Pinhead Wizards

Well, if Tom Jensen's poll numbers are to be believed (and PPP has been pretty much spot on in the past with a good track record) then Stupor Tuesday it could be a long, long day for the forces of Romnevibility(tm).

The news is good for Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich and bad for Rick Santorum in PPP's final polls of the three biggest Super Tuesday states.

In Ohio Romney leads with 37% to 36% for Santorum, 15% for Gingrich, and 11% for Ron Paul.

In Tennessee Santorum leads with 34% to 29% for Romney, 27% for Gingrich, and 8% for Paul.

In Georgia Gingrich leads with 47% to 24% for Romney, 19% for Santorum, and 8% for Paul.

A week ago Santorum had a huge lead in Tennessee, a decent sized one in Ohio, and seemed like he had a good chance for second in Georgia. Now he's barely holding on in Tennessee, ever so slightly behind in Ohio, and seems doomed for third in Georgia.

Romney's fortunes have swung the other direction. What was looking like a runner up finish in Ohio is looking more like a win with each passing day. He has an outside chance at pulling off an upset win in Tennessee. And it looks like he'll finish a solid second in Georgia.

The news for Gingrich is good too. It's been expected he would win Georgia, but it looks now like he could even hit the 50% mark. And he's pulled within striking distance of Santorum and Romney in Tennessee.

We're at a tipping point. A Gingrich win in Georgia with him getting over 50% keeps him in the game, as does a Santorum win in Tennessee (especially if Romney slips into 3rd there.)  Should Slick Rick pull off a win in Ohio to boot, all balls will be locked for multiball and the chaos will truly begin, as Tuesday will only make the national GOP picture even more messy.

If on the other hand Romney can win Ohio and surprise in the Volunteer State, Romnevitability(tm) will rise.  It could go either way at this point.  Me, I'm rooting for multiball, then for the table to break and the balls to go flying everywhere.  Maybe knock over a few bystanders, roll out into the street, cause hipsters to ironically fall.  Yeah, the kind of multiball that makes the local news and forces some local reporter to schlep out to where they still have pinball machines and pizza by the slice with "cheese" and do a report with a straight face with the chyron underneath reading "BIZARRE PINBALL ACCIDENT DOWNTOWN INJURES FOUR.".  I'm all for that.  Let's go with that.  Yeah.

Also, what Doug said.

Walla Walla Ding Dong

Mitt Romney has taken the Washington State caucuses from last night, 38%-25%...over Ron Paul.  Santorum came in a close third at 24%.

Mitt Romney won the Republican caucuses in Washington state, according to unofficial results early Sunday, giving the former Massachusetts governor a shot in the arm heading into Super Tuesday contests.

With 99% of the vote in, Romney had 38%. Texas Rep. Ron Paul had 25% and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum had 24%. They were trailed by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich at 10%.

At stake in the contest are 40 delegates.

"We're in a good second place, but the good news is we're doing very, very well in getting delegates," Paul told supporters in Seattle, when about half of the vote had been counted. "The enthusiasm for the cause of liberty continues to grow exponentially."

It's certainly a blow to Santorum to come in third, making Ohio all that much more important for all four candidates.  Gingrich, Santorum and Romney were in Cincinnati yesterday rather than Seattle or Walla Walla.

With 72 hours to go before Ohio voters go to the polls, the Republican White House hopefuls made a mad dash across the state Saturday – with the three leading contenders targeting Greater Cincinnati.

They revved up fervent supporters, sought converts and threw jabs at each other in the home stretch of this pivotal primary contest.

Rick Santorum rallied hundreds of his supporters with a passionate speech about “liberty” and “American exceptionalism” in an overheated hotel conference room in Blue Ash. Newt Gingrich talked about gas prices and energy issues at the Back Porch Saloon in West Chester. And Mitt Romney wrapped up a three-stop tour of the state at a “Ribs With Mitt” gathering at Cincinnati’s Montgomery Inn Boathouse.

