But John McCain had his reasons for choosing Sarah Palin. The hard-right evangelical social conservative wing of his party didn’t think he was really their guy, and the Ayn Rand end-all-government wing didn’t trust him either, nor did the big-business end-all-regulation-of-everything wing. He was a maverick. But McCain was simply the last man standing after the primaries, the compromise maybe-good-enough choice, and clearly the only Republican who stood a chance against Obama, after eight years of the disastrous George Bush the Younger. At least McCain was a war hero – for getting shot down and spending almost all of the Vietnam War in a small prison cell outside Hanoi. No one was supposed to ask how that gave him insight into anything, and so they didn’t ask. He was a hero, somehow.

But McCain’s own party clearly didn’t like him much. He chose Sarah Palin to keep their votes, as she said all the right things he was reluctant to say – Real Americans didn’t live in cities, or on the coasts, and Real Americans didn’t think much of people who thought they were so smart because they had all those fancy degrees and knew things. No one needed to know things. We’d had enough of the fancy-pants elites who thought they were so smart. They’d ruined everything, and it was time to take the country back from these damned educated and thoughtful un-American creeps – and so on and so forth. And don’t get her started on icky minorities and gays and whatnot.

Well, things didn’t work out and the McCain-Palin ticket went down in flames. He was old and she was young. He was unreliably conservative – sometimes siding with the Democrats in the past – and she was take-no-prisoners committed to the cause, without really understanding the details of course. They should have complemented each other. But she was too toxic. The more she energized the base the more she scared the crap out of the rest of the nation.

And then, the summer after the election disaster, she abruptly resigned her governorship, less than halfway through her first term. She said she felt called to be bigger than Alaska, to be a real national player – or maybe the job bored her, or maybe she actually found Alaska just too provincial – an isolated dump with no big-city bright-lights pulse at all. No one quite knew what to make of it. Books followed, and her curious reality show, and her daughter appearing on Dancing with the Stars – but she faded. Rupert Murdoch paid her big bucks to come on Fox News now and then, but the world was passing her by. She was little more than a curiosity on Fox, and the speaking engagements were few and far between, and then no one was asking her to come and offer her wit and wisdom. Even Tina Fey moved on. Some things just don’t work out.

But here we are four years later and Newt Gingrich is now saying that Sarah Palin will play a “major role” in his administration. Henry D’Andrea offers this video clip of Gingrich saying that on CNN and adds this:

Gingrich wasn’t specific, but he said he would “ask her to consider taking a major role” in my administration. I don’t know if Gingrich is being honest, but if he did pick Palin for some kind of high-level position in his administration, that could help boost Palin for a possible future presidential run and would bring aboard a lot of Conservatives that question Newt’s Conservatism. Nonetheless, if he actually picked her for VP, it’d be the most unconventional thing this entire campaign season. I’d love if he did, but he won’t.

It’s the McCain Gambit all over again. People would no longer question Newt’s conservatism. But Gingrich, who may have an ego the size of Alaska, and a real problem with impulse-control, isn’t dumb. He knows there’s not one position she could handle competently – she has a degree in sports broadcasting, was mayor of a tiny town, and then quit her one significant government job before she had done much of anything, and she’s made no effort, again, to familiarize herself with any of the issues. What would he have her do? And this didn’t work for McCain.

But she’s not one to pass up an opportunity to grab at something like her former significance, such as it was, and on Facebook she posts Cannibals in GOP Establishment Employ Tactics of the Left – and if you’re one of the seven people in the world not on Facebook, most of the text is here:

We have witnessed something very disturbing this week. The Republican establishment which fought Ronald Reagan in the 1970s and which continues to fight the grassroots Tea Party movement today has adopted the tactics of the left in using the media and the politics of personal destruction to attack an opponent.

We will look back on this week and realize that something changed. I have given numerous interviews wherein I espoused the benefits of thorough vetting during aggressive contested primary elections, but this week’s tactics aren’t what I meant. Those who claim allegiance to Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment should stop and think about where we are today. Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater, the fathers of the modern conservative movement, would be ashamed of us in this primary. Let me make clear that I have no problem with the routine rough and tumble of a heated campaign. As I said at the first Tea Party convention two years ago, I am in favor of contested primaries and healthy, pointed debate. They help focus candidates and the electorate. I have fought in tough and heated contested primaries myself. But what we have seen in Florida this week is beyond the pale. It was unprecedented in GOP primaries. I’ve seen it before – heck, I lived it before – but not in a GOP primary race.

Yes, everyone is picking on Newt, and it’s just not fair, and there’s more:

But this whole thing isn’t really about Newt Gingrich vs. Mitt Romney. It is about the GOP establishment vs. the Tea Party grassroots and independent Americans who are sick of the politics of personal destruction used now by both parties’ operatives with a complicit media egging it on. In fact, the establishment has been just as dismissive of Ron Paul and Rick Santorum. Newt is an imperfect vessel for Tea Party support, but in South Carolina the Tea Party chose to get behind him instead of the old guard’s choice. In response, the GOP establishment voices denounced South Carolinian voters with the same vitriol we usually see from the left when they spew hatred at everyday Americans “bitterly clinging” to their faith and their Second Amendment rights. The Tea Party was once again told to sit down and shut up and listen to the “wisdom” of their betters. We were reminded of the litany of Tea Party endorsed candidates in 2010 who didn’t win. Well, here’s a little newsflash to the establishment: without the Tea Party there would have been no historic 2010 victory at all.

It’s those damned elites again, and they have to be stopped:

Pundits in the Beltway are gleefully proclaiming that this primary race is over after Florida, despite 46 states still not having chimed in. Well, perhaps it’s possible that it will come to a speedy end in just four days; but with these questions left unanswered, it will not have come to a satisfactory conclusion. Without this necessary vetting process, the unanswered question of Governor Romney’s conservative bona fides and the unanswered and false attacks on Newt Gingrich will hang in the air to demoralize many in the electorate. The Tea Party grassroots will certainly feel disenfranchised and disenchanted with the perceived orchestrated outcome from self-proclaimed movers and shakers trying to sew this all up. And, trust me, during the general election, Governor Romney’s statements and record in the private sector will be relentlessly parsed over by the opposition in excruciating detail to frighten off swing voters. This is why we need a fair primary that is not prematurely cut short by the GOP establishment using Alinsky tactics to kneecap Governor Romney’s chief rival.

Yeah, yeah – Saul Alinsky – sounds Jewish and left-wing and all – even if she doesn’t know who the guy is. But the warning is clear. Matt and his buddies, demoralize many in the electorate at your risk. We may be nuts but we can break you.

Both CNN and Reuters covered this story, but the coolest assessment comes from TBogg:

Gone-to-seed cougar Sarah Palin, who may be the next Mrs. Newt Gingrich if Callista gets a head cold or possibly her period at an inopportune time, is out defending Newt Gingrich from those mean old Republican elites who dated Sarah back in ’08 and then they never called or returned her long weepy drunken voicemails or angry texts and then there was the restraining order issued following that ugly scene in the Taco Bell parking lot….

But the less said about that the better, because Sarah has moved on with her life and is now going all Mama Grizzly Pit-Bull Screechy Wolf-Killer On Meth on anyone who dares say a discouraging word about her lil’ Newt-cub…

Callista Gingrich, however, might want to update her resume…

But in Politico, Ginger Gibson calls Sarah Palin Newt’s Secret Weapon:

Newt Gingrich has a new unofficial campaign surrogate and her name is Sarah Palin. As the 2008 veep nominee sees it, Gingrich is getting a raw deal from the national media and conservative elite, the very same forces who conspired against her when she was on the national ticket. Palin hasn’t endorsed Gingrich – and has no official role in his campaign – but she is repeatedly surfacing at just the right times on the national airwaves to vociferously defend him.

In her latest appearance, Palin stated: “Look at Newt Gingrich, what’s going on with him via the establishment’s attacks,” she said, though the original question was about Ron Paul. “They’re trying to crucify this man and rewrite history and rewrite what it is that he has stood for all these years.”

Palin then called conservative writer Peggy Noonan “hypocritical” for recently calling Gingrich an “angry little attack muffin.”

“They maybe subscribe such characterization of Newt via words like that, but they don’t subscribe those to say Mitt Romney when he or his surrogates do the same thing,” she said. “That’s that typical hypocrisy stuff in the media that I’ve lived with over a couple of decades in the political arena. So I’m used to it.”

“But in order to help educate the rest of the American public, I’ll articulate that it is hypocritical of the media to subscribe to one candidate and not another, that kind of angry attack muffin verbiage to one and not the other.”

Newt is not an angry little attack muffin. He’s not. He’s not.

But of course he is, and he has a new friend:

As has usually been the case with Palin, her exact motives remain a mystery. But it does seem like the two Republicans share a common bond in suspecting the media and Washington power brokers are biased against them.

When asked about Palin’s unofficial advocacy for him on Friday, Gingrich’s campaign had no comment.

But after Palin picked Gingrich in South Carolina, Gingrich spokesman R. C. Hammond told NBC News: “We think it’s a pretty darn clear call to arms.”

Gibson goes on to explain how Palin’s husband, Todd, backed Gingrich before he won South Carolina, and right afterward, she jumped in and called Gingrich the leader of the pack. And Newt gets a freebie:

Gingrich rarely employs the use of official surrogates, lacking the organization of Mitt Romney, who frequently dispatches supporters to make public appearances. A surrogate that is doing so voluntarily is a plus for a campaign that is struggling to fend off a barrage of attacks.

And this has been going on for some time:

The first sign that Palin would ride to Gingrich’s rescue was a radio interview with Sean Hannity right before ABC aired its interview with his ex-wife, Marianne Gingrich, in which she claimed the former speaker wanted an open marriage.

“I call them dumbarses,” said Palin of the media, according to The Huffington Post. “They, thinking that by trotting out this old Gingrich divorce interview that’s old news – and it does feature a disgruntled ex, claiming that it would destroy his campaign – all this does, Sean, is incentivize conservatives and independents who are so sick of the politics of personal destruction because it’s played so selectively by the media, that their target, in this case Newt, he’s now going to soar even more. Because we know the game now, and we just won’t put up with it.”

“Good call, media,” she quipped.

Ah, the scorn of infidels is the praise of Allah. No wait – that’s the Koran, or Saul Alinsky.

And then there was Romney’s guy Chris Christie criticizing Gingrich on “Meet the Press” after Gingrich’s South Carolina win. Christie called Gingrich an “embarrassment” to the Republican Party and Palin warned him not to get his “panties in a wad” over this. And yes, the image is priceless, and insulting, implying Chris Christie should just be a man here. And she drips with condescension:

You know, sometimes, if your candidate loses in just one step along this path, as was the case when Romney lost to Newt the other night – and, of course, Romney is Chris Christie’s guy – well, you kind of get your panties in a wad, and you may say things that you regret later. And I think that that’s what Chris Christie did.

And then she took it a step farther, saying this demonstrated a “lack of self-discipline” (unlike her mastery of the political process) with this on the Fox Business Network:

Poor Chris… This was a rookie mistake. He played right into the media’s hands. The host had asked Chris, “Does Newt embarrass the party?” I think he asked him twice, and there, Chris played right into it.

She knows how to handle these things. No one else does. Yes, that’s absurd on the face of it, given what happened in 2008 and since – but her ego is as big as Alaska too.

And earlier she had praised Rick Perry for dropping out of the race and throwing his support behind Gingrich:

“I think what Rick Perry having dropped out and that patriot having done well for the front-runner, whom I will call Newt Gingrich now, being the front-runner, having endorsed him, was a good smart move,” Palin said on Fox News after the results rolled in. “He kind of took one for the team there, the conservative team, when he dropped out.”

Palin quipped: “I don’t know, do political pundits back there in the Beltway feign surprise, or are you really surprised that Newt Gingrich did as well as he did?”

Don’t try to figure out the grammar in that first sentence there. Only asshole elitists do that sort of thing.

But there was Stephanie Pappas with the odd science story of the week:

There’s no gentle way to put it: People who give in to racism and prejudice may simply be dumb, according to a new study that is bound to stir public controversy.

The research finds that children with low intelligence are more likely to hold prejudiced attitudes as adults. These findings point to a vicious cycle, according to lead researcher Gordon Hodson, a psychologist at Brock University in Ontario. Low-intelligence adults tend to gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, the study found. Those ideologies, in turn, stress hierarchy and resistance to change, attitudes that can contribute to prejudice…

And of course there’s controversy ahead:

The findings combine three hot-button topics.

“They’ve pulled off the trifecta of controversial topics,” said Brian Nosek, a social and cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who was not involved in the study. “When one selects intelligence, political ideology and racism and looks at any of the relationships between those three variables, it’s bound to upset somebody.”

Polling data and social and political science research do show that prejudice is more common in those who hold right-wing ideals that those of other political persuasions, Nosek told LiveScience.

Add this:

There is reason to believe that strict right-wing ideology might appeal to those who have trouble grasping the complexity of the world.

And this:

They found that what applies to racism may also apply to homophobia. People who were poorer at abstract reasoning were more likely to exhibit prejudice against gays. As in the U.K. citizens, a lack of contact with gays and more acceptance of right-wing authoritarianism explained the link.

And from Charles Blow there’s this:

Hey, I get it: Republicans have to reject and condemn virtually everything President Obama proposes, no matter how noble, to satisfy their base. This is our political predicament.

Rick Santorum, however, has followed that logic out the window. In New Hampshire last week Santorum accused President Obama of “elitist snobbery” and “hubris” for suggesting that “under my administration, every child should go to college.”

