution. Newt Gingrich is: (a) an original thinker-politician, whose fear for America's sagging trajectory prompts him to offer fresh solutions that go beyond politics as usual; (b) a manipulative propagandist, whose benign facade masks a ruthless hunger for power that he'll use for God-knows-what if we don't stop him; or (c) a jargon-loving management consultant in disguise, whose bromides and futurist visions get loonier with each new one he spews.

If you said "all of the above," maybe you've already read To Renew America, in which the traits that make Gingrich both fascinating and scary are on neon display. Renew is a breezy screed that purports to explain the source of Gingrich's ambitions, his diagnosis of what ails us, and his inventory of cures. There's plenty to question or dismiss here. Yet for liberals, the only thing that should be as troubling as Newt's agenda is their own illiberal refusal to admit there might be a sincere or worthy thought in his head.

After an opening reflection on his formative years (where we're told, among other things, that at age 14 the future speaker consecrated his life to "understanding what it takes for a free people to survive and to helping my country and the cause of freedom"), the book speaks in successive chapters to "the six challenges" Gingrich sees facing the country. These are, in his words, "Reasserting and Renewing American Civilization"; "America and the Third Wave Revolution"; "Creating American Jobs in the World Market"; "Replacing the Welfare State with an Opportunity Society"; "Balancing the Budget and Saving Social Security and Medicare"; and "Decentralizing Power." There's little new here if you've heard his spiel before.

Gingrich also offers a mini-memoir of the Contract With America, from inception to execution in the new Congress's first 100 days. The last 100 pages of the book consist of 17 bite-sized chapters in which Gingrich offers short takes on subjects ranging from Rush Limbaugh to the flat tax.

As with most Gingrich utterances, the book is bursting with ideas--some sensible, some inflammatory, others daffy. Among the sensible: Gingrich wants prisoners to work and study in prison, not lift weights and channel surf. He'd expand the Earning by Learning program he helped pilot in Georgia, which gives poor kids a dollar for each book they read and has created scores of ghetto bibliophiles. He also points persuasively to the...