The New Republic’s Jon Chait wrote an excellent piece last year titled “The Case Against New Ideas,” which explodes a series of myths about the supposed power of new ideas to shape political outcomes. (See also my post on new ideas and the “gridlock zone.”)

The American Prospect’s Ezra Klein now offers a more mundane reason to question the fixation on “new ideas” — it’s a substantively meaningless term in practice:

It’s [not] just that Newt has no new ideas, it’s that his ability to convince the media otherwise exposes the bankruptcy of the whole new ideas concept. After all: Newt’s health savings accounts might as well be new. It’s not as if more than a dozen Americans even understand how health savings accounts work in the first place. And this goes for most policies. Newt could champion tort reform and, if Tim Russert wanted to call it blindingly brilliant and inventive, it’s not clear who’d stop him.

In a media landscape where nobody bothers to explain policies, all policies may be new, or they may be old, or they may be stolen, or unworkable, or brilliant. All that matters is the appended adjectives. Given that there aren’t media protocols for routinely talking through the details and evaluating the worth of policy proposals, they exist entirely in terms of their throwaway descriptors, which are in turn functions of candidate narratives, atmospherics, the reporter’s familiarity with the concepts at hand, etc. And because fairly few reporters are actually policy experts, it’s sadly easy to construct a reputation for big thinking out of loud talking. Newt [Gingrich] can spin old ideas into new ones because we have a media that doesn’t much traffic in ideas, and thus doesn’t know how to tell the difference. What they do know is that most candidates don’t talk about policies, and Newt does, and that makes him different. That his policies are generally bad is, again, a level of analysis we rarely reach.

Exactly right. A case in point is David Brooks’s latest column, which concludes with this:

Perhaps, as my friend Daniel Casse notes, what the G.O.P. needs is Newt Gingrich’s brain lodged in Fred Thompson’s temperament.

Remember, Gingrich is the pseudo-intellectual who used beach volleyball as the basis for a condemnation of government:

A mere 40 years ago, beach volleyball was just beginning. Now it is not only a sport [but] in the Olympics. … And there’s a whole new world of opportunity opening up that didn’t even exist 30 years ago or 40 years ago, and no bureaucrat would have invented it. And that’s what freedom is all about.

But he talks about new ideas a lot, so he must have them, right?