Santorum had the basic questions. Who are you? Who are you to say that every child in America go to college? And Blow demonstrates that Obama never said that, in fact Obama consistently talks about trade schools and apprenticeships too, and also that college maybe just might be a good thing too:

Oh, the hubris and elitist snobbery of wanting a more educated, more highly employed work force.

But Sarah is back, just in time, to demonstrate how elitist what’s called a good education, and knowing things, really is – or to demonstrate what it means to not know things. And we’re back to 2008 again. Luckily we know what that means.

But those first six films grossed over a billion dollars, and that’s not exactly chump-change, and Stallone has expensive tastes. Of course the character Stallone plays, Rocky Balboa, is certainly a chump – a dim-witted talentless boxer who always manages to win that one big fight, by enduring getting the crap beat out of him for many long rounds – in slow-motion close-up shots – until at the last moment when he somehow clobbers the other guy but good, or the other guy collapses in exhaustion. And the heroic score swells – something about the Eye of the Tiger or some such thing.

And you can see the appeal of such narratives – the illiterate loser, too slow to realize what is going on around him all the time, every single day, overwhelmed and defensive about everything in his life, wins big in the end by getting beaten to a pulp, and then not actually dying. So there’s a message here – you don’t have to be smart, or aware, or curious, or even coherent, or even employed, or even employable. You don’t have to be successful at anything at all. You just have to be willing to endure being beaten nearly to death. It’s inspiring, if you like that sort of thing. So we get these periodic cinematic paeans to all the heroic dumb-as-dirt incoherent ordinary folks, who will win eventually, if they don’t die. That’s a large demographic – the inarticulate sullen who dream of winning something, anything, one day, if they can manage not to die. It’s their only hope. But it is hope. And Stallone gets his homoerotic martyr jollies, and a lot of money, pretending to get beat up on screen. Everyone wins.

But it’s not real life. Of course it’s not. In real life Rocky Balboa would be dead – ask any doctor or nurse or paramedic who ever watched one of those Rocky movies. They’re absurd. And in real life, watching two exhausted heavyweights stumbling around in the final rounds of long fight, too tired to throw a punch and just leaning against each other, slowly shuffling their feet, is just depressing. No one is going to be a winner. They’re just putting in time, hoping the bell will ring pretty soon and the judges can add up their points and it will be over, one way or the other.

And that’s kind of like watching the Republicans these days, the final days before the Florida primary. It’s almost as if they’re too tired to throw a punch and just leaning against each other, slowly shuffling their feet, and putting in time, throwing a halfhearted punch now and then, just for the hell of it, if they can. And on this day one of those halfhearted punches came from Newt Gingrich. See Conor Friedersdorf with To the Moon, Callista! Newt Gingrich Promises Lunar Colony by 2020:

Speaking at a Florida community college Wednesday, Newt Gingrich promised voters hit hard by the end of the Space Shuttle program that by the end of his second term, there will be an American colony on the moon. Ultimately, he said, it ought to be the 51st state. (Sorry, Puerto Rico.)

And the kicker was in Gingrich’s explanation for why he was proposing this:

The reason you have to have a bold and large vision is you don’t arouse the American nation with trivial, bureaucratic, rational objectives.

He doesn’t belief in rational objectives! Bully for him. But it was a wild and weak punch.

On the other hand, people had been picking on him, people like Bob Dole:

I have not been critical of Newt Gingrich but it is now time to take a stand before it is too late. If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state, and federal offices. Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice. It was his way or the highway…

Gingrich had a new idea every minute and most of them were off the wall. He loved picking a fight with President Clinton because he knew this would get the attention of the press. This and a myriad of other specifics like shutting down the government helped to topple Gingrich in 1998.

In my run for the presidency in 1996 the Democrats greeted me with a number of negative TV ads and in every one of them Newt was in the ad. He was very unpopular and I am not only certain that this did not help me, but that it also cost House seats that year. Newt would show up at the campaign headquarters with an empty bucket in his hand – that was a symbol of some sort for him – and I never did know what he was doing or why he was doing it, and I’m not certain he knew either.

But maybe Newt has always been a kind of post-rational guy. And now it seems to be his new thing too.

But Jim Vandehei and Mike Allen report on the hammering Newt has been enduring from Matt Drudge and others:

Drudge linked prominently to the American Spectator’s R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s similarly harsh takedown of Gingrich over character: “William Jefferson Gingrich.” In it, Tyrrell writes: “Newt and Bill are 1960s generation narcissists, and they share the same problems: waywardness and deviancy. Newt, like Bill, has a proclivity for girl hopping… His public record is already besmeared with tawdry divorces, and there are private encounters with the fair sex that doubtless will come out.”

Drudge runs hundreds of links to stories of all stripes about candidates, but has been seen by Republicans as favorable to Romney in the past.

Conservatives are circulating a piece written by the editors of the National Review: “The Hour of Newt.” The editors, who have been extremely critical of Gingrich for weeks, waved conservatives off the Gingrich bandwagon. “Gingrich backers say that he is inspiring. What he mostly seems to inspire is opposition.”

Ann Coulter, the conservative columnist writing on her self-titled website, warns: “Re-elect Obama, Vote Newt!” She, too, gets Drudge promotion, with a column punctuated with this punch: “Hotheaded arrogance is neither conservative nor attractive to voters.”

Tom DeLay, a top deputy to Gingrich during the Republican revolution of the mid-1990s, joined the chorus of other conservative members breaking their silence about Gingrich’s erratic leadership style. In a radio interview with KTRH, DeLay said: “He’s not really a conservative. I mean, he’ll tell you what you want to hear. He has an uncanny ability, sort of like Clinton, to feel your pain and know his audience and speak to his audience and fire them up. But when he was speaker, he was erratic, undisciplined.”

Someone is worried Rocky may win the fight, by managing not to die:

A top conservative media figure said the flood of attacks reflects a “Holy crap, it could happen” moment in the movement, as Republican leaders began to realize after Gingrich’s South Carolina victory that he could become the nominee, the global face and voice of their party and theology.

“It could happen, and it would be a disaster,” said the conservative, who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect private conversations. “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 thinks he embodies conservatism and if he wakes up one day and has a grandiose thought, he is going to expect all of us to fall in line behind him.

“There’s just so much risk on so many levels,” the official continued. “Everyone’s thinking, ‘It could really 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. In a worst-case scenario, you could see unified Democratic governance, and we’d be back where we were in ’09 and ’10. It’s insane.”

And Vandehei and Allen report this feeling is pretty widespread:

Remember 2010 (Gingrich certainly does): The establishment doesn’t have a great track record in picking candidates and warned primary voters against tapping Sharron Angle in Nevada and Christine O’Donnell in Delaware because they were too radioactive and couldn’t win in the November general elections. The voters didn’t listen, and it cost Republicans the Senate.

Remember 2010 (Romney certainly does): Republicans lost two elections they should have won.

And Greg Sargent in the Washington Post discusses the implications of this:

The New York Times reports today – based on unclear sourcing – that Mitt Romney has endorsed a strategy of raising doubts about Newt Gingrich’s “emotional stability.”

But then there’s Sarah Palin – “Look at Newt Gingrich, what’s going on with him, via the establishment’s attacks. They’re trying to crucify this man and rewrite history, and rewrite what it is that he has stood for all these years.” And Rush Limbaugh on his radio show said he saw all the headlines, calling it all a “coordinated” effort to smear Gingrich – “Now, when I saw all it is stuff – and obviously it’s a coordinated document dump here, opposition research dump. It’s obviously coordinated.”

Yeah, yeah – the exhausted heavyweights are throwing half-assed punches now, and Kevin Drum comments:

It’s sort of fascinating watching the Republican establishment finally go nuclear on Newt Gingrich. As near as I can tell, pretty much everyone who actually served with or alongside Newt in the 90s hates his guts. But as long as he was just writing books and doing think-tanky stuff, they were willing to let bygones be bygones. Ditto for the period when he was supposedly running for president but, in reality, was just conducting an innovative new kind of book tour.

But now that he has millions of dollars of Sheldon Adelson’s casino money and has even an outside chance of actually winning, the long knives are out.

But it is like watching the sad end of a long heavyweight fight between mediocre boxers:

What’s most ironically amusing about all this, though, is that underlying a lot of the attacks on Newt is the complaint that he’s not conservative enough. Weirdly enough, there’s some truth to this by modern GOP standards. Newt’s tone and temperament are perfectly suited to the no-compromise-no-surrender spirit of the tea party-ized GOP, which is why he’s so appealing to the base during debates. But the truth is that for all his bluster, Newt was perfectly willing to do deals during his time as Speaker. He likes to think of himself as a world-historical figure, and that means getting world-historical things done. Simple obstruction is not really his MO. That makes him doubly unreliable, since obstruction is the sine qua non of movement conservatism these days.

Conservatives think that listening to Newt is a hoot, and they love it when he gets the crowds wound up. The problem is that they never quite realized the crowd wasn’t in on the con. The rank-and-file actually took Newt seriously, and now party leaders have to figure out how to suck the fetid air back out of the Gingrich-inspired fever swamps without losing their core audience of old people and the white working class, who are voting for their side because they’re scared to death that Barack Obama is destroying western civilization. In the end, I don’t think they’ll have much trouble pulling this off, but in the meantime it makes the whole spectacle even better fun for us jeering liberals.

But the punches are so feeble. Drum also points out that one week ago CNN’s John King asked Newt Gingrich if it was true that in 1999 he asked his then-wife Marianne Gingrich for an open marriage so that he could continue having an affair with his girlfriend-mistress Callista, who is now his third wife, if you’re keeping count. And on national television, in front of a huge audience, Gingrich said this:

Now, let me be quite clear. Let me be quite clear. The story is false. Every personal friend I have who knew us in that period says the story was false. We offered several of them to ABC to prove it was false. They [ABC] weren’t interested, because they would like to attack any Republican.

It seems that this was a lie. Gingrich’s campaign has finally admitted what ABC knew all along – Gingrich hadn’t suggested any personal friends to them at all – and obviously they hadn’t refused to interview any of these personal friends, as they just didn’t exist. So Drum adds this:

There’s an odd de facto standard for political lying: you can mislead people to almost any degree and it doesn’t really count against you. It’s he-said-she-said. But if there’s a clear, smoking gun fact that you plainly misrepresent, no matter how trivial, then it’s a scandal. By that standard, Newt ought to be in trouble. His dealings with ABC News may not be all that important in the cosmic scheme of things, but by DC standards this is a flat-out, premeditated fabrication and therefore a scandal. Gingrich told a bald-faced lied and he knew he was lying when he did it.

This all fits Newt’s personality. He’s always been more brazen than even your usual hardened politico because he knows that nobody really cares about fact checking. But he went over the line this time. I wonder if he’ll pay a price.

Hey, a tired boxer throws crappy punches. And the other guys do too. In fact David Frum pretty much excuses Mitt Romney’s rather silly caricatures of Obama:

Elections turn on more than facts, promises, and programs – especially this current campaign for the Republican nomination for president. More perhaps than most, this election turns on shared feelings. Many Republican primary voters have been sold a narrative or image of the Obama presidency in which a radical socialist alien president is seeking to wreck and overturn the American way of life and the free enterprise system. That narrative is nuts, but unless you signal that you share the nuttiness, your campaign goes the way of Jon Huntsman’s.

Romney, having no interest in martyrdom, has sent his share of such signals. And it is those signals that I doubt he believes. Whatever else Mitt Romney may be, he’s certainly no fool. So when he says something foolish, I assume there must be a part of his brain that knows better. What choice does he have?

It’s the late rounds. These things happen. And then the bell rang for another round, and they had another debate:

An aggressive Mitt Romney repeatedly challenged Republican presidential rival Newt Gingrich in a fast-paced campaign debate Thursday night, ridiculing the former House speaker’s call to build costly projects in key primary states and to colonize the moon.

Romney vehemently denied Gingrich’s own accusation that he anti-immigrant – more so than any other candidate. And, as charges flew back and forth, Gingrich rebutted any suggestion that he couldn’t rein in surging federal spending.

They slugged it out, and after the bell at the end of the final round, one judge, Kevin Drum again, has declared a winner:

You know those basketball rematches where a team that got pummeled last time suddenly comes out totally on fire and wins by a mile? It’s never clear quite why that happens, but it happened in the Republican debate tonight. I don’t know what Romney ate for breakfast this morning, but he came alive and wiped the floor with Newt Gingrich in this debate. He went after Gingrich for his Freddie Mac connections and made it stick. He was outraged when Newt said he was anti-immigrant, and for once he actually sounded outraged.

And when Gingrich tried “to buy some anti-media cred by attacking Wolf Blitzer” he got stomped:

BLITZER: Earlier this week, you said Governor Romney, after he released his taxes, you said that you were satisfied with the level of transparency of his personal finances when it comes to this. And I just want to reiterate and ask you, are you satisfied right now with the level of transparency as far as his personal finances?

GINGRICH: Wolf, you and I have a great relationship, it goes back a long way. I’m with him. This is a nonsense question. Look, how about if the four of us agree for the rest of the evening, we’ll actually talk about issues that relate to governing America?

BLITZER: But, Mr. Speaker, you made an issue of this, this week, when you said that, “He lives in a world of Swiss bank and Cayman Island bank accounts.” I didn’t say that. You did.

GINGRICH: I did. And I’m perfectly happy to say that on an interview on some TV show. But this is a national debate, where you have a chance to get the four of us to talk about a whole range of issues.

ROMNEY: Wouldn’t it be nice if people didn’t make accusations somewhere else that they weren’t willing to defend here?

Drum:

Ouch. Gingrich has tried that bit about nasty attacks being OK when you’re on some radio show or something but not when you’re on national TV, and for some reason he’s gotten away with it even though it’s transparently self-serving and ridiculous. Tonight he didn’t.

