At the heart of Gingrich‘s campaign is his increasingly successful strategy to persuade large numbers of voters that he is the anti-establishment candidate even though he has spent more than three decades bound up with Washington politics, including a contentious four years as speaker of the House of Representatives and architect of the so-called „Contract with America“, which originally proposed many of the policies he is still pushing, before he was convicted of ethics violations and dumped as leader by his own party.