An anonymous "conservative media figure" summarizes the GOP's panic:
It could happen, and it would be a disaster. All of us who were around and saw how he operated as speaker — there’s no one who’s not appalled by the prospect of what could happen.... He could win the presidency if there’s a way to win with 45 percent — a second recession or a third-party candidate. The immediate worry is him winning the nomination and losing the election, tanking candidates down-ballot.
The nonsense of Gingrich's winning the White House is immeasurable, while the prospect of his losing and felling down-ballot candidates is incontrovertible -- and yet this near catastrophic option would be the healthiest for the GOP.
If Republicans nominate Romney, as is likely, the far right, subsequent to Romney's annihilation in the general election, will instantly begin agitating for a "true conservative" to run in 2016. And that means another batch of Cains, Bachmanns, Perrys, Palins, and so on. Their party will suffer through another dreadful four years of moving farther and farther right, while the electorate moves farther and farther away from what should be an authentically conservative party -- which a healthy, two-party American democracy requires.
If, however, the party nominates Gingrich, the right, post-2012, will be deprived of its now-incessant complaint that the party too often nominates a losing "moderate." It's true that Gingrich has flipped or wobbled on several issues of key interest to the far right, but no one among the pseudo- or ultra-conservative ranks will be able to convincingly deny that the party's 2012 candidate was himself, in the personage of Newt Gingrich, in so many primal ways, an ultraconservative. And with Gingrich's resounding defeat, that brand of ultraconservatism will have proven itself to be altogether electorally unviable.
The result: a GOP campaign of ideological cleansing, a heaving of Tea-Party misfits, a distancing by what remains of the establishment from far-right media jackals. The predicament will present itself as a rather simple matter of political survival. Either the party divests itself of its extremism, or there will be no Republican Party of national scope.