I can tell you about the venues.  Any hotel in business park laden Blue Ash says "I'm a grown up, why won't you listen,"  The Back Porch in IKEA country of tony West Chester says "I'm pretending to working class but so is everyone else here" and the Montgomery Inn boathouse location down by the levee says "I'm pretending to be working class and failing miserably."  He probably ruined a lot of people's evenings who were planning to go eat ribs, it's pretty much the busiest restaurant in Cincy and he and his Secret Service detail probably put a whole bunch of hungry people out.

In other words, completely a Mitt thing to do.  Douchebag.

Challenge Accepted

You can't put a gun rack on a Chevy Volt, eh Newt Gingrich?

The Long, Stupid Defeat Of Willard Romney

At this point Mittens is just plain giving up.

A Republican debate that was set to be held on March, five days before Super Tuesday, now appears to be on ice — with Newt Gingrich the only candidate confirmed for it, and the others either turning it down or not accepting.

The debate is (or was) set to be held in Atlanta, and was set to be hosted by CNN and the state Republican parties of both Georgia and Ohio. Recent polls have shown favorite son Newt Gingrich with a big lead in Georgia, and Rick Santorum pulling ahead comfortably in Ohio.

But the dominoes really started falling Thursday, after Mitt Romney opted to not accept the invitation.

And now the Georgia debate has been canceled.  To recap, the front runner is now pulling out of debates because he can't out-argue Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul.

I submit that Mitt Romney is now running the worst campaign in American presidential history.  And unless something dramatic happens, Mitt will *be* history...and the nominee will be Santorum.

That can't happen.  It would prove God exists, and that She's trolling the Republicans.

Nuked Gingrich Served In Cincy

So if you want to know what LEROOOOOOY NNNNNEWTON! was doing while he was drowning in flop sweat and Santorum last night, he was too busy playing for Ohio by attacking the President (and Mitt Romney) here in heavily Catholic Cincinnati yesterday.

Republican presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich today brought his talk of family, jobs and God straight to where he hoped it would resonate - Cincinnati's West Side.

And it did. The popular Price Hill Chili was packed with 200 people who cheered and clapped as Gingrich promised he'd put people on unemployment into job training and cut corporate taxes. "Large-scale" change is needed, he said, and he's the man to bring it.

"It is fundamentally wrong to give people 99 weeks of money for doing nothing," he said, prompting the crowd to yell, "Newt! Newt!"

He must hate anyone who's on Social Security for more than two years then.  Oh wait, he pretty much does.

He drew his biggest cheers when he talked about oil and said, "No American president will ever again bow to a Saudi king."

He said he doesn't want to run just a Republican campaign, but one that unleashes "the American people so they can go out and rebuild the America we love." A woman shouted, "Yes! Yes!"

When someone in the crowd yelled, "Lead us back to the Bible, Newt!" he didn't miss a beat: "What I want is to lead you back to the Declaration of Independence... The fact is, in America, we believe that power comes from God to each of you personally" and you loan it back to the government."

Newt went on to attack Obama's War On People Who Were Never Going To Vote For Him In The First Place, and the crowd ate it up.

Jim Ferneding of Montgomery wanted the chance to shake Gingrich's hand, and he got it. He told him: "You're the one with the strength. Just concentrate on condemning Obama and you will win."

Because in the end, that's all that matters to a hell of a lot of folks around here.  They don't want someone to beat Obama, they want him so thoroughly and utterly destroyed that nobody "like him" dares to run for President again in their lifetimes.  He must be broken.

Don't forget that little goal even for a second.

Rick's Slick: Return Of The Drooler

By taking all three contests last night, Rick Santorum has not only stopped Mitt Romney cold, but he's severely damaged Newt Gingrich to boot.  In the back rooms of the halls of GOP power, there are a lot of depressed Republican party officials who now know without a doubt that this mess will go all the way to August's GOP convention in Tampa.

Considering Romney finished a distant third in Minnesota and in Missouri, with Gingrich not even on the ballot, Romney managed only 25% of the vote, the message couldn't be louder:  the GOP base is now in open revolt against Mitt Romney's front-runner status.

And if it's possible, Gingrich had an even worse night.  He ignored all three states and it showed.  He wasn't even on the ballot in Missouri and came in dead last in Minnesota and only a percentage point ahead of Ron Paul in Colorado.

