Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich called for a return to “the politics of big ideas” at the Northwest Suburban Republican Lincoln Day Dinner in Palatine Wednesday.

Introduced by his wife, Callista, Gingrich talked to a crowd of about 460 people about the need for technology improvements in the federal government.

“The thing I find most disheartening about this campaign is the difficulty of talking about positive ideas on a large scale because the news media can’t cover it, and candidly, my opponents can’t comprehend it,” Gingrich said. “And the result is you can’t have a serious conversation.”

Gingrich is visiting several northwest Chicago suburbs Thursday, March 15.

Gingrich compared the 2012 presidential election to that of 1860, where Abraham Lincoln ran on a platform that called for technological change. Calling for a more modern anti-fraud system in Medicare and Medicaid, Gingrich said by getting rid of a bureaucratic, paper-based system taxpayers will save billions of dollars.

He went on to talk about the need for American energy and that thanks to recent improvements in how we get natural gas and oil, North Dakota has been able to increase the amount of its recoverable oil from 115 million barrels 15 years ago to 24 billion barrels today.

“The same breakthrough in drilling technology has lead to us moving from a position where we had seven years of natural gas supply and we were about to start importing billions of dollars of liquefied natural gas from the Middle East,” he said. “Today we have 125 years of natural gas supply. And we are about to start exporting liquefied natural gas to China.”

He said if the price of gasoline were to drop as much as the price of natural gas has dropped in the last four years, it would be $1.13 a gallon.

The crowd responded well to Gingrich's call for more modernization in government. Keith Hanson, chairman of the Gingrich campaign in Illinois, said the Palatine area is a good source of support for Gingrich since it has a sizeable tea party following and the area draws a sophisticated crowd that understands government.

Gingrich, who lost Tuesday in the Alamaba and Mississippi primaries, isn’t trying to win delegates in one particular state, Hanson said.

“He’s keeping his campaign going to share his big ideas and keep the conversation going,” Hanson said. “I always get energized listening to him talk — he doesn’t back down.”