How do we love you, Newt Gingrich? Let us count the ways:

We love that, in an age of disciplined pols, you are not: You travel with suit jackets in multiple sizes to keep pace with your yo-yoing waistline. You’re always late — sometimes spectacularly so — to your events. Romney follows a written, minute-by-minute schedule, complete with weather forecasts for the cities he visits; often it seems that even your top aides don’t know what your schedule is.

We love your versatility: that you oppose the embryonic stem-cell research and the health-care mandate you once favored. We’ve admired your pivot from a friend of Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry and Al Sharpton to being the angry voice of American conservatism. We were tickled when you condemned us this week for having a “horse race mentality” — nine hours after you were in a bar with us spinning the latest polling.

We love your larger-than-life impression of yourself: We have a special place in our hearts for a man who describes himself as “a really important guy who really knows a lot and who really has lots of information.” We also enjoyed that, when you were told your moon colony idea was grandiose, you doubled down on grandiosity: “Lincoln standing at Council Bluffs was grandiose. The Wright Brothers standing at Kitty Hawk were grandiose. John F. Kennedy was grandiose. I accept the charge that I am grandiose.”