The larger problem is that for Romney, not doing any better than 35% in the Midwest contests means that not only that Romney isn't the front-runner, but in many respects he never was.

It's wide open now.  And I couldn't be happier.  Next stop:  Maine's caucus on Saturday, and then Arizona and Michigan on Feb. 28.  Because the real losers last night?  The entire GOP party.  Turnout for these caucuses and Missouri's primary was in every single case less than 10% of voters, and in the case of Minnesota, less than 50,000 people turned out.  63,000 in Colorado.  Both were far fewer than 2008 numbers.  Missouri's roughly 200,000 primary turnout was just one third of 2008's number.

Republicans are staying home.  They are despondent, depressed and don't give a damn about their candidates, because they're losers.  They know they can't beat Obama.

Music to my ears.

Nuked Gingrich, Part 17

Considering Leroy Newton Gingrich has already lost the Serious Villagers to Mitt Romney some time ago, he's now reduced to running on EVIL SOSHULIST GUBMINT PROGRAMS.

The 2012 Republican presidential candidate was asked by NBC’s David Gregory on “Meet The Press” whether his hopes for a U.S. colony on the moon fly in the face of the GOP’s fiscal responsibility mantra. Gingrich responded with some choice words about austerity itself before defending his lunar ambitions.

“First of all, David, I don’t think you’ll ever find me talking about an age of austerity. I don’t think that’s the right solution,” Gingrich said. “I am a pro-growth Republican. I’m a pro-growth conservative. I think the answer is to grow the economy, not to punish the American people with austerity.”

One of two things is going to happen (and probably both).  One, Newt will be called a "big-government fake conservative" by his GOP opponents, and two, we're going to see more than a few Puritopians on the "left" say that this makes Gingrich more "progressive" than Obama.

This really is one of those cases where Newt's GOP critics are correct:  Newt's been a government creature for close to three decades now.  Defecits have never bothered him.  But this is Newt's version of pivoting to the middle.  Either that, or he's desperate as hell right now.  Probably both.

Don't fall for it.  Still Newt.

Last Call

MoDo The Red may actually have found somebody she despises more than Michelle Obama: Callista Gingrich.

IF you want to figure out why Newt Gingrich is still out there grasping for lost power, howling at the moon like King Lear, look to Callista. 

You can find her anytime standing statue-still on stage next to Newt as he speaks, gazing at him with such frozen attentiveness that she could give a master class to Nancy Reagan. 

Yeah, at this point she's blaming Callista for Newt still being in the race.  She hates Michelle Obama, but man if she were in an elevator with Callista, MoDo would stab her.  Like, 27 times.

In business, the Transformational Wife is less complicated. In politics, she’s a double-edged spouse. She feeds his ego like a goose destined for pâté, but drains support among some women and some evangelicals who disapprove of a man who keeps trading in wives, even sick ones. 

At the Texas meeting of evangelicals last month, one of the leaders, James Dobson, questioned whether Callista, “a mistress for eight years,” as he put it, would make a good first lady. 

Ouch.

Gingrich’s communications director, Joe DeSantis, has airbrushed Callista’s Wikipedia page 23 times since 2008, often to banish unflattering details from the site, according to BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski. 

DeSantis edited the introduction, taking out the fact that she is “the third wife of,” and excising the sentence, “She met her husband while he was in the House, and had an affair while he was conducting the impeachment investigation for President Bill Clinton.” 

As The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza reported, the top Google search for Gingrich in Florida during the primary there was “Callista,” right up there with “Newt wives” and “Newt scandals.” 

That may be why she has a largely nonspeaking role in the campaign, as silent as the slender heroine of “The Artist,” even though Newt relays that she has described herself as a hybrid of Nancy Reagan, Laura Bush and Jackie Kennedy. The campaign does not want to remind voters that the relationship, portrayed as so redemptive, was born in sin and hypocrisy.

 

Damn.  I mean I know it's petty, catty malarkey and all (MoDo's specialty) but it's just as awful when directed at Republicans as it is when it's directed at the First Lady.  The difference is that she's right about Newt's hypocrisy, but directing that anger at Callista isn't healthy.  Pin it on Newt, where it belongs.

And stop penning columns while drunk.