This was all in the first half hour, but by then the debate was over. Romney lost a bit of his mojo later on and reverted to the stuttering, stumbling Mitt that we’ve seen in the last two debates, but not enough to hurt him, especially after Newt was forced to endure ten minutes of attacks over his support for a lunar colony during the second hour.

And Drum calls this attack from Romney both brutal and effective:

ROMNEY: I spent 25 years in business. If I had a business executive come to me and say they wanted to spend a few hundred billion dollars to put a colony on the moon, I’d say, “You’re fired.”

The idea that corporate America wants to go off to the moon and build a colony there, it may be a big idea, but it’s not a good idea. And we have seen in politics – we’ve seen politicians – and Newt, you’ve been part of this – go from state to state and promise exactly what that state wants to hear. The Speaker comes here to Florida, wants to spend untold amount of money having a colony on the moon. I know it’s very exciting on the Space Coast.

In South Carolina, it was a new interstate highway, and dredging the port in Charleston. In New Hampshire, it was burying a power line coming in from Canada and building a new VA hospital in New Hampshire so that people don’t have to go to Boston.

Look, this idea of going state to state and promising what people want to hear, promising billions, hundreds of billions of dollars to make people happy, that’s what got us into the trouble we’re in now. We’ve got to say no to this kind of spending.

Drum:

Coming from a guy like Romney who’s famous for his willingness to say pretty much anything to anybody, this was a great job of jiu jitsu. It was also true. Gingrich really has been pandering to state interests relentlessly – and nowhere more so than in Florida.

I don’t know how much debates really matter compared to the tidal wave of advertising that’s inundating Florida right now, but if they do matter then Romney won the Florida primary tonight, and almost certainly the nomination along with it. The punters on InTrade obviously agree: Romney’s chances of winning shot up from 66% to 89% and Gingrich’s plummeted from 12% to 5%. Adios, Newt.

And there’s Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta, in an email:

It was interesting to see what may be the end of the Gingrich debate tactic (or is it a strategy? Frankly, I can’t always distinguish between the two) of trying to hijack leadership of all the candidates on stage, by redirecting the focus elsewhere and attacking the common enemy: the media.

But when he tried it again tonight – essentially responding to Wolf Blitzer’s question about what he had said about Romney’s Cayman Islands finances (et al) – calling it a silly question, not worthy of discussion, then admitting it might be a fair question in some non-candidates-debate forum but not in a debate, then turning for support from Santorum, then suggesting that all four of us candidates band together against this kind of thing – he got the rug pulled out from under him by the other front-runner, Romney, who finally came to the realization that he should no longer be helping Newt score points, saying maybe it’s time that any candidate who makes claims elsewhere should be willing to defend them in the debate setting.

You could see Newt’s body go limp, all the power having been drained out of him. Even though I want Newt to win the nomination, I just couldn’t help not loving this scene.

You could see Newt’s body go limp, all the power having been drained out of him – like the boxers in the Rocky films, actually. And Rod Dreher continues the fight metaphor:

Romney won this debate, and probably Florida, and so the nomination. Newt collapsed, as bullies and blowhards often do when somebody fights back. Santorum auditioned for Romney’s VP, and greatly enhanced his chances. Ron Paul shines on, that crazy diamond.

And that was that.

But maybe Gingrich really is Rocky Balboa – too slow to realize what is going on around him all the time, every single day, overwhelmed and defensive about everything in his life, who will win big in the end by getting beaten to a pulp, and then not actually dying. And he has his natural constituency – the inarticulate sullen who dream of winning something, anything, one day, if they also can manage not to die. But this isn’t Hollywood. And those are awful films.

And of course now it’s an election year, so blocking anything the president and Democrats propose as something that should be done, even if you’ve always agreed with it, will be blocked. It won’t even come up for a vote. You don’t want to give the other side anything they can claim as a victory. So now there’s no hope for anything getting done. And the Republicans can point to the Democrats and say see, they can’t get anything done, so let’s run those useless twits out of office. But that’s politics. And the American people yawn. They knew politicians were useless anyway, all of them, on both sides. And there’s a sale at the mall, or a good game on television.

But after the debate and the State of the Union thing the American people got a day off, Wednesday, before the Thursday debate on CNN, where Mitt and Newt will insult each other again, and Rick Santorum and Ron Paul will look on, a bit befuddled, and try to get a word in edgewise when they can. And a day off is good. It gives you time to reflect and reconsider, and assess what the hell just happened, if you care to do so.

And as for Obama’s State of the Union address, in the cold light of day, Jonathan Chait decided he was impressed:

It was the speech of a man who realizes that he has only one thing left to do, and that is to win reelection. The Obama of 2009-2010 was a pure pragmatic wonk, and his inattention to politics hurt his standing. Through sheer bloody obstruction, Republicans forced him to the only available alternative, which was to use his office solely as a political platform. His agenda is dead, but his public standing has benefited. Perhaps one day Republicans will wish they had been a little more flexible, and had kept the old, wonky, bargaining Obama rather than the slashing populist who’s cutting their throats.

Ross Douthat argues here that the “address made plain” that “President Obama has decided to run for re-election as a full-throated liberal populist”:

There were rhetorical nods to deficit reduction, sensible regulatory reform and the Lincolnian idea that “government should do for people only what they cannot do better by themselves, and no more.” But the substance of the speech could be summed up in one word: More. More spending on education. More spending on infrastructure. More money for green energy projects. More assistance for homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages. More tax breaks for manufacturers – for high-tech manufacturers, for manufacturers who relocate to poor areas, for manufacturers who retrain workers, for manufacturers who don’t outsource jobs, for manufacturers who upgrade their buildings … O.K., I lost count. And all of it to be paid for, inevitably, by more taxes on the wealthy.

Yeah, so? If the Republicans want all government action to stop, cold, Obama has the right to lay out what he actually managed to get done, and what could be done, if they weren’t being such assholes. And UCLA’s Mark Kleiman loved the speech:

What can the Red Team say in response, except “Ouch!”? American isn’t great? Osama isn’t dead? Vulture capitalists ought to pay lower tax rates than workers?

On the other hand, Kevin Drum was just not impressed:

I’m a Democrat and a fan of the president, but even I found this speech formulaic, devoid of interesting ideas, and built almost solely for applause lines. Presumably this means that it’s going to poll through the roof. Joe and Jane Sixpack will love it. And with that, Campaign 2012 has officially gotten underway.

Well, he was right about Joe and Jane, as we see from Stan Greenberg’s findings after tracking fifty voters in a focus group responding to the speech:

The dials spiked when the President made his strong populist pitch for the “Buffet Rule,” with Democrats exceeding 80 on our 0-to-100 scale and both independents and Republicans moving above 70. There was no polarization here, as voters across the political spectrum gave Obama high marks. And Obama’s framing of the economic challenges facing the country through the lens of post-World War II America was particularly effective. He also received high marks for his proposal to change the tax code to encourage “insourcing” instead of “outsourcing,” his call to change our “unemployment system” to a “re-employment system” and his appeal to make it easier for entrepreneurs and small business to grow and create jobs.

Yes, what can the Red Team say in response? They’re getting pushed into a smaller and smaller corner, even if a lot of what Obama said was kind of corny.

And David Frum recognizes that:

Yep, the speech was pretty corny. Flags, Seal Team 6, we got each other’s backs … large parts of the writing seem to have come from the kind of movies satirized by Team America. And guess what? People will like it. I could feel those focus group dials whirring faster and faster as the speech wore on.

But he says this was Obama’s most liberal State of the Union yet:

From its endorsement of the DREAM act amnesty for young illegal aliens – to the robust defense of direct government investment in energy and infrastructure – its proposal that states be mandated to give high school diplomas to every student, the speech piled boondoggle upon fantasy. The speech whipsawed between complaining that the corporate tax code was too costly and too complex – and then promising to render the corporate tax code even more complex with new deductions, credits and penalties according to where and how the corporation sited jobs.

Well maybe Obama gave up on being a wonk, all careful and precise. What had that gotten him, after all?

And Frum adds this:

In the absence of recovery, the president is offering social reform: a more redistributive tax system to finance more government benefits. That’s the first argument. The second argument was an argument that Congress’ failure to deliver on prior reform proposals reflected institutional failure in need of correction. These two arguments – higher taxes for more benefits; reform of Congress to expedite social reform – are the president’s big offers to the country for November.

Well, fine – Frum hates that sort of thing. But what’s the alternative? What are Newt and Mitt offering? And who are these guys anyway? This sort of question drives the conservative columnist Ross Douthat to despair:

There are 300 million people in the United States of America. There are millions of political activists, volunteers, organizers and would-be officeholders. There are hundreds of thousands of elected officials. Yet somehow, out of all this multitude, the Republican Party has been unable to find a candidate for the White House in 2012 who inspires anything but weary resignation from its voters.

What’s remarkable is how often this seems to happen. As weak as this year’s Republican field has proved, it’s not that much weaker than a number of recent presidential vintages, from the Democrats’ lineups in 1988 and 2004 to the Republican field in 1996. In presidential politics, the great talents (a Clinton, a Reagan) seem to be the exception; a march of Dole-Dukakis-Mondale mediocrity is closer to the rule.

Maybe it’s just the Republicans’ turn this time, and Douthat suggests some general principles:

First, a great politician needs the gift of management. A would-be president has to be the CEO of his or her campaign, with a flair for fund-raising, an eye for talent, and a keen sense of when to micromanage and when to delegate. This is the arm-twisting, organization-building, endorsement-corralling side of presidential politics, and not surprisingly it tends to favor insiders and deal-makers and old Washington hands.

But successful insiders and deal-makers are rarely comfortable with the more public, rhetorical, self-advertising side of politics. The great manager is unlikely to be a great persuader, capable of seducing undecided voters with his empathy, or inspiring them with what George H. W. Bush (who lacked it) called “the vision thing.” He’s also unlikely to be a great demagogue, capable of demonizing his enemies and convincing his supporters that they stand at Armageddon and battle for the Lord. The manager can play these roles, but there will always be a hint of irony, a touch of phoniness, a sense that he’d much rather get back to the inside game…

When a politician somehow hits the manager-persuader-demagogue trifecta, he can seem unstoppable. (See Roosevelt, Franklin, and his four terms in office.) But just going two for three is usually enough to create an immensely formidable candidate.

But the guys on his side don’t even make that bar. He’s an unhappy conservative, and in this item notes he’s not alone:

The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol has continued to pine – publicly, unstintingly, immune to either embarrassment or fatigue – for another candidate to jump into the race. He’s dreamed of Mitch Daniels, touted Chris Christie, talked up Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio, name-dropped Jeb Bush, and circled back to Daniels once more. …

And do you know what? He’s been right all along. Right that the decisions by various capable Republicans to forgo a presidential run this year have been a collective disgrace; right that Republican primary voters deserve a better choice than the one being presented to them; and right, as well, that even now it isn’t too late for one of the non-candidates to change their mind and run. True, any candidate who jumped in would have a necessarily uncertain path to the nomination (requiring, at the very least, more than one convention ballot), and by casting themselves as a white knight they would risk embarrassment on a significant scale. But with the field having been winnowed and their opening clear, their path would be smoother and their odds higher than many successful presidential candidates in the past – Barack Obama in 2008 very much included.

Hey, it could happen:

Contrary to what some of my more excitable colleagues in the press corps have been claiming, the weekend’s results didn’t demonstrate that Newt Gingrich could actually win the Republican nomination, or prove that Mitt Romney could actually lose to him. … But the last week was a reminder, after months in which the incompetence of his rivals made him look better than he is, that Romney remains a tremendously weak frontrunner, whose strengths don’t compensate for a style that leaves conservatives cold and a background that will leave him open to attacks across a variety of Democratic-friendly fronts in the general election. I don’t think he can lose the primary, and I still give him decent odds of winning in November. But those judgments have everything to do with his political environment, and very little to do with the man himself. And under such circumstances, it seems absurd and pathetic that both the party and the country won’t have the chance to consider another option besides Newt the Great and Terrible.

Absurd, pathetic, and pretty much inevitable -

Ah, the good guys are cowards, and the lame guys ambitious – what a world, what a world.

But in the American Conservative, Daniel Larison says this is nonsense – fantasy candidates look strong because they haven’t been subjected to all the nasty (or justified) attacks real candidates have to face. The guys Douthat thinks are way cool simply “don’t have the qualifications that Romney has, they all have their own weaknesses with conservatives and/or with the general electorate, and all of them decided for various reasons to save themselves the trouble, toil, and humiliation that a presidential bid would have entailed.”

And then there’s Jonathan Bernstein:

What Republicans could have used both this cycle and last is a candidate who raised no suspicion from any important party faction and also had conventional credentials. Rick Perry, Tim Pawlenty, and perhaps Fred Thompson all came close, but none of them really achieved that. Given the GOP’s wild pivots on so many issues over the last decade, perhaps no one can, and someone like Romney – who holds orthodox views on all issues right now, but hasn’t for long enough to build long-term trust – is the best they can do.

Maybe he is, but Matt Steinglass argues here that the Republican field this year was bound to be terrible regardless of the candidate:

This is an extremely important point to keep in mind. Mitt Romney looks like a weak phony in this election campaign because he has to pretend to believe with all his heart in orthodox tea-party conservative positions that he transparently doesn’t really believe in. We know this because in the past, Mr Romney supported health-care reform including an individual mandate along the lines of the system he instituted in Massachusetts, essentially the same system as Obamacare. And in the past, he supported a cap-and-trade system for limiting greenhouse-gas emissions to address climate change.

