Is Newt Gingrich as smart as he thinks?

By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE | 11/22/11 11:45 PM EST Updated: 11/24/11 5:32 AM EST

Newt Gingrich is always on message about one thing: He’s not just smart, he’s a deep-thinking intellectual with the big ideas to set the country right.

Leading conservative intellectuals who spend their days discussing big ideas aren’t as convinced.

They don’t doubt he’s smart. They just doubt he’s as smart as he thinks he is.

Gingrich is interested in ideas and at his best has been highly skilled marketer of them — as when he distilled decades of conservative thought into the “Contract with America” in 1994. But as he surges in the 2012 polls on the strength of professorial debate performances, some skeptics on the academic and think tank right say that the former speaker’s showy intellectualism and endless reservoir of obscure historical trivia are not the same as being an original or rigorous thinker.
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