Last Call

So Mittens had the Florida primary sewn up by 8 PM apparently, and now we have a month with no debates and several smaller caucuses up until Arizona and Michigan at the end of the month, and Super Tuesday on March 6th.

I don't see the Non-Romneys going too much further past Super Tuesday, frankly.  Shame too.  I was really hoping for an ugly primary season.

Now it's still possible that it could go on.  Newt especially has a lot of ego and could get the fundraising once Santorum leaves...but I doubt it.  Mitt just has too much money and he sent a clear message that he has the juice to swamp anyone who goes up against him in the primary.

On the other hand, it's looking like Romney can't top 50% even when he's basically running unopposed.  Santorum and Paul left the state days ago, and Mitt outspent Newt by more than 6 to 1.  Mitt still couldn't crack 50%.

He should get used to that 47% number in Florida, I think.

Last Call

Having taken over Washington Monthly's Political Animal blog for Steve Benen (now part of the Maddow team at MSNBC, and more power to him there, he's badly needed), Ed Kilgore is doing a pretty solid job so far.  He flags this article from The Hill written by FOX News punching bag Juan Williams and immediately asks the correct question: How long will Juan Williams now last at FOX after stating the obvious about the network's racial dog-whistle language?  Williams states:

The language of GOP racial politics is heavy on euphemisms that allow the speaker to deny any responsibility for the racial content of his message. The code words in this game are “entitlement society” — as used by Mitt Romney — and “poor work ethic” and “food stamp president” — as used by Newt Gingrich. References to a lack of respect for the “Founding Fathers” and the “Constitution” also make certain ears perk up by demonizing anyone supposedly threatening core “old-fashioned American values.”

One has to wonder then why Williams is hanging out at FOX News, arguably the number one source for disseminating these code words.  I have zero sympathy for the guy, he made his choices and he has to live with them.  But Kilgore immediately grasps the issue:

When Newt Gingrich turned Juan Williams into the perfect foil during the January 19 Republican candidate debate in Myrtle Beach, SC, ironic symbolism certainly abounded. Aside from the fact that Newt vaulted himself into the lead by beating up on an African-American journalist on MLK Day in the Cradle of the Confederacy, there was the additional fact that Williams is a Fox News panelist who briefly became a conservative celebrity after NPR fired him for on-air remarks deemed insensitive to Muslims. The debate audience didn’t know or care, presumably viewing Williams as just another “race-card” player who needed to be slapped down for suggesting anyone railing against the work ethic of food stamp recipients might be appealing to atavistic motives. 

Now, I think Kilgore is on the right track, but my cynical side wants to move the grubby, Cheeto crud-covered GOP chess pieces forward a few moves and says Williams lobbed such a fat, tasty curveball over the plate of Gingrich in South Carolina for a reason, and that is to make a horse race out of the coronation of Marquis du Mittens as long as possible to keep the faithful glued to the primary noise machine.  With Newt down in Florida and big by most accounts, he's pitched another juicy one right into Gingrich's ego wheelhouse with the primary just hours away.

Just the kind of scrum FOX excels at creating and running with.  Williams knows damn well what he's doing now, just like he damn well knew what he was doing in South Carolina, people.

Like I said, zero sympathy for this phony simp's symphony.

The Big GOP Debate Thread: Flori-duh

Naturally, the big topic at the final Florida GOP debate before Tuesday's primary was immigration, and all four candidates traded shots on the subject.

Early in the evening, Romney drew frequent applause when he pushed back attacks by Gingrich over immigration.

Gingrich called Romney the most anti-immigrant candidate on the debate stage, repeating a charge in a campaign ad Gingrich eventually pulled after a complaint it was unfair by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio.

Romney responded with outrage, accusing Gingrich of using "highly-charged epithets" irresponsibly and denying he wants to deport all of the nation's estimated 11 million illegal immigrants.

However, Gingrich and Santorum also agreed with Romney that at least some illegal immigrants would be likely to "self-deport" if the government were to crack down on employers who hired illegal immigrants. All three men advocated a system of identification for immigrants that would help employers verify an employee's legal status.

