Quotes of the Day

Newt Gingrich was barely through the door of the Point of Grace Church in a Des Moines, Iowa, suburb when a man stopped him and thrust out his hand. "We need you," he said. The former House Speaker, television pundit and GOP idea maven flashed his medium-warm grin, said thank you and then turned to meet a throng of admirers gathering around him. For many of the attendees at the Iowa Faith & Freedom Coalition's annual spring kickoff on March 7, Gingrich was as much celebrity as candidate, and it seemed an open question whether people there wanted Gingrich as President — or just a high-profile agitator.

"We watch you on Fox all the time!" exclaimed one well-wisher, referring to Gingrich's appearances on the cable network, which lately have featured grandiose claims about America's descent into Barack Obama-imposed socialism. A couple, Tom and Karen Quiner, stopped Gingrich to rhapsodize about a made-for-DVD film he recently produced that describes Pope John Paul II's role in the fall of Communism. "We've been passing around your video," Karen told Gingrich. "It was so moving."

Such encounters offer a glimpse of the appeal in conservative circles of the multimillion-dollar, multimedia empire Gingrich has created in the 12 years since he left office under less-than-ideal circumstances (affair, divorce, scorn from his colleagues). His content machine cranks out books, DVD movies, paid speeches, television appearances, grass-roots organizing work. Along the way, this output has made Gingrich a wealthy man. And now he may be about to set it all aside to pursue a long-burning ambition of becoming President, a goal many people consider about as plausible as some of Gingrich's other designs, like his 1995 vision for a "massive new program to build a lunar colony." Gingrich has reportedly told supporters he's leaning toward an early-April announcement of his candidacy.

It won't be an easy one. He has always operated on a Wagnerian scale, and there's little doubt he feels qualified to lead the U.S. through what he awkwardly calls "a crossroads that we cannot hide from." Yet he is also one of the most divisive figures in politics. Though he may have high name recognition, he is disliked by roughly half of those who are familiar with him — a stigma matched within the GOP only by Sarah Palin. He has a flair for hyperbole that seems antithetical to executing a well-disciplined national campaign. And he has a personal life for which he says he has sought God's forgiveness. "He's one of the most creative thinkers out there," says Tom Quiner. Quiner's wife agrees but then pauses. "I don't know," she says. "He's got some baggage."

Indeed he does. It's unclear whether that baggage is too heavy for a journey to the White House — and whether Gingrich, 67, is really serious about running in the first place. But as he took the podium at the Point of Grace Church before an enthusiastic audience of perhaps 1,500, Gingrich was in his element. The former history professor declaimed about the fate of the Republic in a speech that ranged from Abraham Lincoln to Cold War-era Poland and even Albert Camus, as he outlined a battle with Obama and the "secular, socialist left." "We need a political change so deep and so profound," Gingrich told the crowd, "that nothing we have seen in our lifetime is comparable."

We've been down this road with Gingrich before. He has hinted at his presidential ambitions in nearly every election since he rose from the Atlanta suburbs to national fame in 1994 by leading the Republicans' reclamation of the House of Representatives after 40 years of Democratic rule. Most recently, in late 2007, Gingrich announced a "feasibility assessment" of his prospects for the 2008 campaign but then concluded it would be "irresponsible" to leave his just-founded nonprofit activist group, American Solutions for Winning the Future.

The serial flirting, coupled with Gingrich's nonstop product output (he has written more than 20 books since 1994, including three that were published in the past year alone), fuels suspicion that he's more profiteer than candidate. "We've heard this before," says one veteran presidential-campaign operative who advises a potential rival. "I'll believe it when I see it." It doesn't help that Gingrich himself has alluded to the benefits that accrue to those who are discussed as possible Presidents. "It helps sell books," he admitted to the Des Moines Register in 2005. "It helps communicate ideas. It helps get attention."

Gingrich's aides insist that this time is different. His spokesman, Rick Tyler, argues that in past cycles Gingrich hadn't severed financial or business ties — whereas this month his contract was suspended by Fox News, and he stepped down from a position at the American Enterprise Institute. "Those are two very solid indications of seriousness," Tyler says. Adds Ralph Reed, a longtime Evangelical Christian operative who has known Gingrich for decades: "I think he'll get in."

