The difficulty many conservatives have with Newt Gingrich is not the commercial with Nancy Pelosi as heart-sinking as it was.  Nor is it the seemingly cruel way he ended his marriages.  Even his classless, unprovoked attack on the Ryan plan could be forgiven. No, the real problem with Newt is that he loves big government.

In recent weeks, having been abandoned by much of his campaign staff, Gingrich claims that what drove them away was his radically different approach to winning the nomination, one that would be characterized by vigorous new approaches and programs.  Indeed, no bureaucracy reaches end-of-life were Newt to become our Washington, DC product manager. 

Rather, in a segment on Laura Ingraham's radio talk show he explains how he would transform the Environmental Protection Agency into the Environmental Solutions Agency while inaugurating new public-private partnership.  And with Sean Hannity on Fox he discusses ambitious new federal funding mechanisms to support research on brain diseases.

Perhaps even worse than his embrace of ever-expanding of big government is Gingrich's apparent belief in the myth of good government, the theory that if he and like-minded republicans were in charge, government would become more efficient and responsive.

This is the brand of republican governance that promises to lead us over a cliff but on a much slower train than the democrat's  current bullet line.  It's  the same theory that brought compassionate conservatism to champion no child left behind and created the Medicare prescription drug program, a new $20 trillion unfunded liability.

But we are living in the Tea Party era, when all the motivating energy on the right comes from the desire to tame federal overreach and excess, to reduce the size of government in absolute terms and to starve government to death if possible.  We prefer Rand Paul's formula that shutters existing government agencies to an agenda that adds to their number. If Gingrich was a radical ideological firebrand that ushered in House control in 1994, he is anachronistically becoming identified with the debt-laden, regulatory monster that the tea party hopes to vanquish.

Often identified as one of the party's best strategists, rhetoricians and scholars it seems that the idea that we should abandon the empty promises of big government is a subject Gingrich seems uninterested in debating.

Claude can be reached at csandroff@gmail.com