WASHINGTON It's probably not wise for a man who had a weepy boy crush on the last Democratic president to threaten to stalk the current one around the country.

But more than anything in his Icarus flight toward the White House, Newt Gingrich seems infatuated with the idea of recreating the seven Lincoln-Douglas debates with President Barack Obama.

"I will concede in advance that he can use a teleprompter," Gingrich said at a Republican Jewish Coalition forum here last Wednesday.

The president idolizes Lincoln, but now Newt wants to ape Abe.

Wherever Stephen Douglas went, Gingrich said, "Lincoln would show up one day later. And presently, Douglas began to figure out, the news coverage was always Lincoln's rebuttal."

Just so, Gingrich says, if he gets the nomination, he'll let the White House be his "scheduler.... "Wherever the president goes, I will show up four hours later," he vowed. In a rare moment of self-deprecation, Gingrich asked: How does the Harvard Law Review star "look in the mirror and say he's afraid to debate some guy who taught at West Georgia College?"

A match between Gingrich and Obama would be fascinating: two men who grew up without their hot-tempered, hard-drinking fathers, vying to be the nation's patriarch. The Drama Queen versus No Drama Obama. The apocalyptic prophet versus the ambiguous president.

One hot, one cold. One struggles to stop setting fires as the other struggles to get fiery. One who's always veering out of control, one who's too tightly controlled. One reining it in, one letting it rip. One tamping down his pugilistic side, the other ramping it up. One channeling Ronald Reagan to seem more genial; the other channeling Harry Truman to have more spine.

Nutty Newt is dancing a fandango on Mitt Romney's head even though not a single hair has gone askew. As Michael Steele, the former Republican National Committee chief, so eloquently summed up the Romney free fall on MSNBC, "The brother just can't bake the cake."

Republicans still seem dazed by Newt's rise.

Peggy Noonan calls him "a trouble magnet" and "a human hand grenade who walks around with his hand on the pin, saying, 'Watch this!' "

Joe Scarborough, one of the House plotters against Speaker Gingrich back in 1997, quipped, "Let me just say, if Newt Gingrich is the smartest guy in the room, leave that room."

Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina, who worked with Newt in the House, noted, "He's a guy of 1,000 ideas and the attention span of a 1-year-old."

Congressman Peter King of New York told CNN that Newt's "inflammatory" statements, his "erratic" and "self-centered" behavior, and his "Armageddon language" wear people out.

The Gingrich grandiosity was on display, King asserted, when the new frontrunner "compared his wife to Jacqueline Kennedy and Laura Bush and Nancy Reagan."

King said that because Newt "puts himself at the center of everything," and because he can't "stick with a game plan," Bill Clinton was constantly able to outmaneuver him.

If Newt doesn't fly into the sun but instead lands in sunny Tampa, Obama should use the Clinton playbook: Make him get a crush on you. Then crush him.