The way things stand today, doing politics in Second Life is a lot like having sex in a car. Just when things hit a groove, something falls out of whack. Still, when all is said and done, you're glad you did it.

That's the way it was yesterday at Newt Gingrich's appearance in Second Life on the 13th anniversary of the Contract with America. Gingrich certainly likes to hear himself talk, and so it was to good effect that he made use of the fairly new voice features built in to Second Life. But is often the case with Second Life, nothing seemed to go right. The event organizers struggled to get the audio stream up and running, and at one point Gingrich could be heard commenting in a slightly annoyed voice, "I’m not hearing anything…”

But once the audio troubles were worked out, Gingrich found his rhythm. He took a steady stream of questions from the crowd, deftly handling avatar names like "Astrophysicist McCallister" and "Silverblade Dagger" as if he were referencing "Mike Jones" and "Jose Rodriguez." Gingrich offered his opinions and thoughts on everything from the threat posed by China to the economics of virtual worlds, from the Senator Mike Gravel's National Initiative process to whether or not he owns land in Second Life.

Gingrich's answer to the last question was along the lines of "not yet." Still, it's clear that the former speaker has an interest in virtual worlds that goes beyond a one-off appearance in Second Life. He'd love to use SL to hold debates with Hillary Clinton on health care or John Edwards on poverty, he said. And the SLNN blog has reported that Gingrich has been talking with IBM about creating SL sub-universes called Legislative Life that would be offered to thousands of state legislators. More from the website of Gingrich's American Solutions organization:

We want to illustrate a point of how far we've come in 13 years. Thirteen years ago, the Internet was in its infancy—the House and Senate web sites just went online and Republicans stood on the west front of the Capitol to sign the Contract with America. Thirteen years later, on Solutions Day, we return to the West Front of the US Capitol--but in the virtual world--to continue where The Contract left off.
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3D Internet is yet another example of how the private sector is leading transformational change, in this case, in the field of online collaboration.
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In 2008, American Solutions will explore idea of adopting for public policy what the business world is already doing very successfully: building a virtual world for public policy solution creation.

Clear Ink, the organizers of the event, allowed into the sim a smattering of virtual protestors led by TechPresident's own Ruby Sinreich (in SL, Ruby Glitter). With silent chat running throughout the event, Gingrich could be heard while protestors yelled things like "end corporate personhood" or "you should be in jail." In the moment, it could be difficult to follow the several threads of conversation going on in the room. Though when all was said and done, one Gingrich fan by the avatar name of Etain Indigo commented that "the protesters added a nice counterpoint to the talk, I thought."

So yes, it was a complete mess. My computer crashed three times during the event, even though I was running Windows connected to a hard network line, about the most stable set-up for SL I could hope for. And yep, the audio dropped in an out at various points. And sure, at one point I got so caught up in the tail of a furry standing in front of me that it took me some time to get my way clear.

But I say and listened to what Newt Gingrich had to say for more than an hour, and I'm not exactly his target audience. And I did it while "sitting" next to some conservative Republicans who have far, far different ideas about economics and social justice than I do. And maybe most of all, it was a good time.

So I'm glad I did it, and I'd do it again.