But at the time, both of those were orthodox Republican Party positions. The fact that they are anathema today is a legacy of the reactionary fury that has driven the party for the past three years. Conservative voters responded to their epic loss in 2008 with a partisan Kulturkampf that labeled every major initiative launched by the Obama administration socialism, and declared the very existence of global warming to be some kind of Communist-scientist hoax. There were very few established Republican politicians who hadn’t taken positions in the George W. Bush era (or the Newt Gingrich era!) that pose ideological problems for them in the tea-party era. Mr Gingrich himself can fleetingly outrun the problem because, like most voters, he has the long-term intellectual consistency of a goldfish. But YouTube never forgets.

So we have a system problem:

Republicans’ disenchantment with their current presidential candidates is not an incidental characteristic of this crop of candidates. It’s a structural feature of a contemporary Republican Party whose pieces don’t hang together. Pro-Iraq-war neoconservative Republicans cannot actually live with Ron Paul Republicans. Wall Street-hating anti-bail-out Republicans cannot actually live with Wall Street-working bail-out-receiving Republicans. Evangelical-conservative Republicans cannot actually live with libertarian, socially liberal Republicans. Deficit-slashing Republicans cannot live with tax-slashing Republicans. Medicare-cutting Republicans cannot live with Medicare-defending Republicans. These factions have been glued together over the past three years by the intensity of their partisan hatred for Barack Obama, and all of the underlying resentments that antipathy masks.

And that’s why nothing gets done:

Republicans have buried their differences by assaulting everything Mr Obama supports, and because Mr Obama is a pretty middle-of-the-road politician that includes a whole lot of things that many Republicans used to support. They are disenchanted with their candidates because their candidates are incoherent, but their candidates are incoherent because the base is incoherent. If the GOP wins this election, the party’s leaders are going to be confronted with that incoherence pretty quickly. Unfortunately, so will the rest of us.

Now THAT’S scary. Get a day off to step back and think about things and you find out they’re worse than you thought.

And after the previous CNN debate there’s the Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons:

Judging by the whooping and hollering of the CNN debate audience, the GOP’s neo-Confederate wing wishes for nothing less than an electoral replay of Pickett’s charge – the doomed infantry attack at Gettysburg most historians believe marked the beginning of the end of the Civil War. A sizable proportion of South Carolinians have yearned for a rematch ever since.

And they don’t think they’re going to get it with Mitt Romney, a Yankee’s Yankee who goes around babbling passionless truisms like this gem unearthed from his standard stump speech by the National Review’s Mark Steyn:

“I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.”

Do what? (That’s Southern for what the hell?)

Romney’s just not the guy:

There’s little sign of anger in his personality. But then why would there be? The son of a failed candidate, Romney gives every indication of wanting to be president simply because, well, he deserves to be president.

To a GOP base bombarded with Manichaean propaganda depicting President Obama as a veritable antichrist that may not be good enough. They don’t simply want to prevent Obama’s reelection. They want to see him obliterated, humiliated and shamed. Watching Gingrich verbally pummel Fox’s Juan Williams and CNN’s King – antagonists who, by definition, can’t fight back – sharpened their appetite to see him take on Obama.

Republican debate audiences that have boisterously cheered Texas’ use of the death penalty, booed a gay soldier serving in Iraq, hooted at Fox News’ Williams for asking about racially stereotyping food stamp recipients, and even applauded torture, appear to find Gingrich’s surliness and ill-concealed personal resentments a perfect match for their own. Newt’s ability to channel their anger resembles Richard M. Nixon’s, albeit without Nixon’s self-discipline.

Fox News’ Steve Doocy spoke for them all, predicting that, if nominated, “Newt is going to take off the head of the president” (lovely metaphor) in debates. Many actually believe that Newt’s a brilliant extemporaneous thinker like Rush Limbaugh, while Obama’s an affirmative action hire who’s helpless without his teleprompter.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the saner kinds of Republicans are running scared.

And Lyons concludes with this:

I think even the perception that Newt could get under Obama’s skin is badly mistaken. In a presidential debate, the guy sweating and glowering is the guy losing. The sorehead right, however, won’t believe it until they’ve lost the visceral confrontation they so crave.

In that sense, a Gingrich nomination could end up being very good for the country.

Well, that’s a pleasant thought on the day off between major political events, but there are more debates to endure, and another ten or eleven months of Congress trying to stop the government from doing much of anything, and probably succeeding. Maybe it’s best not to have a day off from the big political events, with time to think about what’s really happening. Sometimes a pause can be refreshing, and sometimes alarming. But the nonsense will resume soon enough, and we can pretend that it’s all great fun. Or we can move to Malta.

Newt Gingrich says he won’t “allow” the moderators of future GOP presidential debates to keep the crowd out of it. Speaking on Tuesday to Fox News, Gingrich took the opportunity that was denied him at Monday night’s debate, and blasted the media. …

He said it wasn’t fair, and it proves the media is out to get him, and so forth and so on… and he actually framed it as a free speech issue. The press was out to silence the people, or something. But there was also this:

NBC also noted that the eventual GOP nominee will debate President Obama in front of a completely silent audience, per the instructions from the Commission on Presidential Debates.

And in an email shot off to here in Hollywood, Rick, the News Guy in Atlanta added this:

Since the Commission is a joint-venture of the two major parties, I suspect if Newt is the nominee, he will try to overturn that, and might even succeed.

Now that’s interesting. Unless Gingrich can whip a crowd into a wild frenzy with his smirks and sneers about shiftless black folks who just want all your money, and all sorts of other minorities expecting the put-upon responsible white folks to bail them out, and about how the press mocks real conservatives and he’s not going to take it anymore – he’s got nothing. Saying those things all by himself, without a large live audience of supporters, makes those things his alone – and they sound nasty and mean and kind of whiney and stupid. He’d rather share responsibility for all this everyone’s-always-picking-on-me petulant whining – you know, whip up the crowd and then hide behind them. He seems terrified of standing alone and speaking for himself. Cool. And that’s interesting.

And also interesting was Mitt Romney’s campaign, as promised, releasing his 2010 tax returns, as well as an estimate for his 2011 returns, and now we can see why he wasn’t eager to share the details:

Mitt Romney offered a partial snapshot of his vast personal fortune late Monday, disclosing income of $21.7 million in 2010 and $20.9 million last year – virtually all of it profits, dividends or interest from investments. None came from wages, the primary source of income for most Americans. Instead, Romney and his wife, Ann, collected millions in capital gains from a profusion of investments, as well as stock dividends and interest payments.

And his effective tax rate was under fourteen percent, far lower than the rate of those who actually work for a living, and the overseas accounts were interesting:

His 2010 return also showed that he had a financial account in Switzerland that was closed in 2010 and that he generated income from overseas investments. He also reported financial accounts in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands.

And Reuters reported here that Romney’s Swiss bank account was closed in 2010 “after an investment adviser decided it could be politically embarrassing to Romney.”

No kidding! And Duncan Black sums up the situation nicely:

Romney has said he was unemployed. He’s right. He actually does nothing to earn most of his income. He’s just in possession of a giant pile of cash. He pays some people to do stuff with that giant pile of cash so it earns a rate of return. And because we are ruled by horrible people who think the lives of the 1% are more important than everyone else, the tax rate on any money that pile of cash earns is much lower than it is on the money earned by people who actually work.

And Scott Galupo piles on:

A sizable chunk of the electorate – maybe the decisive chuck – simply will not believe that the tide that lifted Bain lifted them – or will ever lift them again. This bloc of voters is going to hear Obama’s critique and nod in agreement. And there’s very little that Romney will be able to say in his own defense that will change their mind.

In a way, Romney’s dilemma is the unhappy result of about 50 years’ worth of capitalism-as-populism rhetoric catching up with the conservative movement.

And Digby is quite blunt:

Now the .01% like Romney will tell you that they work actually work much harder than the rest of us and as a result they should be allowed to keep all of their money. After all, if they didn’t work harder they wouldn’t be rich, right?

Indeed, Romney likes to say that his father gave him nothing and he pulled himself up by his bootstraps. If you believe that growing up with a very famous family name in both the world of business and politics – in a world made up of other people with vast wealth and famous family names in business and politics – counts as up from nothing, I suppose that might be true. But Mitt was born with every advantage – many more than his father who really did work his way up the ladder of success. It’s insulting that he even tries to relate to average people in this way.

There’s nothing wrong with being wealthy and running for office. But if you are nothing but a privileged plutocrat, without any sense of noblesse oblige, everyone will rightly see your self-serving policies for what they are: a chance to enhance your own wealth, that of your wealthy peers and, most importantly, that of your heirs. In other words you are just another in a long line of would-be aristocrats trying to game the system for your own.

We’ve had many wealthy presidents in America, but never one as rich as Mitt whose policies were so blatantly geared to make himself even wealthier at the expense of the rest of the nation. If he wins this election we will know once and for all that deep down, Americans really want to be subjects, not citizens.

A long line of would-be aristocrats trying to game the system for their own – that’s an interesting way to frame the Republican agenda. That seems about right, and Greg Sargent offers the larger political context here:

I’m not sure the Obama campaign could have scripted this more perfectly. In a remarkable bit of good timing, President Obama is set to deliver a State of the Union speech focused on income inequality and tax unfairness on exactly the same day that Mitt Romney will reveal that he made over $40 million in the last two years – all of it taxed at a lower rate than that paid by middle class taxpayers. …

Romney doesn’t just disagree with Obama on these fundamental issues; he personally symbolizes virtually the entire 2012 Democratic message. He is the walking embodiment of everything Dems allege is wrong with our system and the ways it’s rigged in favor of the wealthy and against the middle class. Yet this is the standard bearer the GOP seems set to pick.

And Romney and his crew thought that releasing these tax returns would end the discussion, or so they hoped. They just made things more interesting.

And of course this was the perfect chance for Obama to hit it out of the park with his State of the Union speech – to put it all in perspective – the guys who want his job are just wrong for the job – one is an angry and somewhat cowardly lobbyist for the One Percent and the other a would-be aristocrat trying to game the system for folks like him and no one else. They threw Obama a high hanging curveball that didn’t break, the perfect pitch right down the middle of the plate – and he bunted and settled for a single. His speech was a laundry list of things to do, soon, if possible, and short on fire and game-changing ideas.

But maybe that tortures the baseball metaphor too far. The New York Times opens their summary with this:

President Obama pledged on Tuesday night to use government power to balance the scale between America’s rich and the rest of the public, trying to present an election-year choice between continued leadership toward an economy “built to last” and what he called irresponsible policies of the past that caused an economic collapse.

Declaring that “we’ve come too far to turn back now,” the president used his final State of the Union address before he faces the voters to showcase the extent to which he will try to contrast his core economic principles with those of his Republican rivals in a time of deep economic uncertainty. While many Americans remain disappointed with the state of the economy and the president’s handling of it, Mr. Obama nonetheless tried to bring into relief the difference between where the country was when he took over and where it is now.

“The state of our union is getting stronger,” he declared in time-honored tradition. “In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than three million jobs.” He pointed to renewed hiring by American manufacturers and – borrowing the “built to last” phrase from the auto industry he helped save – he sketched out, albeit vaguely, what he called a blueprint for economic growth in which the wealthy play by the same rules as ordinary Americans.

The vagueness had to do with the long list of tweaks to the tax code and to this policy and that – all quite specific and rather dull. And no one much felt like fighting:

Republicans challenged Mr. Obama’s assessment of the economy, and asserted that his policies had made the situation worse. But with their own poll numbers diving Congressional Republicans were subdued in their response to the speech, careful not to boo or seem disrespectful. And the president disputed their claim that he was practicing the politics of division.

“You can call this class warfare all you want,” Mr. Obama said of his call to create a more even economic playing field. “Most Americans would call that common sense.” He characterized the choice as one between whether “a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by” or his own vision – “where everyone gets a fair shot.”

There was nothing much new here, and this wasn’t exciting stuff:

Many of his proposals centered on changes to the tax code, including limiting deductions for companies that move jobs overseas, rewarding companies that return jobs to the United States and increasing taxes on wealthy Americans.

Taking aim at financial institutions that engaged in risky lending practices that many believe tipped the country into financial crisis, Mr. Obama said he was asking Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to create a special unit of federal prosecutors and state attorneys general to expand investigations into abusive lending. The new unit, he said, “will hold accountable those who broke the law, speed assistance to homeowners and help turn the page on an era of recklessness that hurt so many Americans.”

Mr. Obama also proposed a new trade enforcement unit that would add to the number of government investigators pursuing unfair trade practices and that would be responsible for filing lawsuits against foreign countries, namely China. He called for new legislation to make it easier for Americans to refinance their homes if their interest rates are above market rates. And he proposed a bound-to-be-contentious way to allocate any savings from ending the war in Iraq and winding down the war in Afghanistan: by using half of the war savings on infrastructure projects and the other half to reduce the deficit.

It was all specific and sensible, and as far from dramatic as possible. But you can win a baseball game with a long series of back-to-back-to-back singles. It’s not exciting but it gets the job done. And much of the speech was simply nice-sounding generalities:

Reflecting the heavy emphasis on the economy in an election year, the president’s speech was relatively short on national security, where most political observers and indeed his own aides believe his performance has been much stronger than on the economy. In fact, Mr. Obama ended his speech with the American assault last year that finally, after 10 years, killed Osama bin Laden, and talked of that fateful day last May when he monitored the attack from the White House.

He called on the country to emulate the unity of the Navy Seal team that conducted the raid. “When you’re marching into battle, you look out for the person next to you,” the president said, “or the mission fails.”

But what does that mean? What are we supposed to do, specifically? And the Time magazine summary was much the same:

Declaring the American dream under siege, President Barack Obama called Tuesday night for a flurry of help for a hurting middle class and higher taxes on millionaires, delivering a State of the Union address packed with re-election themes. Restoring a fair shot for all, Obama said, is “the defining issue of our time.”

