Newt Gingrich begins his home-stretch campaign in the nation’s first caucus state today with a new 60-second spot for Iowa television — the kind of warm, positive commercial that candidates usually use as their first introduction to voters. According to the Des Moines Register, Team Gingrich will spend $250,000 on this spot in Iowa statewide in an attempt to bolster Gingrich’s already-impressive numbers — and probably to avoid the kind of collapse that plagued the other boomlet candidates in this race:

Iowa frontrunner Newt Gingrich’s first TV advertisement will begin airing in Iowa on Monday – and it’s just the beginning of a series of ads that will run before the Iowa caucuses, his spokesman said tonight.

The Gingrich campaign is spending $250,000 for the statewide ad buy on cable and network television stations. …

In the ad, Gingrich says: “Some people say the America we know and love is a thing of the past. I don’t believe that. Because working together, I know we can rebuild America. We can revive our economy and create jobs, shrink government and the regulations that strangle our businesses.”

The ad is called: “Is The America We Love A Thing Of the Past? Newt Says No.”

The introductory nature of the ad is rather interesting, considering that Gingrich has always been one of the most well-known of the presidential hopefuls this cycle.  This is, though, Newt 2.0 — not the consummate Beltway insider who engineered the first GOP Congressional majority in 40 years and who forced a Democratic President to accept welfare reform and reductions in spending, and not the man whose leadership fizzled out shortly thereafter and whose “revolution” got derailed later by “compassionate conservatism” and big-spending Republicans.  Gingrich’s entire campaign has been a reboot, in which he has successfully presented himself as the glue that binds together Republicans while focusing attacks on Barack Obama and the national media.

The ad itself is well-produced, and captures some of that elusive Reaganian “Morning in America” quality, very obviously the intent of his campaign team.  The music choice is also interesting.  Perhaps I’m the only Notre Dame fan that will notice this, but the ad uses one of the gentle passages from the theme to Rudy, a film that celebrated a triumph of will over seemingly insurmountable obstacles on the way to allowing Daniel “Rudy” Reuttiger to take the field for two plays for the Fighting Irish football team.  This theme gets borrowed often by many people for their background music (including early trailers, occasionally, for other films), but it seems perhaps fitting for Gingrich’s team at this point in time.