This Sunday’s New York Times Magazine features some public-service journalism from Weekly Standard senior editor (high keening liberal outcries here) Andrew Ferguson.

To wit:

What Does Newt Gingrich Know?

Let’s consult the literature — all 21 books by the self-proclaimed ideas man of politics. (Gingrich cites 23 books on his Web site. We are not counting the Contract With America or the coffee-table book “Ronald Reagan: Rendezvous With Destiny.”)

This is a humanitarian effort of Madonna-esque proportions: Ferguson has read the entire Gingrich canon and summarized it so we don’t have to undertake that essential task for ourselves.

Excellent!

(Since Gingrich is a Republican presidential neverbe – see also: Herman Cain, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum, and Buddy Roemer for God’s sake – we really should understand what standards the GOP is applying to its White House candidates.)

Ferguson’s overture:

The books taken together are evidence of mental exertions unimaginable in any other contemporary politician. Professorial affectations are not high on the list of tactics candidates like to use in this age of galloping populism. Within the politico-journalistic combine, Gingrich’s status as an intellectual is accepted as an article of faith — something that everybody just assumes to be true, like man-made climate change or Barack Obama’s stratospheric I.Q.

But mostly Ferguson focuses on Gingrich’s Potemkin policy proposals:

The ultimate problem with Gingrich’s firehose approach to idea-generation wasn’t the ideological cast of the ideas but their practicality. To pluck a couple of trivial examples from the scores of proposals he offers in “To Renew America”: “We should work with every recovery program to develop low-cost detoxification programs.” Terrific, but who’s the “we,” and what would the “work” entail, and how would the cost be lowered? Before you can ask the question, Gingrich has rushed ahead. Because “we need to know more about the environment,” we should “develop a worldwide biological inventory.” Excellent idea, for all I know, but administered how? Paid for by whom? Gingrich’s vagueness was always a problem, but the books show something more: a near-total lack of interest in the political implementation of his grand ideas — a lack of interest, finally, in politics at its most mundane and consequential level.

Which mirrors the general public’s lack of interest in Gingrich at his most mundane and inconsequential level.

Farewell, Newt – we hardly wanted to know ye.