WE NEED NEWT

Ordinarily, the identity of the party chairman doesn't matter very much.  The proof of this is that the current chairman of the Republican National Committee is Mike Duncan.  I hadn't heard of him, either.

This is because the president is always the leader of his party.  The leaders in the House and Senate usually play this role for the opposition party.

But for at least the next two years, the Republicans in Congress will be, for all practical purposes, irrelevant. Democratic majorities in the House and Senate are so large the only restraint upon them and President Obama will be public opinion.  How far to the left can they go without risking a backlash?

The party chairman is usually mostly a fund-raiser and a technician.  But this is one of those rare times in history when the chairman of the Republican National Committee will have to function as the chief spokesman for the party, its primary public face.

The traditional roles will be more important than ever, too.  Republicans got creamed in every phase of the game by a superbly run Obama machine, which isn't going to go away anytime soon. 

Democrats raised vastly more money.  Democrats were far better at contacting voters — especially young voters — and getting them to the polls.  Democrats pioneered new technologies while Republicans remained stuck in the past.

Republicans are intellectually out of gas.  Ronald Reagan was a great president. The principles he espoused so well are timeless, and Republicans have paid a steep (but well deserved) price for having deviated from them. 

But Ronald Reagan is gone, and repeatedly invoking his name will not bring him back. We need leaders who can look forward as well as back.  And for the time being, the most important place to have such a leader is as chairman of the Republican National Committee.

The RNC will select a new chairman soon. The new leader needs to be a man of ideas and vision who can communicate them well, and a superb fund-raiser who is comfortable with the new technologies.  But Ronald Reagan is, as I've noted, unavailable, and Superman and Batman exist only in comic books.

But there is a man whose time has come, or, rather, returned.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich has character flaws that would keep me from supporting him for high elective office (I can't stand the way he treated his first two wives).  And as Speaker, he was a mediocre legislative leader.

But if Mr. Gingrich wasn't much good at exercising power, few have ever been better at knowing how to get it.  As a legislative guerrilla, Mr. Gingrich was without peer. 

He understood the power of ideas.  He had lots of ideas, and knew how to market them.  Few have been more successful in raising money for an out of power party than he was.  It was Mr. Gingrich, not Reagan, who was responsible for the GOP takeover of Congress in 1994, which almost all observers at the time thought was impossible.

Mr. Gingrich is experienced in the ways of Washington.  But — perhaps because he is a natural outsider — he hasn't gone native, as so many of the Republicans who came to Washington in 1994 did.

As noted above, Mr. Gingrich is not without his flaws. He's terrific at thinking up and expressing ideas, not so good at getting them implemented into legislation. But the job of Republican National Chairman is one in which his strengths would be amplified, his flaws less consequential.  And there is no one else out there who comes remotely close to him in providing what's needed in an RNC chairman now.

Mr. Gingrich should appoint as his deputy the young, brilliant, Web-savvy Patrick Ruffini. Mr. Ruffini and a group of under 40 GOP operatives already have prepared a sensible ten point plan to use the Internet as effectively as the Obama campaign used it this year.   You can learn about it on rebuildtheparty.com.

The silver lining in the kind of defeat the GOP suffered this year is the impetus it gives to clearing out the deadwood.  With Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Ruffini at the helm, the now moribund Republicans could come back to life faster than almost anyone now expects.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.