Ron Paul chimed in with much the same, that if businesses made the economic climate uncomfortable for undocumented immigrants, they'd leave.  In a state where the Latino voting population could make or break a candidate, all four of these clowns agreed that the chief role of government as far as immigration was concerned was to make life as miserable as possible for Latinos, even Ron Paul.

Not a one of them noted that enforcement under President Obama increased deportations much higher than under previous Presidents either, they were all too busy attacking the President's "weak" immigration policy.

On the issue of health care, Gingrich didn't have too much ammunition.  Rick Santorum saw his chance and took it.

After Romney described his health reforms and noted his pledge to repeal Obamacare, Santorum shot back that Romney said “government-run top down medicine is working well in Massachusetts and he supports it.”

“That’s not what I said,” Romney replied. But Santorum kept rolling.

“Think about what that means going up against Barack Obama, who you are going to claim, ‘well, it doesn’t work and we should repeal,’” he said. “He’s going to say, ‘Wait a minute, governor. You said it works well in Massachusetts.’ Folks — we can’t give this issue away in this election. It is about fundamental freedom.”


Almost confirming Santorum’s point, Romney responded by defending the aspects of his own law that were most directly reproduced in the Affordable Care Act: a mandate to require people to have insurance and a subsidized exchange in which individuals can choose between private health care plans.

“Rick, I make enough mistakes in what I said not for you to add more mistakes to what I said,” he began. “I didn’t say I’m in favor of top down government-run health care…If you don’t want to buy insurance, then you have to help pay for the cost of the state picking up your bill because under federal law if someone doesn’t have insurance, then we have to care for them in the hospitals, give them free care. We said no more free riders. We are insisting on personal responsibility.”

But given the fact that some 400,000 Floridians have already cast absentee ballots, the final debate may not have mattered much.  We'll see what happens on Tuesday.

Last Call

Reiuters conveniently gives the Republican party a way out of having to consider Sen. Marco Rubio for the Veepstakes later this year by noting of all things that like thousands of Floridians who are his constituents, Rubio is way, way underwater on his ritzy Miami mortgage.

In some ways, the story of Rubio's finances is similar to those of hundreds of thousands of his constituents in a state where more than 40 percent of homeowners are "underwater," owing more on their homes than the homes are worth.

It is a crisis driven by falling property values and ill-advised home equity loans that drove up homeowners' debts.

Rubio owes far more on his $384,000 Miami home than it is worth, and at times has had difficulty paying his mortgage.

He bought the home in 2005 for $550,000 with a $495,000 mortgage. He soon had it appraised for $735,000 and took out a home equity line of credit for $135,000.

In 2008, despite earning a declared $400,000 - including his $300,000 salary from the Miami law firm Broad and Cassel - Rubio failed to pay down the principal on his home for several months, according to Florida campaign finance disclosures.

During the same period he did not make payments on a $100,000-plus student loan from his days at the University of Miami, the disclosures said.

Rubio's spending habits also have gotten attention in Florida.

Before joining the Senate last year, he was caught up in an Internal Revenue Service investigation of the Florida Republican Party's use of party-issued credit cards. He frequently had used his party credit card for personal use, and later reimbursed the card company for about $16,000.

Rubio's handling of his personal finances contrasts sharply with the image of him on his Senate website, which highlights Rubio's efforts to prevent Washington from "piling up debt."

"We need a government that stops spending more money than it takes in," the website says.

Rubio's financial issues have led Florida Democrats to cast him as a hypocrite.

I'm honestly not sure whose neck Rubio would be a bigger anchor around:  Romney (who could pay off Rubio's debts with the collective change in his couch cushions in all of his many, many houses) or Gingrich (whose awful comments on Latinos "not understanding" wealth and entrepreneurship aren't exactly going to resolved by a guy who can't pay off his debts in a fiscally austere party of wackos.)

And that's before you factor in what race would mean to Republican voters with Rubio on the ticket.

On the other hand, counting anyone out when the party in question nominated Sarah Palin last time this happened is a huge mistake, frankly.  Guessing veeps at this point is an exercise in futility.  But I finally get to break out the Veeps tag again, huh.

Last Call

To the moon, Alice!

As he says, Newt Gingrich thinks grandiose thoughts. Today’s pitch to Florida’s Space Coast: a lunar base within the next eight years.

