understand is how he, newt gingrich, comes across to people. the answer? not well. his career as a public figure has been marked by the kinds of tenured pronouncements mostly about the personal misconduct of others that can only be likened to a brilliant professional golfer who consistently knocks the ball into the same water hazard again and again. he has a weakness for wildly inappropriate nazi analogies. people like me, he said in 1994, are what stand between us and auschwitz. the two most famous instances of his foot in mouth disease came when he likened the democratic party to woody allen s affair with his own pseudo ç stepdaughter, suggested that if you were upset by the fact that susan smith drowned her two