Walter Shapiro: Doing It For the Gipper: Why Old People Could Be Newt Gingrich's Saving Grace

Walter Shapiro is a special correspondent for The New Republic. He also writes the “Character Sketch” column for Yahoo News. Follow him on twitter @waltershapiroPD.

During the 1960 West Virginia primary,  John Kennedy campaigned in tandem with Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr. to claim that he—and not liberal stalwart Hubert Humphrey—was the rightful heir to FDR. The biopic shown at the 1992 Democratic Convention showcased difficult-to-locate footage of Bill Clinton shaking hands with JFK at the White House in 1963 as an Arkansas delegate to Boy’s Nation.

Even by these bygone standards of the-torch-is-passed iconography, it is hard to top the battle for Ronald Reagan’s legacy being waged in the Florida primary. All that's left is for a smiling Reagan to step through the gates at Disney World to set the record straight as Marshall McLuhan did in Annie Hall.

During Thursday night’s debate, all four candidates invoked Reagan—and both Rick Santorum (winning back Reagan Democrats) and Newt Gingrich (replicating the 1980 landslide) featured the Gipper in their closing arguments. Gingrich, who portrays himself as a “bold Reagan conservative,” will be barnstorming across Florida Monday with Michael Reagan, the Republican version of FDR Jr. And the former House speaker has also unearthed a 1995 video of Nancy Reagan calling him her husband’s heir as she dutifully read from a prepared speech text. Mitt Romney, as part of his successful scorched-earth comeback campaign, has repeatedly pilloried Gingrich as a heretic who challenged Reagan while he was alive and scorned him in death. Of course, Romney with his attacks has been glossing over the inconvenient ideological truth that he only became a registered Republican five years after Reagan left the White House....