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"Well Reagan didnt win the House. It was still firmly in Democrat hands, and was assumed to always be that way, until ~~Newt led the way to winning it~~ Clinton's vast over-reach in '93 turned it over to the GOP.

Newt almost foiled it though, with his clownish "contract." The GOP lead started downward when he brought it out, and we barely made it to the election.

"Clinton's vast over-reach in '93 turned it over to the GOP."

Exactly. That and nostalgia for Reagan. Too much revisionist history on FR surrounding Newt. He rode dissatisfaction with Clinton, and a public who missed Reagan to the speakership. He then managed to squander that healthy pile of political capital and limelight borrowed from Reagan's legacy in fairly short order. In the process of his own self-destruction, he managed to drag US political discourse down to absolute gutter-level partisan sniping. And he led - led - the legislative charge to deindustrialize the country through poorly thought-out (treasonous, really) trade policy.

He's a dried-up hack with no real prospects for ever being elected as POTUS. McCain v. 2.0, but probably not even popular enough in GOP circles to get past Romney's country-club mafia in the primaries. Although it is somewhat entertaining in a perverse way watching a died-in-the-wool reverse class warrior like Gingrich try to take a populist tack in an effort to get some traction against Mitt by trying to paint him as the bigger snake.