Newt Gingrich faces big questions



By JONATHAN MARTIN & JOHN F. HARRIS | 11/17/11 4:38 AM EST

DES MOINES — Newt Gingrich surging to the top of the Republican field? It’s a turn of events so improbable that even a political analyst as sympathetic as Newt Gingrich acknowledges that the latest poll numbers may turn out to be a short-lived fluke.

The question is whether voters will come to see the Old Newt, the one with a decades-long history of savaging opponents and himself in roughly equal measure, as giving way at last to a New Newt — serene, mature, self-aware and self-possessed.

The answer, according to Gingrich: We’ll see.

“They’ll just have to watch it,â€