The War of the Ruses

Once the Romney machine rediscovers that inevitability is for fools, the Gingrich contraption will discover what the former's unlimited funds and tight organization can do. Newt's last seven words to South Carolina's 'AM News' on Monday, for instance, could not have been better scripted for ridicule by Mitt's own hired guns:

[I]t’s wrong to go around and adopt radically different positions based on your need of any one electorate because then people have to ask themselves, What will you tell me next time?

Say, on global warming, on Freddie Mac, on the individual mandate, on an Obamian foreign intervention.

Newt will argue -- indeed he did argue to 'AM News' -- that "It’s perfectly reasonable to change [a] position if facts change, if you see new things you didn’t see" before. That is, it’s perfectly reasonable to change one's position if facts change and one's name happens to be Newt Gingrich; or, it's perfectly reasonable to change one's position if nothing whatsoever changes, as long as the second stipulation still applies.

Gingrich's righteous hypocrisy may be legend, but he's pitting it against Romney's well-financed hypocrisy: a quarter-billion personal dollars, which are quite aside from a six-year ground game and a platoon of media mafiosos hired to launder Mitt's image -- and to dirty up others of equal sin. Newt? Free media. That's pretty much it, and that's not much of a contest.

To those rooting for Gingrich to pull off a miracle by upsetting Romney, though, I'd advise caution. For Mitt Romney may be Barack Obama's more beatable man. Guaranteed, Romney will split the GOP's various factions; tea partiers, especially, and en masse, will either vote third-party fringe or stay home. Gingrich, as wormily contemptible as he is, can nonetheless rather genuinely market himself as a man of contemporary GOP convictions.

In short, Romney will shatter the party, while Gingrich can unite it. Meanwhile, the Occupy movement could splinter the always wobbly left, while the known variable of a bad economy works further to suppress Obama's independent turnout.

So, beware of The Gingrich.