“By the end of my second term we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American,” he said. According to Newt, the base would be used for “science, tourism, and manufacturing” and create a “robust industry” modeled on the airline business in the 20th century.

From there, Gingrich suggested moving towards a Mars mission by the end of the next decade. He proposed setting aside 10% of NASA’s budget in prize money for private research into interplanetary exploration.

“I accept the charge that I am grandiose,” he said. “Because Americans are instinctively grandiose.”

This is actually a pretty awesome idea...until you see the budget cuts in non awesome moon base parts of our spending Newt will need in order to do this.  And considering how much Newt plans to lower revenues by cutting taxes on the rich with his flat tax shell game, the odds of being able to afford a moon base on NASA's budget is about as likely as I would be needing a pap smear in the next month.

I mean, we could totally have USA MOON BASE GO! if we didn't want to fund, you know, Social Security and Medicare.  Which I think is his point.

Nuked Gingrich, Part 16

I wonder what Herman Cain would make of Newt Gingrich's statement that African-Americans don't understand entrepreneurship back in 1993 when he was running his Contract With America shell game?

But before Gingrich could deliver his grand new theory of American civilization to the public in a 1993 speech, his deeply divisive racial stereotypes would need to be removed.

“For poor minorities, entrepreneurship in small business is the key to future wealth,” Gingrich wrote by hand in a first draft. “This is understood thoroughly by most of the Asians, partially by Latinos, and to a tragically small degree by much of the American black community.” [...]

By the time a member of Gingrich’s staff typed up the notes and prepared the speech for delivery at the National Review Institute, the racial stereotypes were gone.

Racist stereotyping assholes never change, people just forget what they say.

The Big GOP Debate Thread: Newt And Mitt

The two big stories from last night's Florida debate were Mitt on the attack, and Santorum and Ron Paul clearly being treated as also-rans.  The contest is now down to Gingrich vs. Romney.

Mitt Romney came ready to take on Newt Gingrich in Monday night’s debate. And for one moment at least he really seemed to throw over the Florida frontrunner in a conversation about lobbying.

Gingrich’s GOP opponents have attacked him for months now over the work he took on after leaving the House, accusing him of being a lobbyist. Gingrich has responded by saying he was just an extremely well-paid former politician companies hired to help them do business with active politicians.

Gingrich has tried to dance that dance for a while now, but during the debate Monday, he finally seemed to trip up.


Romney went after Gingrich hard on the topic, first dismissing Gingrich’s claim that he was a historian for Freddie Mac.

“They don’t pay people $25,000 a month for six years as historians,” Romney said, referring to the fees Gingrich’s consulting firm was paid by the mortgage giant. “They weren’t hiring you as a historian.”

Which is funny if you think about it.  Here's Mitt Romney, worth a quarter of a billion dollars, going after Newt for being on Freddie Mac's payroll, and Newt dropping back into indignation as a defense.

Meanwhile, we learned early this morning that Romney's tax rate last year wasn't 15%.  It was less than that.

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney released tax records on Tuesday indicating he will pay $6.2 million in taxes on a total of $42.5 million in income over the years 2010 and 2011.

Bowing to increasing political pressure to provide more detail about his vast wealth, the former private equity executive released tax returns indicating he and his wife, Ann, paid an effective tax rate of 13.9 percent in 2010. They expect to pay a 15.4 percent rate when they file their returns for 2011.

Romney's tax rate is below that of most wage-earning Americans because most of his income, as outlined in more than 500 pages of tax documents, flows from capital gains on investments.

Some 500 pages of  awesome capital gains, taxed at at lower rate than Americans who make 40 grand a year.  That's going to help him with the average American, right?

The Village Is Terrified Of Newt Vs. Obama

If Jennifer Rubin's hacktastic hyperventilation is any indication, the conservative Village is sweating bullets now at the prospect of seeing Mitt lose to Newt Gingrich and hand the election to President Obama and the Democrats come November.  At this point she's begging anyone in the GOP "leadership" to stop Newt, even if it means getting into the race ASAP, and she can't hide her disgust with South Carolina's primary voters.

