Picture of the Day: Newt Gingrich Reads the Paper in a Sweatshirt, 1994

It's hard to imagine Newt Gingrich walking around a busy part of Washington, D.C., amid the glory days of the Republican Revolution, evidently unrecognized and clearly unbothered by the people around him.

But that's what's going on in the photo above, tweeted this week by conservative writer Ben Domenech, who noted that it was taken in Union Station in 1994, as Gingrich did some Christmas Shopping.

After a few years of relative obscurity, these days it would probably be tough for Gingrich the 2012 presidential candidate to walk around in a sweatshirt, idly reading the newspaper like the average weekend Joe, unmolested by the Union Station crowd.

Image credit: @BenDomenech