TheBakersfieldCalifornian.com

Newt Gingrich is just what America needs. As a campaigner, I mean. In an era when the TV sound bite has nearly been rendered extinct by 140-character Twitter tweets, it's reassuring, in a masochistic kind of way, to hear Gingrich threaten us with a series of Lincoln-Douglas-style debates between himself and President Obama.

The Lincoln-Douglas debates, for those of us more than five years out of high school, were a series of seven campaign encounters between Abraham Lincoln, who eventually lost the 1858 U.S. Senate race, and the incumbent, Stephen A. Douglas, who today is remembered pretty much only for having participated in those debates. Here's the relevancy: The debates were interminable, at least by today's short attention-span standards. (The public ate them up back then, though.) One candidate spoke for 60 minutes, then the other candidate spoke for 90 minutes, and then the first candidate was allowed a 30-minute "rejoinder." Yes, they spoke for a combined three hours, with few of the lively comebacks we would recognize today as gotcha moments (although Lincoln did say one of Douglas' positions had all the substance of a soup made from "the shadow of a pigeon that had starved to death").

Gingrich wants to bring back these three-hour debates before America's voters, and he says he'd be willing to badger Obama into participating if the president tries to dodge him -- a nice pre-emptive zinger by the former House speaker, you must admit, given the fact that Obama can't and won't try to dodge anybody once the Republicans formally nominate their candidate.

With typical Newt aplomb, he has conveniently overlooked the fact that he must survive a series of six-candidate Republican primaries before Obama is forced to officially acknowledge his existence. But that's part of the strategy of inevitability that every competent front-runner employs: I know I'll win, you know I'll win, so let's just dispense with the formalities and move on to the main event: dispatching this one-term incumbent.

The Lincoln-Douglas format works for Gingrich not only because it emphasizes his credentials as a historian and his seemingly inexhaustible ability to lecture with an air of authority, but because it does not employ a moderator. And moderators, as we all know, are liable to ask anything. Gingrich, who's had three wives, some of whom overlapped, and who endured a House ethics investigation that did not end well, would surely rather not hear questions.

His enthusiasm for a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates also indirectly reinforces the narrative that Obama will somehow be lost without his beloved teleprompter. Of course, one of the other story lines that has dogged Obama for the past three years goes like this: He's an eloquent speaker capable of beguiling voters with his rhetorical grace, but is otherwise not qualified for the job. It remains to be seen whether Obama can win voters based on his actual body of work, but his undisputed gift of oratory just might play pretty well in the sort of long-form debate Gingrich proposes.

So why not? The Lincoln-Douglas format could be ready for a comeback. Let's stage a couple of them. Whether anyone actually watches is another matter. The bet here is that they won't, at least not for long. More likely, they'll watch Sean Hannity or Rachel Maddow read the funniest and most cutting tweets about what was said and how the candidates looked when they said it.

Or we could simply cut out the middle man and arrange the debate that America really wants to experience: tweet vs. tweet. It's got to be just a matter of time.

Email Editorial Page Editor Robert Price at rprice@bakersfield.com.