The first thing we ought to do is get away from the delusional notion that we're dealing with a Republican vs. Democrat issue here. Party politics has little to do with this, and the GOP has been complicit in nearly everything we like to blame on the Obama administration. A good indicator of this is that when I look back at the Bush administration and try to come up with historical parallels in U.S. history, the two presidents who I find most similar to Bush were Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson. These are hardly ringing endorsements for a Republican candidate, especially when you realize that LBJ may very well have been the worst president of the second half of the 20th century.
Secondly, let's stop with this nonsense that somehow Newt Gingrich (of all people) is ever going to "fix" anything if he's elected president. As a career Beltway hack, he's part of the problem, folks. He goes from Congress to a lobbying career in Washington (including lobbying for "green energy," Medicare prescription drugs, and a bunch of other things that are part of the problem), then crawls out of a hole in 2012 and tries to present himself as the guy who will fix things in Washington?
One of the things I have always been bemused by is the ability of lawyers to defend either side of a given situation, or of doctors to treat both the gunshot victim and the wounded shooter in the same ER. When one of my kids was in a debate team, the kids had to be able to argue both the affirmative position and the negative position on the same topic. When my same kid went to the Introductory session at university, the speaker said that a high percentage of freshmen entering had been in debate, and most of them had been captains of their team, which my kid had been -- meaning he had had to prepare the entire team for both sides of any assigned topic.
That said, we all want a president with strong and true conservative bona fides. But having leaned this way or that in the course of a long career does not automatically disqualify a candidate in my opinion, unless the leaning went all the way into treason, which is not the case with Newt (but most probably is the case with the Chicago mob).