GOP Race Needs More Bold Ideas

By The Intelligencer
Fred Thompson finally has graced the GOP presidential field with his officially announced presence, and he no doubt will stir up the 2008 — yes, the election really is 14 months away — contest.

Thompson’s presence and celebrity already place him in the so-called “top tier” of GOP candidates, along with Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and a surging Mike Huckabee. But Thompson has not offered much of a rationale for his candidacy. Now that he officially wants to be president, he has some obligation to say what he’d actually do.

Which brings us to the candidate missing from the field, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who has been testing a lot of water himself for months. The architect of the historic 1994 GOP victory has released a new book that lays out an updated “Contract with America,” and he’s set to make a major speech that party activists hope will also be an announcement.

The hunger for Gingrich, despite his political baggage, underscores a largely missing element from a GOP contest in which many of the candidates seem to calibrate nearly everything they say: bold ideas. Of those, Gingrich has no shortage. If he did enter the field at this late date — as bizarre as it seems to describe it as “late” — Gingrich would, like Thompson, stir some life into what so far has been a boring campaign.

If the GOP is to have a legitimate shot at waging a competitive contest for the White House, then it will need bold policy and political strokes. Perhaps Thompson and Gingrich, regardless of whether either one ultimately could win the nomination, are just what the contest needs.