Obama outlined a vastly different vision for fixing the country than the one pressed by the Republicans challenging him in Congress and fighting to take his job in the November election. He pleaded for an active government that ensures economic fairness for everyone, just as his opponents demand that the government back off and let the free market rule.

Obama offered steps to help students afford college, a plan for more struggling homeowners to refinance their homes and tax cuts for manufacturers. He threw in politically appealing references to accountability, including warning universities they will lose federal aid if they don’t stop tuition from soaring.

He offered lists, and as for the Republican rebuttal from Mitch Daniels, see Andrew Sullivan:

It was that rare event when the GOP response surpassed the actual State of the Union. It was what a sane Republican critique of this presidency would be. It began with a grace note on Obama’s courageous assault on bin Laden and the quiet dignity of his family life – avoiding the personal demonization of a well-liked president. There were several shrewd and helpful criticisms of his own side. And there were only a couple of off-notes. I don’t believe the administration has divided Americans or sought to. I don’t think it’s fair to describe a stimulus in a potential depression as wasteful or irresponsible.

But Sullivan is pleased that Daniels spoke about the national debt, one of Sullivan’s major issues, but still it wasn’t enough:

One day, maybe I’ll be able to vote for such a conservative again. They know they have no chance in the roiling circus that Rove and Ailes built. I just remain deeply depressed by the tedium of the president’s speech, its mediocrity, its unreconstructed micro-paleo-liberalism, its lack of imagination, its political cowardice. When, for example, will this president actually make the case for his own healthcare reform – a moderate, sane, historic reform that is the centerpiece of his first term – and which he didn’t mention tonight? When will he be honest about the structural problems facing this country’s economic competitiveness – which cannot be solved by more people going to community colleges?

Look: I still love the guy and wish him well. But this speech shows how he has become captive to the calculators and strategists and world-weary Washingtonians. There was nothing new here, except the mortgage relief, nothing fresh, nothing inspiring, no reason given to re-elect him, except that things are improving and the alternatives are insane. It was also an artlessly written speech that felt as if a committee – still hovered over by Bill Daley – had written it. And the one joke was awful.

It may well be enough come November. But I expected more. And the country deserves more.

Well, life is hard. The world isn’t going to change. There are just the insane alternatives and the careful and pleasant centrist, who will take what he can get, given the circumstances.

Still Sullivan says this:

I was hoping for a vision. I was hoping for real, strategic reform. What we got was one big blizzard of tax deductions, wrapped in a populist cloak. It was treading water. I suspect this will buoy liberal spirits, but anger the right and befuddle the independents. It definitely gives the Republican case against Obama as a big government meddler more credibility. I may be wrong – but the sheer cramped, tedious, mediocre micro-policies he listed were uninspiring to say the least.

We voted for Obama; now we find we got another Clinton.

But one of Sullivan’s readers chides Sullivan:

C’mon man. The speech was a political masterstroke. … It did exactly what it needed to do, which was to make him sound like the reasonable adult in a town full of insolent children. So… what? He should have proposed another hopeless grand vision that would proceed to go nowhere and play right into a Republican narrative about his ineffectual, overreaching nature? Or he should frame himself, and Democrats at large, as the sober party in Washington.

My 84 year old grandmother, who has been taking a 20 minute break from Fox news every week to call me and comment bitterly on what “that boy” (yeah she goes there) is doing to this country, just told me that she found it refreshing after listening to the Republican candidates’ insanity for 7 months. “He’ll get the job done,” she tells me! If she votes for him, the Republicans are in more trouble than they know.

You know when the grand vision will come? A year from today, when Obama’s back in office with, Newt willing, a Democratic majority and Republicans who may finally see that rank obstructionism isn’t a key to electoral success. …

Buck up, Andrew!

But E. D. Kain offers this:

The point of a speech like this one – an election year State of the Union Address – is not to lay out a grand vision. To be honest, the time for grand visions is over. What the president needs to do – and what he didn’t do enough tonight – is lay out in stark terms why his presidency is important and distinct from the hypothetical presidency of Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich.

Ah, another bunt, and he could have hit a home run here. But there’s Will Wilkinson’s take on this:

Obama’s speech, in its particulars, seemed fairly rote. I’m left with the idea that the economy’s getting better, Obama’s keen to do something about jobs, and that bin Laden is fish food. If he can get just that much to stick in the electorate’s collective mind, it’s probably enough to win reelection.

Yep, that’s settling for the bunt single, that actually wins the game. What did everyone expect? It wasn’t interesting, like Mitt and Newt are always interesting. But sometimes you don’t really want interesting.

And that’s not going well, with the rest of us seeing them choosing one just-right masterful champion after another – Bachmann, Trump, Perry, Cain – who embodies and articulates their fervent beliefs and will take the fight to Obama and win big in November – and then discarding each as fatally flawed, or dumb as dirt, or just dull, or too eccentric even for their burn-the-house down tastes. Others just walked away – Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Chris Christie and others – because they couldn’t figure out a way to win the nomination and win against Obama. Satisfying the party and satisfying the nation may be mutually exclusive this year. Only a fool thinks that’s possible now.

And that left only four fools still standing – preprogrammed Mitt Romney, late of Bain Capital, the righteous and angry Newt Gingrich, who sneers and says he’s the smartest man in the room and all other mortals are fools, and the severe if not puritanical social conservative, Rick Santorum, and Ron Paul being all loveable and eccentric. That’s it? That’s it, and after three primaries – Iowa then New Hampshire then South Carolina, and now heading into Florida – the righteous and angry Newt Gingrich is leading in all the polls. The rest of the nation loathes him (soaring sky-high unfavorable ratings in the polls, and favorable ratings about as low as they come) – but the Republican Party seems to like him a lot. And Kevin Drum explains that pretty well:

This is hardly the most important thing in the world, but I’ve heard an awful lot of people lately saying that Newt Gingrich’s recent success is due to the fact that no one is better than him at channeling the anger of the Republican base. There’s nothing really wrong with that formulation, but for the record, I don’t think anger is quite the emotion in play here. Rather, it’s fear and contempt. The Tea Party wing of the Republican Party fears that the America they love is being taken away from them, and they have almost unbounded contempt for President Obama, the taker-away-in-chief.

And who does fear and contempt better than Newt? No one. Those are the emotions he’s channeling, not just boring old anger.

So what we have then is the party of fear and contempt – powerful forces – and series of debates where he who best plays on fear and best expresses contempt is the sure winner. That seems about right, but that doesn’t explain the latest debate, summarized by CNN with this:

In a spirited Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney went after his surging conservative rival Newt Gingrich over his record as U.S. House speaker in the 1990s and accused Gingrich of lobbying after getting out of government.

Gingrich angrily denied the lobbying accusation, accusing Romney of lying about the issue and seeming flustered by the persistent attack.

Pausing at one point to collect his thoughts, Gingrich said Romney had been “walking around this state saying things that aren’t true.”

Romney continued, though, later saying to Gingrich: “You could call it whatever you like, I call it influence peddling.”

So it seems that fear and contempt can only take you so far – sometimes you have to explain yourself, not everything else. And this was the first of two debates in Florida this week ahead of the January 31 primary there. This should be interesting:

Responding to the opening questions in the debate sponsored by NBC News, the National Journal and the Tampa Bay Times, Romney repeated attacks on Gingrich that he has stepped up since Gingrich’s victory in Saturday’s South Carolina primary and rise in the recent polls.

“Members of his own congressional team after four years of his leadership, they voted to replace him,” Romney said of Gingrich’s time as House speaker from 1995 to 99. “This was the first time in American history that a speaker of the House has resigned.”

Romney also said contracts from Gingrich’s work for federal mortgage insurer Freddie Mac showed that Gingrich was hired by the chief lobbyist for the group.

Gingrich was flustered and accused Romney of making false statements, but he declined to specify them. He just said such accusations made him sad, or were sad, or something – and he didn’t need to answer them. And Rick Santorum and Ron Paul just watched – although when the topic turned to foreign policy, Gingrich and Romney took the usual hardline stances, advocating a military response, like an all-out war against any Iranian effort to block the Strait of Hormuz. And Gingrich also supported everything short of a military invasion to overthrow the Cuban government. There is a large Cuban-American community in Florida, and they vote.

And there was the odd man out:

Paul, meanwhile, persisted in his policies to reduce U.S. military presence around the world, saying in response to Gingrich’s Cuba remarks that “the Cold War is over.”

Calling instead for opening relations with Cuba, he said: “It’s not 1962 anymore.”

“We don’t have to use force and intimidation,” Paul said to some applause from the debate audience.

That would be “some applause” of course – in other words, not much. These are Republicans after all.

But this was after a day of sniping:

Before Monday’s Florida debate, Romney ramped up his criticism of Gingrich, labeling him a Washington insider lobbyist, questioning his leadership, and demanding that he release records tied to both a previous ethics investigation and work done for housing giant Freddie Mac.

Romney also demanded Gingrich return roughly $1.6 million earned from a contract with Freddie Mac, and ridiculed Gingrich’s insistence that the work amounted to little more than “strategic” advice, as opposed to lobbying.

Earlier in the day, Gingrich said he had asked his former company, the Center for Health Transformation, to release the details of its consulting contract with Freddie Mac.

But now they can’t find it, of course – or it will turn up. But there’s this:

For his part, Gingrich on Sunday dismissed Romney’s continuing critique of Gingrich’s previous ethics controversy. The former speaker characterized a $300,000 penalty leveled by the House Ethics Committee in the late 1990s as reimbursement for the cost of the investigation.

He also claimed that he persuaded fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives to vote “yes” on the ethics charges against him in order to put a swift end to the proceedings.

You see it wasn’t a fine, and he TOLD them to convict him of ethics charges, to get it over with, for the good of the party. But CNN, not being Fox News, checks the facts:

According to the nonpartisan fact check group PolitiFact, Gingrich was reprimanded by the House and ordered to pay the $300,000 penalty in 1997 for violating an ethics rule. It noted that the penalty was considered reimbursement for the investigation.

The violation originated in a course Gingrich taught at Kennesaw State College, which organizers claimed qualified for tax-exempt status, PolitiFact reported. The House Ethics Committee ultimately concluded the course was run to “help in achieving a partisan, political goal,” making it ineligible for tax exemption, according to PolitiFact.

Central to the 1997 investigation was a letter submitted by Gingrich’s lawyers, which the ethics panel deemed inaccurate. Gingrich conceded Sunday the letter was a mistake.

He lied to the ethics panel in that letter, and he was running a scam, and they caught him, and he had to pay what actually was a big fine, and he resigned as Speaker and left congress – but he says that was no big deal – it’s more important that we be very afraid, and have seething contempt for this Obama guy. That’s his story and he’s sticking to it.

And in his running commentary on the debate, when it came to the lobbying charge, Andrew Sullivan notes this:

I thought Romney won the confrontation. Gingrich was always on the defensive, and the argument that working for Freddie Mac had nothing to do with lobbying or influence peddling is unpersuasive on its face.

There was a moment in that exchange when Gingrich simply went silent. That doesn’t happen very often. It felt as if the demagogue had been exposed and was actually somewhat afraid. But it’s a weird dynamic on that stage. I can’t quite grasp it yet.

But Sullivan was pleased with the NBC moderator, Brian Williams – “He’s the first moderator to ask why the right response to the Wall Street crash is less regulation.” The answers weren’t very good, but the question was. And Williams may have set up Rick Santorum:

Williams gives Santorum his wet dream of starting a war on Iran. Santorum again equates the Shiite theocracy with the radical, stateless Sunni al Qaeda. How many Americans have been murdered by Iran’s regime in the US? Does he conflate all Muslims abroad?

Yes. Next!

Actually the whole debate was strange, as there was very a small and very quiet audience, and one of Sullivan’s readers offers this:

Newt is neutered without a crowd hungry for applause lines and visceral overstatement. Romney, in contrast, is clearly comfortable with the more formal flavor. And Paul is almost serene as Santorum fades into his own podium. A weird dynamic, indeed…

Another:

Gingrich cannot perform outside of high drama. He plays one note, but it can only be played under a specific media-centric form of duress.

Sullivan – “There is a method to Williams’ dullness.”

And as for Gingrich’s long pause, another of Sullivan’s readers offers this:

That was a somewhat strange and long stretch of silence from Newt, but to me it didn’t feel like he was afraid but pausing to let his first instinctive impulse – exploding in a red fury – pass. I thought he was, for maybe the very first time in his professional life, remembering and acting upon somebody else’s advice to stay calm.

Sullivan – “But when there is not a demos, there can be no demagogue.” (There are benefits to a classical education.)

And it seems another of Sullivan’s readers was actually listening to Ron Paul:

I used to think that Ron Paul’s analogies regarding how “we” would feel if “they” did that to us were clichéd and obvious, but they have really grown on me. His analogy regarding the Gulf of Mexico really opened my eyes. If someone set up a blockade in the Gulf, we would consider it an act of war and obliterate it immediately. The only reason we think that we can set up a blockade in foreign waters and say it is not an act of war is because the offended country wouldn’t be stupid enough to retaliate against a military superpower. It’s like the bully politely asking for the nerd’s lunch money: the only reason the transaction takes place without a fight is because the nerd is smart enough to realize if he doesn’t comply he will end up with a broken nose. But that doesn’t mean the bully is practicing peaceful diplomacy.

Ron Paul isn’t a very good Republican. But Sullivan is more concerned with tax policy:

So Gingrich says that the Bush tax cuts helped the economy not to go under after 9/11. Does that mean that the Obama tax cuts helped the economy not to enter a Second Great Depression? Or does Keynesian economics only work under Republicans?

But notice how that question – why didn’t the Bush tax cuts work? – should have prompted an anti-media tirade from Newt. It was the perfect set-up, and also the kind of valid point that usually makes Newt’s head explode. But he just went along with it. He seems completely robbed of that South Carolina fire. Is it the audience? Or is he just exhausted? I wouldn’t blame him. But Romney has, in my view, done well in this debate so far. Because he has never really been challenged…

And that leads to this summary:

What a different Gingrich tonight: eager to thank and support his rivals; humble with respect to the huge challenges ahead. He has decided to cut the fireworks to foil his critics. And I presume his Super PAC will meanwhile open up various cans of whup-ass on Romney. So this is Newt on his best behavior – even when Romney called him a “disgrace” three times.

Maybe Gingrich is trying to reassure the establishment that he is not the constant bomb-thrower and surprise agent. Maybe he realizes he needs to look more presidential. My own take is that this gambit cannot work for Newt. He is not a serene statesman. He’s a ferocious demagogue. That’s all he knows. I don’t find the new Newt very appealing. But maybe tactically, it makes sense.

As for Romney, he was back on form…

But Sullivan wasn’t impressed:

How does having a family advance conservatism as an ideology? Or working for a private equity company? Just when you think Romney has rallied, he gives you a lame-ass answer like that one. And ends it with a smirk…

And we still have the same Republican puzzle. Which of these four runs against Obama, with a plausible chance of winning? David Frum says it had better not be Gingrich:

It’s striking that almost none of Gingrich’s former colleagues in the House has endorsed him for president. Striking that nobody associated with a past Republican presidential association has done so. He is a candidate of talk-show hosts and local activists – and of course of Rick Perry and Sarah Palin – but not of those who know him best and have worked with him most closely. Gingrich may raise more money after his South Carolina win. But prediction: Romney will raise even more, among the great national network of Republicans who recognize that to nominate Gingrich is to commit party suicide.

And Steve Schmidt agrees:

If Newt Gingrich is able to win the Florida primary, you will see a panic and a meltdown of the Republican establishment that is beyond my ability to articulate in the English language. People will go crazy… There are 33 House Republicans in districts that Barack Obama won. What is the impact in terms of Republicans being able to keep the House of Representatives in majority control if Newt Gingrich was the nominee of the party? What is the impact in the United State Senate races where Republicans have a great chance of taking majority control of the United States Senate? With Newt Gingrich as the nominee of the party, that is, perhaps, all up in the air.

Erick Erickson adds this:

The Republican Establishment fears Gingrich will cause them to lose the House and not get the Senate. Put another way, the current Republican leadership fears that the man who helped the GOP take back the House for the first time in 40 years and his allies in the Tea Party who helped take back the House in 2010 will cause the GOP to now lose.

And also on the right, Tim Carney says this could be the end for the Republican Establishment:

Given his record, it may be implausible that Gingrich can pose as anti-establishment. But the establishment is certainly anti-Newt. And for South Carolina’s voters, that was an endorsement enough.

And maybe he’s right, as Sullivan argued earlier in the day that there is no Republican Establishment:

I’m not sure what this phrase means or what it represents any more – the Chamber of Commerce? John Boehner? The Bush family? But the concept of a responsible, sane, pragmatic party leadership able to corral or coax or manage a party’s base is, it seems to me, a preposterous fiction on its face, as we are seeing.

The Republican Establishment is Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, Karl Rove, and their manifold products, from Hannity to Levin. They rule on the talk radio airwaves and on the GOP’s own “news” channel, Fox. They have never quite reconciled themselves to Romney since he represents a gray blur in a stark Manichean universe they have created for more than a decade now. In this universe, there is only black and white. There is only them and us. Anyone who diverges an iota from this schematic is speaking without a microphone in front of a revving airplane engine.

And Sullivan harks back to Gingrich’s victory speech in South Carolina:

It was completely, fundamentally, organizationally Manichean, if you’ll pardon the expression. He limned a familiar battle between independence and dependence, pay-checks vs. food stamps, America vs. “Europe”, the American people vs. elites “forcing people” for 35 years not to be American, the traditional America vs. the “secular, European style socialist bureaucratic system.” There is no gray here. There is no nuance. And there is the imputation to the other side of malign motives, secret agendas and foreignness that has been Gingrich’s hallmark since the very beginning, when he assaulted the traditions of the Congress until that institution eventually had to repel him.

Listen to Limbaugh, the GOP’s chief spokesman. How does a Romney channel that level of viciousness and rage? Listen to Hannity. How does a smooth manager reach a base that wants the same Manichean approach to foreign policy, in which there is only one ally (Israel) and enemies everywhere else (Europe, China, the Arab world, Russia)? Read Mark Levin. There are only two options now on the table, as he sees it: freedom or slavery. And a vote for Obama is a vote for slavery.

So Drum was right about fear and contempt, but Sullivan says that’s the Republican Party now:

It purges dissidents, it vaunts total loyalty, it polices discourse for any deviation. If you really have a cogent argument, you find yourself fired – like Bruce Bartlett or David Frum – or subject to blacklists, like me and Fox. You can find Steve Schmidt lamenting Gingrich for very good reasons, and then you realize that it was Schmidt – a moderate, sane, level-headed professional – who helped pick Sarah Palin for the vice-presidential nomination. Because he correctly realized that she would actually add base votes and prevent a total Obama tsunami. In the end, he knew what he had to do. In the end, the “establishment” knows the party they have created.

This now is the party of Palin and Gingrich, animated primarily by hatred of elites, angry at the new shape and color of America, befuddled by a suddenly more complicated world, and dedicated primarily to emotion rather than reason. That party is simply not one that can rally behind a Mitt Romney. He too knows what he has to say – hence his ludicrous invocation of Obama as some kind of alien being. But it doesn’t work. He believes it – since he seems capable of genuinely believing in anything that will win him votes and power. But he doesn’t have the rage to make it work. And that rage cannot be downward, as Romney’s often is – toward hecklers or interviewers. It has to be upward – at vague, treasonous elites. It has to have that Poujadist touch, that soupcon of contempt, that sends shivers up the legs of the Republican faithful, reared on Limbaugh, propagandized by Fox, and coated with a shallow knowledge of a largely fictionalized past.

This is Gingrich’s party; and Ailes’; and Rove’s. They made it; and it is only fitting it now be put on the table, for full inspection. Better sooner than later.

Yes, you do need to know about Pierre Poujade to get all of Sullivan’s rant – or not. But you do see that the party has no use for Romney. In fact, in the American Conservative, Noah Millman argues that Romney, to these folks, seems like a manager rather than a leader:

To put it very crudely, he just doesn’t seem like an alpha male. Gingrich, by contrast, is a walking catalog of everything that is wrong with alpha-maleness. But for better or worse, Americans want to believe that their President is a leader, captain of his own ship, commander of his own destiny. Romney is an organization man. Having the organization come in and try to muscle him to the top will only provoke a greater rebellion, which in turn will damage the organization more than it will help Romney.

So this Republican puzzle won’t be solved – or cannot be solved. Maybe they should just nominate Obama and be done with it. That would save everyone a lot of needless trouble.

But something else was decided the evening before the playoff games between the giant mutants in pads and helmets, and perhaps it was consequential. There was a political playoff game, the South Carolina primary, where – as no one would have predicted ten days before the thing – Newt Gingrich stunned the political world by winning big:

With 99.49 percent of precincts reporting at 11:16 p.m. ET, Gingrich had received 40 percent of the vote in South Carolina. Mitt Romney followed in second with 28 percent, Rick Santorum received 17 percent, and Ron Paul received 13 percent.

Romney, who delivered his speech just after 8 p.m. ET on Saturday night, said: “This race is getting to be even more interesting … This is a hard fight because there’s so much worth fighting for.”

Well maybe, but maybe he won’t be going to the Super Bowl, the general election, facing off against Obama in November. He may have been eliminated, like the Baltimore Ravens with that missed field goal in the final seconds. This was Mitt’s missed field goal. Yes, Gingrich is a nasty and mean dude, with a nasty past both political and personal, but the voters clearly preferred him to Romney. And Andrew Sullivan, who followed events as they unfolded, concluded that evening that it was all over for Romney:

This is the Republican crack-up people have been predicting for years. Gingrich is on a roll. I think he can win this – and then lose this in a way that could change America history. That is a brief impression in one moment of time. But I cannot see Romney winning this at this point. They are just not into him, and he’s an awful candidate.

It seems Gingrich just captured the zeitgeist, of the party and perhaps the nation:

This is what the GOP now is, and it deserves its spokesman. But do not under-estimate the appeal to some of the idea of humiliating and removing the first black president. That’s what Gingrich is really about. He is giving them what they want. And it’s meat that has barely seen a skillet. …

And the rage among some about a black president actually exercising authority is real. This man can roil it brutally, shamelessly, mercilessly. And he will.

What is Sullivan talking about? Maybe it was Gingrich’s victory speech, which the New York Times says exploited racial resentment and hatred of the news media to connect with furious voters:

He was helped by Mitt Romney’s halting answers about his tax returns and his finances, and by Rick Santorum’s tepid campaign, in which he compared himself to warm porridge. But Mr. Gingrich won this largely on his own. He had a much better sense of the raw, destructive anger at President Obama swirling around a highly conservative and combative state, and he reflected it back to voters everywhere he went.

South Carolina has moved sharply rightward since Mr. Obama arrived on the national scene. In 2000, 24 percent of state voters said they were “very conservative,” but that number jumped to 34 percent in 2008. Now it is up to 37 percent, according to exit polls. Two-thirds of Saturday’s voters said they supported the Tea Party, reflecting the election in 2010 of four South Carolina freshmen who are among the most extreme members of the House.

This was his kind of crowd:

In one of the most telling results of the exit polls, most voters said that cutting the federal budget was more important than encouraging job growth. At a time when more than 13 million people remain unemployed, these voters do not want the government to do a thing about it, possibly because it might improve Mr. Obama’s re-election chances.

Mr. Romney’s foam-rubber ideology was not built for an electorate this rigid.

And this was just a nasty business all along:

He repeatedly called Mr. Obama “the greatest food-stamp president in American history,” and lectured a black questioner at Monday’s debate about the amount of federal handouts to blacks, suggesting their work ethic was questionable.

On Thursday, in the derisive tones of a radio talk-show host, he said Mr. Obama’s cabinet looked like Mickey Mouse and Goofy. At that night’s debate, he lashed into the moderator for asking a perfectly reasonable question about his ex-wife’s allegation that he wanted an open marriage, saying it was typical of an “elite media” that was trying to protect the president by attacking Republicans.

That was just what South Carolina voters wanted to hear, the signal that he would not only challenge Mr. Obama but work to bloody him, to destroy his dignity. As one voter told a reporter, “I think we’ve reached a point where we need someone who’s mean.”

And that’s what they got:

Mr. Gingrich shocked Mr. Romney by making an issue of the jobs he destroyed in his leveraged-buyout firm, and he is clearly prepared to take negative campaigning against Mr. Obama to a new low. In his victory speech, he even descended into Rick Perry territory by accusing the “elite media” of anti-religion bias. Is that really what Republicans across the country want from their nominee, or is South Carolina, with its history of acute racial tension and contrarianism, simply sending a singular, extreme message?

That’s an interesting question, and South Carolina was the first state to secede when it came to war way back when, with the first shots of the Civil War fired there, and was the last state to continue, until very recently, to fly the confederate flag over their capital, in a big fuck-you to their black citizens. They may be a throwback to a nasty past, or a harbinger of our future. And as this editorial notes, South Carolina may be an aberration or a bellwether. They hope for the former, but they’re not sure. Of course Newt says they’re a bellwether.

And as for what actually happened here, Politico’s Jonathan Martin notes that less than two weeks ago Mitt Romney seemed all but certain to become the Republican presidential nominee but now Romeny is weaker than ever:

The establishment favorite didn’t just lose South Carolina – he got thrashed. Less than a week after he was leading in the polls here, Romney found himself taking a twelve-point beating and dropping all but three counties of the state’s 46 counties.

Romney’s thumping defeat – and his verbal miscues in the days before the election – has many Republicans worried that he’s a more brittle candidate than they thought. As in the past, he had difficulty connecting with the party base and was walloped by Gingrich among conservatives and voters supportive of the Tea Party. It’s the former speaker who is captivating party activists looking for somebody to channel their burn-it-down anger toward President Obama and elites. …

But the statement made in South Carolina wasn’t entirely about Gingrich’s attributes. He also served as a vessel for rank-and-file voters to send a message.

“The Republican primary electorate does not intend to do what the Republican establishment tells them,” said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), a longtime strategist, comparing voters here to the independent-minded class of House GOP freshman.

So this was the triumph of those Tea Party freshmen congressmen types – no compromise, ever – tear it all down unless we get exactly what we want. And Mitt wasn’t it:

It was impossible not to see the results as an indictment of Romney, though. The pulses of conservative activists just don’t go racing for the frontrunner — and he’s paying a price for his inability to capture his party’s spirit.

“He has a passion deficit,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), diagnosing Romney’s condition.

But there’s the other view:

Romney backers are incredulous at the idea that Gingrich, with all his well-documented private baggage and public inconsistency, would somehow be a more competitive general election candidate.

“Really – Newt?” asked former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty. “Are you serious? To look at the field and say Newt is the outsider defies facts.”

Yes, and Steve Kornacki calls this the GOP’s South Carolina nightmare:

Newt Gingrich wanted to make Mitt Romney’s life miserable, and now he’s succeeded.

After getting blown out in Iowa on Jan. 3, the former House speaker all but announced he was transforming his presidential campaign into a one-man crusade to exact maximum vengeance on Romney, whose super PAC allies had crushed Gingrich’s December surge with a barrage of negative attacks. Gingrich then suffered through a predictably miserable week in New Hampshire before moving to friendlier turf in South Carolina, where he completed one of the more improbable turnarounds in modern presidential campaign history on Saturday night with a startlingly lopsided victory over Romney.

The good news for Romney is that he can probably make most of his troubles – not to mention Gingrich himself – go away with a solid win in Florida. The bad news is that Florida will look infinitely more imposing to him at the start of this coming week than it did at the start of this past one, when polls showed Romney opening a lead of more than 20 points. But the poll numbers in Florida, as elsewhere, have been absurdly volatile; it was just over a month ago that Gingrich enjoyed a 27-point lead over Romney. So the race in the Sunshine State should tighten dramatically in the days ahead, if it hasn’t already.

And Florida may be Newt’s kind of place too:

Florida proved itself in the 2010 elections to be particularly hospitable to the Tea Party strain of Republicanism that powered Gingrich’s South Carolina surge – and that has long been suspicious of Romney. In that year’s GOP gubernatorial primary, Rick Scott, a Tea Party-aligned outsider with a troubled past whose nomination state and national party leaders feared and strongly discouraged, defeated Bill McCollum, a well-credentialed political veteran with broad support from the party establishment. On the surface, at least, the dynamics of a Romney-Gingrich battle are rather similar.

Disrupting Romney’s easy glide to the nomination and forcing him into such a precarious position gives Gingrich at least a measure of the revenge he’s coveted.

And Kornacki sees a number of possibilities here, like Romney actually getting his act together:

Romney did his best to project confidence and steadiness in his concession speech. What he seems to be counting on is that the GOP’s opinion-shaping class will respond to Gingrich’s win Saturday night the same way it responded to his surge in early December: with panic.

Much has been made of the role the pro-Romney super PAC played in undermining Gingrich last month, and for good reason. But his poll numbers didn’t just collapse in Iowa, where the ads aired; they fell everywhere. That points to the role played by many of the right’s leading voices, commentators, activists and elected officials who remember with horror Gingrich’s run as House speaker in the 1990s and who used their platforms to lash out against him. Their warnings trickled down to rank-and-file Republicans, who began to get cold feet.

That basic pattern, in fact, has played out multiple times during the GOP campaign, with nervous party elites helping to beat back surges from candidates they saw as unfit for the nomination. Romney clearly hopes the elites – and his super PAC buddies – will do some dirty work for him again now, arresting Gingrich’s post-South Carolina momentum and leaving Romney in position to score a Florida victory that would silence the doubts about his viability.

Well, that’s possible, but how Romney did in Iowa and New Hampshire weren’t that impressive, and his poll numbers still fall:

So it can’t be ruled out that Gingrich will roll his sudden momentum into Florida, capitalize on the state’s Tea Party-friendliness, and engineer an equally impressive follow-up triumph – one that might lift Gingrich into a clear lead nationally and in the next wave of states.

Or maybe the Florida result won’t prove much at all and we’re in for a long hard slog:

The scenario is that South Carolina firmly establishes the GOP contest as a two-man race, with the Tea Party wing of the party largely uniting around Gingrich and everyone else siding with Romney. The two men would then trade wins and losses through a drawn-out, virtually momentum-less primary season…

But then there’s what Kornacki calls his chaos theory:

What if Romney suffers such a bad loss in Florida that his campaign melts down completely and elite Republicans lose confidence in his ability to stop Gingrich? If they really are committed to stopping the former speaker, these elites would then be in need of a Plan B, leading to the “white knight” scenario – a new candidate drafted into the race who could qualify for the late big-state primaries and to prevent Gingrich from racking up the delegates he’d need for a first ballot nomination. There are many reasons to sniff at this possibility, not the least of which is that it’s unclear if the GOP has any candidate on the sidelines who would be capable of this. But if Mitt can’t get the job done in Florida, expect to hear it mentioned a lot.

And that would explain this:

Romney surrogate and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie called Newt Gingrich an embarrassment to the Republican Party on Sunday, one day after the former House speaker rode a late surge to victory in the South Carolina primary.

“I think Newt Gingrich has embarrassed the party, over time,” Christie (R), who has endorsed Romney, said Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press. “Governor Romney never has.”

When pressed on how Gingrich had embarrassed the Republican Party, Christie mentioned said that Gingrich had been pressured to resign from the House of Representatives in 1998 and had been fined for House ethics violations.

“We all know the record,” Christie added. “I mean he was run out of the speakership by his own party, he was fined $300,000 for ethics violations. This is a guy that’s had a very difficult career at times and has been an embarrassment to the party.”

Christie suggested the former House speaker’s record could predict what he would be like as president. ”I’m not saying he will do it again in the future, but sometimes past is prologue,” Christie said.

The long-knives are out. Christie isn’t defending Romney here. And John Heilemann sees other factors at play:

Contrary to the received wisdom up until now, Gingrich is the favorite in the Sunshine State. Yes, Romney has the financial advantage. Yes, he has been on the air with ads for weeks. Yes, there has been early voting in Florida under way for weeks, too, during which time Romney’s air of inevitability will have given him an edge. But Florida is a closed primary, the first contest so far in which only registered Republicans are allowed to cast ballots. And the state’s GOP voters are far more conservative and anti-Establishment than many people understand. This is especially true in the panhandle of northern Florida, where Gingrich is likely to take up residence for much of the time between now and the vote on January 31. But watch for Gingrich to play hard for the state’s Hispanic voters – and not just the Cuban-Americans who are thick on the ground in South Florida but also the polyglot Latino population around Orlando – by emphasizing his stance on immigration, which is notably more moderate than Romney’s. Between all this and the wave of momentum and free media coverage he’ll enjoy coming out of South Carolina, the former speaker, I think, has the upper hand, though not by a lot.

And Heilemann cites the influential conservative fellow Erik Erickson saying that Romney really needs to “refine his message, not sharpen his knives,” and suggests Romney will never take Erickson’s advice:

Incredulous at the notion that anyone on God’s green earth could ever take Gingrich seriously as the Republican nominee, their plan is to step up their attacks on him, beginning at the debate in Tampa tomorrow night. There are two obvious problems with this strategy, though: (a) When it comes to wallowing around in the mud, Gingrich is King Hog, while Romney isn’t even a pig farmer in waders – he’s the CEO of the agribusiness conglomerate that owns the place, worried about getting any flecks of dirt on his starched white shirt; and (b) Gingrich’s rise represents as much as anything a rejection of Romney, his theme-less pudding of a campaign, and the Establishment support of it. At Romney’s final rally in Charleston on Friday… he ended his speech by declaiming, “I love this land, I love its Constitution, I revere its founders, I will get America back to work, and I’ll make sure that we remain the shining city on the hill.” It would be hard to conjure a stanza less suited to rousing the hot-eyed Republican base of 2012 than that.

But there is that other factor:

If Gingrich wins Florida, the Republican Establishment is going to have a meltdown that makes Three Mile Island look like a marshmallow roast. Why? Because the Establishment will be staring down the barrel of two utterly unpalatable choices. On the one hand, Gingrich’s national favorable-unfavorable ratings of 26.5 and 58.6 percent, respectively, make him not just unelectable against Obama – but also mean that he would likely be a ten-ton millstone around the necks of down-ballot Republican candidates across the country. And on the other, Romney will have shown in two successive contests – one in a bellwether Republican state, the other in a key swing state – an inability to beat his deeply unpopular rival.

If this scenario unfolds, the sound of GOP grandees whispering calls for a white knight, be it Indiana governor Mitch Daniels (who, conveniently, is delivering the Republican response to Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night) or Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan or even Jeb Bush, will be deafening.

Yes, what Sullivan said makes sense:

This is the Republican crack-up people have been predicting for years. Gingrich is on a roll. I think he can win this – and then lose this in a way that could change America history.

Well, he may be a bellwether of something, but a friend sent this along in an email:

This Newt guy is starting to really get on my nerves. I can’t decide whether or not I want to see him as the nominee, even if I think he’s easier to beat than Romney, since after hearing his acceptance speech, I think he’d be a formidable debater who could possibly embarrass Obama, and then there is that chance that he’d become president. Shit. Oh, please, God, no! Please let somebody trounce Newt in Florida!

That may not happen. Things are changing, and not for the better. And maybe the playoffs are over.

A newt is an aquatic amphibian of the family Salamandridae, although not all aquatic salamanders are considered newts. Newts are classified in the subfamily Pleurodelinae of the family Salamandridae, and are found in North America, Europe and Asia. Newts metamorphose through three distinct developmental life stages: aquatic larva, terrestrial juvenile (called an eft), and adult. Adult newts have lizard-like bodies and may be either fully aquatic, living permanently in the water, or semi-aquatic, living terrestrially but returning to the water each year to breed.

In short, they’re neither here nor there. They’re sneaky little shape-shifters and entirely unpleasant. They don’t make good pets. You don’t cuddle with a newt.

On the other hand, Sir Isaac Newton was rather amazing:

His monograph Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, lays the foundations for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws, by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler’s laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the Scientific Revolution.

Many consider Newton the greatest scientist of all time, and one of mankind’s true great minds. And those are few and far between, in spite of what people say about Frank Zappa or Glenn Beck.

And then there’s Newt Gingrich – Newton Leroy “Newt” Gingrich – actually born Newton Leroy McPherson. Yes, he was named after the truly great mind, but his mother’s marriage to that McPherson fellow fell apart after only a few days and she later married an Army officer named Gingrich. She was only sixteen and these things happen. In any event, Newt eventually got a new last name and a new father, who presumably affectionately called the young tike Newt. That may have been a term of endearment, or a bit of passive-aggression. Maybe his new father realized that what he was dealing with was a sneaky little shape-shifter who was entirely unpleasant. That’s how many see the adult Newt now. He sneers and reminds everyone that he’s always the smartest man in the room – perhaps like Sir Isaac Newton, or so he seems to dream – but folks still call him Newt. They know, even if they don’t realize it.

But now, the night before the South Carolina primary, Newt Gingrich is poised to win handily – and perhaps win the Republican nomination – and perhaps win the presidency, unseating Barack Obama. The first is likely, the second is less likely. The third is anyone’s guess. Who wins the presidency may depend on how the Germans feel about the Greeks and whether the world’s banking system collapses when Greece inevitably defaults, and, as the Germans twiddle their thumbs and grin, the world plunges into something far worse than the Great Depression. Or something awful and not entirely unexpected may happen with the Chinese economy. Or, conversely, things may turn around and our economy surges and no one sees much point in getting rid of Obama now. No one knows.

But Gingrich is poised to win South Carolina. The Washington Post quotes an impressive list of big-gun political pundits saying so – after the last two debates Newt has this one in the bag. And there’s this item reviewing all the polling and the InTrade futures – Newt wins. You can bet on it. In fact, people do. And there’s the latest Clemson poll where Gingrich has a six point lead over Romney in South Carolina. Rick Santorum is at nine percent, which suggests the evangelicals down there have decided on Newt, in spite of the evangelical leaders meeting and deciding that Santorum is their guy, and God’s guy, and Santorum being as sanctimonious and noble and pious as he can be, only more so. But Santorum is done. The only caveat in the Clemson poll is that twenty percent of the voters were still undecided the day before the primary. They’re thinking about it. Don’t rush them.

But this may come down to the evangelicals, who, but for their leaders, seem fine with Newt. But Michael Kazin argues they are a dying breed, when you consider the aging of the Christian right:

Put simply, the Christian Right is getting old. According to the largest and most recent study we have of American religion and politics, by Robert D. Putnam and David E. Campbell, almost twice as many people 18 to 29 confess to no faith at all as adhere to evangelical Protestantism. Young people who have attended college, a growing percentage of the population, are more secular still. Catholicism has held its own only because the Church keeps gathering in newcomers from Latin America, Africa, and Asia, few of whom are likely to show up at a Santorum rally. To their surprise, Putnam and Campbell discovered that conservative preachers infrequently discuss polarizing issues from the pulpit. Sermons about hunger and poverty far outnumber those about homosexuality or abortion. On any given Sunday, just one group of Christians routinely grapples with divisive political issues: black Protestants, the most reliably Democratic constituency of them all.

There may be not much left of the Matlock and Jeopardy crowd, shouting get off my lawn at the young whippersnappers in the neighborhood. Gingrich and Santorum may have been appealing to the last few of those who once seemed so many. And that may be a miscalculation.

But it may not matter all that much, because if Gingrich wins South Carolina, Steve Kornacki argues here that Florida would be in play:

The Florida polling that now shows Romney crushing Gingrich would tighten dramatically. (Remember that in early December, when he was surging everywhere, Gingrich was the one with a commanding Florida lead; that’s how volatile these numbers can be.) This would set up a frantic ten-day campaign in Florida (which votes on January 31) that the media would likely portray as a referendum on Romney’s viability. There would probably be, as John Heilemann suggested on MSNBC earlier today, talk of party leaders lining up a consensus back-up candidate in the event of a second straight Romney loss (because Newt would still not be an acceptable option for most of them).

Yes, as Kornacki explains here, they see a newt, not a Newton:

The epitaph on Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign tombstone may end up reading, “No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t outrun his past.”

Think back to early December, when months of well-received debate performances (coupled with Herman Cain’s demise) finally turned into real polling traction for the former House speaker. He surged to lopsided leads in national and key early state polls, and with Iowa less than a month away his timing seemed almost perfect. Gingrich grew so cocky that he declared, “It’s very hard not to look at the recent polls and think that the odds are very high I’m going to be the nominee.”

