One of the most oft-quoted clichés about American public life is that there are no second acts.

But if Newt Gingrich decides to run for the Republican presidential nomination, he will be the latest of many disproving it. Then, he could give a full-length lecture on a) why F. Scott Fitzgerald said it in the first place; b) what Fitzgerald wrote about the Jazz Age; c) how Prohibition affected the political culture of America; and d) how we can all learn an important lesson about what all of the above means for America’s future.

Gingrich is in the news this week following comments he made to conservative insiders in Washington — but which were clearly intended for wider consumption. He denounced the McCain-Feingold campaign finance laws as too restrictive. And he ridiculed the way we pick a president, likening it to a series of American Idol-type auditions.

He’s right on both counts, of course. But he couldn’t resist adding an exquisitely Newtonian touch, the kind that makes people love him, hate him, or in many cases, be oddly fascinated by his strangeness.

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Comparing himself to Charles De Gaulle in semi-retirement, Gingrich said that if no GOP candidate emerged by mid-October with the strength to win the general election against Sen. Hillary Clinton, he would condescend to enter the race to defeat her.

Such an attitude displays more overt self-confidence than generally considered appropriate in American political life, but that’s exactly Gingrich’s point.

How can a candidate possibly explain a substantive position on Iraq, or health care, or immigration with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews hovering nearby, ready to cut him off after 45 seconds? We’re trying to decide who gets to be the world’s most powerful person, not who can leave the wittiest answering machine messages.

Monday night’s Democratic presidential debate did little to inspire renewed confidence in the electoral process, no matter how many times CNN journalist Anderson Cooper mentioned how “revolutionary” or “historic” it was for the questions to come in the form of YouTube video clips.

The questions were about what you would get from one of the “town hall” debates we’ve seen. The show’s producers still selected which questions to use, and the candidates still had too little time to answer them.

For two hours after the debate, CNN analyzed every conceivable detail of what happened, from body language, to second-by-second focus group data, to how many times candidates said nice things about each other.

Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama seemed to earn the highest marks, but only for appearing “strong” or “presidential,” not for what they said.

Indeed, Obama got away with saying the most profoundly stupid thing said by any candidate so far, excepting, of course, Mike Gravel or Dennis Kucinich.

Obama said there is “no military solution to our problems in Iraq” and that we should pull out and get Iraq’s “neighbors in the area” to help out. Which neighbors would those be? Syria and Iran?

If we had real debates, candidates could directly challenge ideas like those. Wouldn’t it be much more informative to have no more than three or four candidates at a time sit down and talk to each other, perhaps with a grown-up like Gwen Ifill or Brit Hume to moderate?

In such a setting, Gingrich might seem less like a wacky professor and more like the resolute national leader we need.

Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited. He can be reached at aaronkeithharris@gmail.com.