Rich Lowry becomes the latest conservative thinker to weigh in on the current iteration of Newt Gingrich, and he points out that the old Newt and the new Newt look fairly similar:

The “New Newt” surging in the Republican polls overlaps so significantly with the former version that the “Old Newt” should be suing for copyright infringement.

The New Newt talks of teaching a course as president; the Old Newt came to grief teaching a course as House speaker. The New Newt is outraging the Left by saying poor kids should work; the Old Newt provoked his opponents by saying more kids should be in orphanages. The New Newt’s presidential campaign has at times seemed a vast book tour; the Old Newt immediately got embroiled in a controversy over a multimillion-dollar book deal as speaker.

The New Newt says he’s 68 years old and therefore has mellowed and matured. He was 65 years and a few months old when he opposed TARP and then supported it. He was still just 67 years old when he criticized President Obama for not instituting a no-fly zone over Libya and then criticized him for doing it. He was on the cusp of 68 when he denounced Paul Ryan’s Medicare reform as “right-wing social engineering,” before contorting himself to explain it away.

We should all envy Newt Gingrich’s vitality that he has been capable of such youthful indiscretions in his mid to late 60s. The Gingrich story is less the tale of a slow evolution toward steadiness and wisdom than the fable of the scorpion and the frog. The scorpion stung the frog as it hitched a ride across the river because it couldn’t help itself. Newt is intellectually frenetic by nature. He’ll be 105 and wildly contradicting himself from one day to the next as he indulges his latest enthusiasms.

(snip)

More than a decade after he was cashiered as speaker, he’s back on the basis of his superlative handling of the debates. He is better informed and has more philosophical depth than any of his rivals. Despite all his meanderings through the years, he knows how to win over a conservative audience as well as anyone. The debates have held out the alluring promise of a New Newt. But beware: The Old Newt lurks.

Lowry's argument is less the one that's been employed by Mitt Romney surrogates -- that Gingrich is "unstable" and could blow at any moment, although he makes that point as well. But his point is more that the notion of a mellowed Gingrich isn't historically accurate.