But here’s the thing: The voters in their infinite wisdom have just given a huge boost to perhaps the only GOP candidate who could shift the spotlight from President Obama to himself, alienate virtually all independent voters, lose more than 40 states and put the House majority in jeopardy.

We’d be looking at four more years of Obama’s economic policies, four more years of strained relations with allies, several new Supreme Court justices and an unprecedented power shift to the executive branch.

It seems, gentlemen, it’s time to get off your . . . er . . . time to get off the bench and into the game. It is time to make the case for winning conservatism — a conservatism attractive to centrist voters that can be translated into a reform agenda. If conservatism becomes a movement of anti-media bashing and hyperbolic rhetoric, it will cease to be a force in American politics. And if it is led by an egomaniac whose personal advancement takes precedence over any principle, the GOP will be (correctly) mocked.

So how about it? One of you can run yourself. Or you can instead collectively get behind a not-Gingrich candidate. But really, if you are to have a Republican Party to lead one day in the future, you can’t very well do nothing.

Part of that of course is Gingrich's win this weekend coming off of racial dog whistles and media bashing.  They didn't much like it when Sarah Palin did it in 2008, and they certainly aren't going to stand for Newt trying to get away with it in 2012.  Rubin is practically in tears trying to get someone like Chris Christie to enter the race at this point just to sink Newt.  The liabilities that Gingrich exposed in Romney's facade are mortal.

Bill Kristol at the Weekly Standard is now playing the same song:  it's time for somebody else to run.

Two months ago, I wrote an editorial headlined “Evitable.” The subhead captured the thrust of the piece: “It might not be Mitt. It could be Newt. It could be someone else.”

The editorial concluded:

“Or, if Iowa (January 3), New Hampshire (January 10) and South Carolina (January 21) produce fragmented results, and the state of the race is disheartening to Republicans, a late January entry [I'd now say an early February entry] by another candidate isn't out of the question, either . . .

“With a splintered field in a turbulent time in an Internet age, there are more possible outcomes in today's politics than are dreamt of in the philosophy of inevitability.”

I notice a new online petition was launched Saturday night to try to produce one possible outcome. It’s at runmitchrun.com.

They understand two things:  one, that Newt knows how the game is played far better than Romney does and that means he will force the Village to back his awful dog-whistles and media-bashing and that the Village will lose all credibility or risk getting cut off by conservatives.  Either way, they lose access and influence.  Two, they know it means President Obama will be re-elected as a result.  They don't want either.

I have no sympathy for Rubin.  She and Bill Kristol and others like her helped create this monster.  They are in a near panic now, and they know it.  They wanted Mitt Romney to wrap up the nomination quickly so that he could pretend to be a moderate for the next nine months and win people over.  There is no chance of that now, as Romney will now have to go to the right of Gingrich in order to stop Newt.  By doing so, he destroys all chance he has in the general.  If he doesn't, Newt wins the nomination only with the same result in the general.

Rubin and Kristol pleading for a white knight to save the party is proof enough that they believe this is true.

And Barack Obama will be laughing all the way to re-election.

Newtmentum

Not only did Mitt Romney lose in South Carolina tonight, he lost to Newt Gingrich by such a substantial margin that the networks called Newt the winner immediately at 7 PM after the polls closed.

Newt Gingrich has won the South Carolina Republican primary, capping off a remarkable comeback for his presidential bid that reshapes the trajectory of the battle for the GOP nomination.

Based on early exit polls, NBC News projects Gingrich as the winner of the primary, while former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will finish second.

The results mark the end of a tumultuous week in politics that saw Gingrich erase and then overcome the lead Romney had in the Palmetto State following his victory in the Jan. 10 New Hampshire primary. Gingrich came on strong in the closing days of the campaign, looking to rally under his banner the many conservatives unwilling to get behind Romney, who had sought to posture himself as the eventual nominee.

Combine that with the news that the Iowa GOP dropped their idiotic pretense of a tie and Santorum won, and Mitt goes from Mr. Inevitable to Mr. Inexplicable.  The battle is now truly on.  Let the bloodletting begin.  We're in this for the long run now:  Florida on the 31st and beyond to Super Tuesday in March.

[UPDATE]  This is why Newt Gingrich won in South Carolina: