Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and architect of the Republican takeover of Congress 14 years ago, managed to make some news last week. He told an audience of chin-pullers and longheads at the Brookings Institution that he might consider running for president in 2008.

Let the world be shocked. This won’t be news to us thrill-seekers who gather regularly at Gingrich’s Web site, www.newt.org.

There visitors find a little clickable box titled “Watch Newt on Road to the White House.” It turns out to be a video clip of an appearance Gingrich made on a C-Span television show of that name, but still: You can’t get a much clearer description of Newt’s present activities and ambitions.

The moron who said there were no second acts in American life – was it Ryan Seacrest? Paula Abdul? – is about to be refuted yet again.

Gingrich has been dipping his toe in the presidential bathwater for several months now. The fact that no responsible Republican has waved him off, or even fled from the spectacle shrieking in horror, is further evidence of the unsettled state of today’s Republicans – and of their short memories.

When Gingrich first retired from politics, in 1998 following an intra-party challenge to his speakership, Republicans greeted his departure with gratitude and relief. They were grateful for his role in winning the House in 1994, relieved that they would no longer have to shoulder the public-relations burden he had become.

His public unpopularity was rooted in his self-created persona. Holding a Ph.D., and having taught for eight years at West Georgia College, Gingrich saw himself as part politician, part intellectual. But he was an unusual specimen of both.

As a politician, he seemed less interested in electoral mechanics than the grand sweep of historical ideas. And as an intellectual, he seemed less concerned with the grand sweep of historical ideas than the pop-sociology fads of the recent past.

Gingrich’s intellectual hero, for example, was the 1970s soothsayer Alvin Toffler, a “futurist” whose greatest gift was fashioning catchy titles (“Future Shock,” “The Third Wave”) to jazz up his repetitive, eye-glazing books.

Toffler appealed to Gingrich’s taste for schematics. Under the glare of TV lights the speaker would forgo political speeches in favor of didactic lectures, during which – hunched over an easel, felt-tip pen in hand – he would flog his stupefied audiences with the “Triangle of American Progress,” the “Nine Zones of Creativity,” and the “Five Pillars of Civilization.”

In private musings later made public, Gingrich described his “primary mission” as “Advocate of civilization, Definer of civilization” and – my personal favorite – “Leader (possibly) of the civilizing forces.” That “(possibly)” showed a touching, but almost certainly bogus, humility.

When the Republicans suffered an unexpected setback in the congressional elections of 1998, they decided their party needed fewer zones and pillars and more nuts and bolts – less theorizing and more whipcracking. Enter Tom DeLay, majority leader; exit Newt Gingrich, political has-been.

And now, eight years later: Exit Tom DeLay, enter Newt Gingrich. DeLay’s departure under an ethical cloud allows Gingrich to ride to the rescue, promising to return the party to the days when the most obnoxious thing about House Republicans wasn’t their sleazy ethics but their speaker’s comparatively harmless verbosity and megalomania. In a near-perfect reversal, a disastrous Republican showing in the congressional elections of 2006 will only strengthen Gingrich’s hand.

Aside from its limitless entertainment value, it’s hard to predict what a Gingrich presidential candidacy will offer. A recent speech at the American Enterprise Institute on the white-hot issue of immigration offered tantalizing clues.

Among the commonly mentioned Republican presidential candidates – Arizona Senator John McCain, Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney and bland establishmentarians like Senators George Allen and Bill Frist – only Gingrich agrees with the anti-illegal-immigration passions now bubbling up from the party’s most loyal voters.

Gingrich’s opinions are never less than totalistic, so he fits his anti-immigration stand into a comprehensive conceptual framework. The failed response to Hurricane Katrina, he says, demonstrated that government has grown sclerotic, a 19th century mechanism hobbling a 21st century nation. The border breakdown signals the same catastrophe.

Thus he announces, with typical grandiosity, that the U.S. faces “a crossroads” more significant than at any time since the dawn of the Civil War.

What to do? Gingrich proposes a blend of high technology (“biometrics”) and “entrepreneurial public management,” reforms like those that streamlined U.S. corporations in the 1990s, to unlimber the bureaucracy and restore control at the borders.

Meanwhile, a full-throated attack on “mid-1960s Great Society models of a nonintegrated America” would lead to “a return to patriotic immigration.” Such a program, he says, would Americanize (now there’s a word you don’t hear every day) immigrants who are already here.

And in a final rabble-rousing flourish, Gingrich says: “The American people are sick of being lied to by their elites.”

It’s quite a stew, served in a pot that only Gingrich can stir. High-tech utopianism, business-school buzzwords, old-fashioned nationalism, and populist demagoguery: The “civilizing forces” better prepare to suit up. Their once and future leader (possibly!) is on the move.

Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.