Plural Potential

When I was in grammar school I learned a mnemonic poem designed to force me to memorize anything under the guise of making me memorize something about the tenses of the verb to be.  Allowing for variance over time, it went something like this:

An is is just a was that was and that is very small,
An is is was so fast it hardly was an is at all,
And as an is advances to become a was you see,
Another is must take its place and cease to be will be. 

I say this because I am somewhat proud of having remembered the ditty over multiple decades now, and to establish that I know something of the English language.

I also know this: while it may take two to tango, it certainly takes two to plural. 

Which leads me to an inevitable point about Newt Gingrich.  Newt was ridiculed and left for naught last summer when his campaign staff resigned en masse.  I know, I heard it on the radio.  At the time and many times since, the erstwhile Speaker has insisted that he would run a "campaign of big ideas" all in open contradiction to the rules of presidential campaigns which are meant to be run by small minds.  This was and is a noble purpose.


However, the key to understanding the ensuing campaign might be encapsulated in the single word ideas.  An idea is a worthy thing, and a great idea should be praised.  A campaign of ideas suggests multiple great ideas.  A campaign of great ideas is a worthy experiment in democracy.  It discomfits the conventional wisdom and the reign of convenience among the politically powerful.  There is a less than subtle implication that the forthcoming ideas will be novel and game changing.  As much as we expect them to challenge the status quo, we expect them to make us wonder how we'd never thought them before. 

But presidential campaigns are not college seminars or corporate retreats.  Brainstorming a continuous stream of out-of-the-box ideas, which are dumped unedited upon the electorate is not a winning strategy or even a worthy one.  And here is where it gets dicey: Ideas as promised requires a minimum of just two.  In this the Speaker has erred. If two makes a plural, more than five makes a mess. 

Simply put, Mr. Gingrich's campaign of daily whims is a very different animal than a campaign of big ideas.  It is a campaign of a big idea maker at best and a campaign of idea fatigue at worst.  Today we make kids janitors, tomorrow we cram a star onto the flag for the Moon.  The sad thing is that Mr. Gingrich offers so much in which we might believe, and a lot around which we might rally.  If only he could boil it down to the three or four causes for which we might fight.

It is still possible that Mr. Gingrich is a was that is, but if another is advances to become the is we need, it will be in no small part because of his endless ideation.

Maybe he should blog?