Further evidence of Gingrich's seriousness is the spadework he's doing with Reed's fellow religious-conservative activists. Next month, Gingrich will speak at the San Antonio megachurch of Evangelical pastor John Hagee. Later this month he will return to Iowa to promote another DVD movie, Rediscovering God in America, which he produced with his wife Callista and which highlights the role of faith in America's heritage.

Callista's presence at his side is one reason Gingrich has some extra work to do with religious conservatives. Although she converted him from Baptist to devout Catholic in 2009, Callista is also his third wife, nearly 23 years his junior and the woman he began seeing while still married to his second wife, Marianne. He likewise started to see Marianne while still married to his first wife, Jackie, whom he reportedly presented with divorce terms while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery. "He was a son of a gun when he was younger," conceded one Newt admirer at the church event. "The way he treated his first wife was not good."

Gingrich was briefly a national celebrity after leading the Republicans to a 1994 victory that he described, of course, as "a historical tide." But he was quickly outmaneuvered by Bill Clinton — in part because he simply couldn't hold his tongue. Gingrich can seem as if he has no filter. Many Republicans feel they lost the upper hand in the 1995 budget showdown because Gingrich told reporters he felt slighted after being seated at the rear of Air Force One during an international trip with Clinton and hardened his position on budget cuts in response. Today Gingrich argues that his record as Speaker is strong — that his pressure was central to Clinton's reluctant adoption of a balanced budget and a tough welfare-reform law. Yet Republicans looking for a winning candidate in 2012 may note that Clinton trounced Gingrich politically and used him as a foil to ensure his own 1996 re-election. "What had been a noble battle for fiscal sanity," former House majority leader Tom DeLay, then a Gingrich lieutenant, would later write, "began to look like the tirade of a spoiled child."

Gingrich was forced out less than two years later, blamed by House Republicans for their 1998 election losses following the failed impeachment campaign against Clinton — which Gingrich, despite his own extramarital affair, had vigorously led. (Gingrich draws a distinction between his infidelity and Clinton's perjury.) Exiled from Congress, Gingrich busied himself with writing, teaching and television punditry. In the mid-2000s he reappeared with new projects, including a center dedicated to modernizing health care; he seemed to be tempering his image as a radical. In 2007 he even appeared with then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a television advertisement promoting a campaign to address climate change.

More recently, however, the old firebrand has returned. Gingrich's 2010 book To Save America warned that "the secular socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did." He has also described "a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us [and] is prepared to use violence." According to Gingrich, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is "a mortal enemy of our civilization." And as for President Obama, Gingrich has endorsed the notion that his thinking was shaped by a Kenyan father whom Obama met just once. "What if [Obama] is so outside our comprehension that only if you understand Kenyan, anticolonial behavior can you begin to piece together [his actions]?" Gingrich said to the National Review in September.

How these views would cohere as a campaign platform remains unclear. At the Point of Grace Church, Gingrich called for an "American exceptionalism" that protects the role of God in society and reins in the power of government. "You loan power to the government, the government does not loan power to you," Gingrich told the crowd. "Power does not start with a bunch of judges and bureaucrats."

Gingrich's best bet may be to set himself up as an alternative to former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, whose conservative credentials many party faithful view with suspicion. Whomever he meets in the race, though, the biggest threat to Gingrich's candidacy is likely to be Gingrich himself. He raised eyebrows this month when his aides offered conflicting takes on whether he would create an official presidential exploratory committee. (He did not, perhaps because doing so would have brought legal and campaign-finance strictures that would have forced Gingrich to give up most of his business ventures.) "It led to unfortunate confusion," Gingrich recently conceded. "I wish we had been a little more structured."

Granted, the episode was a minor snafu, of interest mainly to political insiders. But the support and respect of insiders is vital at this early stage, and some wondered anew whether Gingrich lacks the self-discipline for the demanding presidential stage. Executive function has never been his strong suit. "If you can't get the rollout right, which is something you can totally control," says the veteran GOP operative, "how are you going to get other things right when events are not in your control?"

Others are more charitable, suggesting that the irascible Gingrich of old has matured in his later years. At the Point of Grace Church, Navy veteran Lee Booton of Ankeny, Iowa, pulled out a small blue Bible from his pocket: "This book here says that with age comes wisdom. And that's what's happened to Newt."

If Gingrich is truly prepared to run for President — trading in the comfort of private jets and hotel suites for cheap rooms and bus trips through rural Iowa and New Hampshire — he'll have to prove people like Booton right.

This article originally appeared in the March 10, 2011 issue of TIME.

• Michael Crowley