But the sudden, previously unimaginable possibility that Gingrich might win the Republican nomination spooked a very specific group of elite Republicans: those who remembered what an epic political disaster his four-year run as speaker was for the party. Together they used their influential perches to undermine his standing with the many Republican voters who don’t really remember the 1990s and who’d come to know Gingrich through his Fox-enabled rehabilitation as an “ideas man” and GOP elder statesman. Any tool they could find to puncture the Gingrich bubble they used, and their efforts (combined with those of a free-spending pro-Mitt Romney super PAC) quickly paid off.

Kornacki offers the who-did-what and when in those matters, along with the damage done by Newt’s second ex-wife telling the nation, on air, what a sneaky little shape-shifter, who was entirely unpleasant, Newt was. And Kornacki ends with this:

Newt’s wild mood swings and cruel treatment of her in the ’90s could be the kind of sensational development that nullifies whatever progress he’s made this week. And even if he does somehow pull out a win Saturday, the ghosts won’t just go away. It’s the story of his campaign: Whenever something goes right, the people who know him best are there to spoil the fun.

Maybe his mother should have named him Fred or Joe. The name Newton may have given him ideas. Mothers should be more careful in naming their children. Ask Cher about that.

But then Rod Dreher was thoroughly unimpressed by the Marianne Gingrich interview:

This Newt-is-a-sleaze anecdote is news, but it’s not new news. And that – plus her own squirreliness – makes me conclude that this thing won’t have legs. Especially after Newt’s I-am-outraged attack on the news media tonight. Demagoguery? Sure. But effective at stopping any potential fallout from the Marianne interview, which turned out to be pretty weak tea.

But Lloyd Grove disagrees:

In case anyone needed to be reminded of Gingrich’s outrageous hypocrisy, ABC helpfully spliced in footage of the then-adulterous speaker, in a breathtaking feat of compartmentalization, pursuing the impeachment of Bill Clinton for arguably less egregious behavior, denouncing the Clinton-Gore administration as having “less moral authority than any administration in history,” and continually defending the sanctity of marriage as a political talking point.

And there’s Margaret Carlson’s here:

Newt was not polling well among evangelical women before Marianne’s revelations, and surely won’t now. But he makes up for it with his surge among men in a state where divorce is not unheard of, despite the fact that 60 percent of Republican voters identify themselves as Christian conservatives. Residents of South Carolina divorce at a rate twice as high as for that den of iniquity, Washington, D.C. Many fewer people divorce in the bluest of states, Massachusetts, than in the Palmetto State, according to the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics.

Ah, they understand sneaky little shape-shifters who are entirely unpleasant. That’s them. And there’s Jay Nordlinger in the National Review:

I wonder whether Newt’s “personal” record will hurt him, electorally. When you think about it, betrayal and divorce are as American as apple pie.

Well, maybe so, but why was Newt busting Bill Clinton’s chops about that blow-job way back when? And there was how Newt addressed the whole issue, as described by Tim Stanley:

To understand the full power of Gingrich’s answer, you really have to watch him give it. The former Speaker has three standard expressions: charmed bemusement (“Why are you asking me that, you fool?”), indignant (“Why are you asking me that, you swine?”) and supreme confidence (“That’s not the question I would have asked, you moron”). Each comes with its own number of chins. For his stunning “No, but I will”, Newt employed the full dozen. He looked straight down them, with half moon goblin eyes. “I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office. And I am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like that.”

By the time his chins unfolded, Gingrich was in total command of the debate.

That’s when he thought his name was Newton, not Newt.

But there was James Taranto’s claim here that Gingrich’s standing ovation for saying something else that “was the most compelling dramatization of racial progress so far this century [aside from Obama's election].”

What? Ta-Nehisi Coates was having none of that:

When a professor of history calls Barack Obama a “Food Stamp President,” it isn’t a mistake to be remedied through clarification; it is a statement of aggression. And when a crowd of his admirers cheer him on, they are neither deluded, nor in need of forgiveness, nor absolution, nor acting against their interest. Racism is their interest.

So Coates, a black man, says he knows who is who here:

They are not your misguided friends. They are your fully intelligent adversaries, sporting the broad range of virtue and vice we see in humankind. If you are a praying person, you should pray for their electoral destruction in November.

And it gets worse, with Kristin Ford at Faith in Public Life reporting Catholic Leaders Challenge Gingrich and Santorum on Divisive Rhetoric around Race and Poverty:

More than 40 national Catholic leaders and prominent theologians at universities across the country released a strongly worded open letter today urging “our fellow Catholics Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum to stop perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes on the campaign trail.”

In the lead up to Saturday’s primary in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich has frequently blasted President Obama as a “food stamp president” and implied that some African Americans are more content to collect welfare benefits than work. Rick Santorum attracted scrutiny for telling Iowa voters he doesn’t want “to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.”

The open letter reminds the two presidential candidates, vying for Christian conservative voters, that U.S. Catholic bishops have called racism an “intrinsic evil” and consistently defend vital government programs such as food stamps and unemployment benefits that help struggling Americans.

The full text of the statement and signatories follows that, and there is this from the statistician Nate Silver:

The good news for Mr. Romney is that while voters often like to defy expectations in the early-going, they usually make fairly rational choices in the end. (Let me be bold enough to suggest that Mr. Gingrich, whose favorability rating is just 27 percent in an average of national surveys, does not ultimately have the stronger side of the electability argument.) Probably not since George McGovern in 1972 have voters nominated a candidate to whom the tag “unelectable” might be fairly applied. And Mr. McGovern’s victory came in part because of his superior understanding of the Democrats’ brand-new nomination system, which he had helped to design.

So Newt has favorability ratings in the cellar – he is unelectable – and he should win – or the other guy, who is equally unelectable, will be the nominee. What?

In the American Prospect, see Paul Waldman:

Predictions are dangerous, but I’m going to go ahead and make one right now: By November, the Obama campaign will have torn Mitt Romney into tiny little pieces, put those pieces into a wood chipper, and fed the dust that came out the other end to the worms. He’ll end up the kind of failed nominee that no one wants to associate themselves with when it’s over. Think Bob Dole after 1996, or Michael Dukakis after 1988.

Maybe they should nominate that newt after all. In fact consider the “Fox News Medical A-Team” – and specifically Dr. Keith Ablow – because he analyzes the newt’s marital history:

Here’s what one interested in making America stronger can reasonably conclude – psychologically – from Mr. Gingrich’s behavior during his three marriages: 1) Three women have met Mr. Gingrich and been so moved by his emotional energy and intellect that they decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with him. 2) Two of these women felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married. 3) One of them felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married for the second time, was not exactly her equal in the looks department and had a wife (Marianne) who wanted to make his life without her as painful as possible. Conclusion: When three women want to sign on for life with a man who is now running for president, I worry more about whether we’ll be clamoring for a third Gingrich term, not whether we’ll want to let him go after one.

And then there the biggest factor:

Two women – Mr. Gingrich’s first two wives – have sat down with him while he delivered to them incredibly painful truths: that he no longer loved them as he did before, that he had fallen in love with other women and that he needed to follow his heart, despite the great price he would pay financially and the risk he would be taking with his reputation. Conclusion: I can only hope Mr. Gingrich will be as direct and unsparing with the Congress, the American people and our allies. If this nation must now move with conviction in the direction of its heart, Newt Gingrich is obviously no stranger to that journey.

And Rod Dreher concludes with this:

At some point, you have to wonder when shamelessness crosses the line from character defect to psychopathology.

Maybe there is a psychopathology, although the good doctor seems to be a bit of a creepy guy just blithering. The psychopathology is clear. The right really does believe they’re victims. And Steve Kornacki explained that too:

It’s no mystery why the audience of Republicans so instinctively and passionately rallied to Gingrich’s defense. His final line was the key: that the liberal media is out to get Republicans and will stop at nothing to destroy them is an absolute article of faith on the right…. What Gingrich did brilliantly on Thursday night is to articulate this paranoid victimhood in a clear and compelling (for his audience, at least) way. It’s the same basic trick he pulled in this week’s other debate, when he connected with another strain of the persecution complex: that honest, tax-paying Republicans are the victims of a dependency class of poor people and minorities that Democrats intentionally enable.

And Steve Benen sums it up:

Conservative voters hate the media, so Gingrich exploits that hatred. Conservative voters don’t like feeling defensive about race and policy, so Gingrich tells them why they shouldn’t. His debate performances are like dopamine for the right-wing soul.

And because Gingrich understands this so well, the nature of the story shifts – it’s not about Gingrich’s scandalous personal life and his habitual adultery; it’s about those media scoundrels trying to keep Republicans down. GOP voters should feel sorry for Gingrich, the argument goes, because they feel sorry for themselves.

The fact that this article of faith is a fantasy is irrelevant. Indeed, it just takes a moment of independent thought to tear the house of cards down: was Gingrich condemning the “despicable” media when news organizations obsessed over Anthony Weiner’s personal life? How about Eliot Spitzer? Or John Edwards?

More to the point, when Gingrich was helping lead an impeachment crusade against President Bill Clinton, and the media’s obsession with a sex scandal was boundless, did Gingrich whine, “I think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country”? If he did, I missed it.

But for GOP voters in South Carolina, none of this matters. Gingrich “gets” them, and it’s why he’s now favored to win tomorrow’s primary.

But he’s still a slimy newt, not a Newton. And we have an interesting situation. Everyone knows what he is, really, but a good number of folks seem to like entirely unpleasant nasty little shape-shifters, who sneer at others, and who say they’re brilliant and only dumb-shits think otherwise. It’s very odd.

But it could have been worse. His mother could have named him Willard.

And Thursday, January 19, a few days before the South Carolina primary, was one of those days when too much was happening in Republican politics, as the day opened with the news that Rick Santorum, not Mitt Romney, may have actually won the Iowa caucuses a few weeks earlier – the Iowa Republican Party declared him the winner by thirty-four votes, not Romney by eight votes. But they’re not sure – they lost the votes from a few precincts and have no hope those votes will turn up. It’s a mess, but this sort of thing can change the dynamics of the race, in terms of momentum – who’s hot and who’s not. Has everyone been misreading Romney’s surprise victory in Iowa? There’s a lot to consider here.

But there was no time for that, as a few hours later Rick Perry quit the race and endorsed Newt Gingrich – the day after Sarah Palin endorsed Gingrich. What happened to Perry? Why didn’t he get anywhere? He was supposed to be the awesome alternative to the far-too-slick Romney. What does this mean for the party, and does this change everything? There’s a lot to consider here.

But there was no time for that, as few hours later we got the dirt on Newt Gingrich from his second ex-wife, Marianne, the one he left for his current wife, Callista, the third, who had been his mistress for many years when he was married to the second wife. And this was harsh:

Newt Gingrich lacks the moral character to serve as President, his second ex-wife Marianne told ABC News, saying his campaign positions on the sanctity of marriage and the importance of family values do not square with what she saw during their 18 years of marriage.

And the details were amazing:

Marianne said Gingrich conducted his affair from “my bedroom in our apartment in Washington” and during the time he led the impeachment proceedings against President Bill Clinton – a time when Marianne defended his ethics. She said Gingrich proceeded with the divorce only months after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, when a doctor had advised she not have any stress. At the time of the divorce, Marianne said Gingrich told her that Callista was “going to help him become president.”

There’s a lot to consider here too, but there was also an odd incident with Mitt Romney – Greg Sargent has the video clip here of a protester, a heckler really, loudly shouting a question at Romney. What does he plan to do for the Ninety-Nine Percent, given that he’s part of the One Percent?

And Romney’s response was this:

Let me tell you something. America is a great nation, because we’re a united nation. And those who are trying to divide the nation, as you’re trying to do here, and as our president is doing, are hurting this country seriously. The right course for America is not to try to divide America, and try and divide us between one and another. It’s to come together as a nation.

And if you’ve got a better model – if you think China’s better, or Russia’s better, or Cuba’s better, or North Korea’s better – I’m glad to hear all about it. But you know what? America’s right… and you’re wrong.

And Sargent comments:

Clearly this protester isn’t someone who wants to discuss inequality only in “quiet rooms.”

In all seriousness, I’d dispute the idea that these Occupy protesters constitute a major threat to America. After all, which is the greater threat to the country’s future – them, or the things they are protesting? It’s also interesting to contrast Romney’s response – in which he drew a distinction between the protesters on one side and “America” on the other – with Colin Powell’s recent suggestion that the protests are “as American as apple pie.”

I’m not defending heckling. But I did think we’d gotten past the point where a major party presidential candidate would respond to this kind of thing with the functional equivalent of “go back to Russia.” I guess not.

And Digby translates Romney:

We need to come together as a nation – so love it or leave it, commie. And that includes the Kenyan president. Republicans really do believe that the nation needs to come together – which means do what they say or shut the hell up.

I’m sure this will play well down there in South Carolina, but he’s got a way to go before he gets a standing ovation for dressing down an uppity black reporter on national television. It’s a high bar. I don’t know if Mittens has what it takes.

Yes, Gingrich got a standing ovation at a previous debate when he told that uppity black reporter that he didn’t see why anyone would be offended by him saying lazy black folks should stop demanding food stamps and just get a job. What Romney said was far less bold – but it is something to consider. If you don’t like the rich folks grabbing all the goodies and screwing everyone else over then move to Russia, you commie. Is that how things work? Do we want this guy as president? Maybe – but we should discuss this further.

In short, it was a day that called out for some perspective, and yes, there was some, like Jonathan Chait on that mess with the Iowa vote count:

Romney’s run of luck during the Republican nominating race is beginning to defy belief. Begin with the fact that Rick Santorum turns out to have won the Iowa caucuses. Finding this out now is approximately 0.001 percent as valuable as having it announced the night of the caucuses. There was an old Fed Ex commercial depicting an aging pool cleaner suddenly discovering a 20-year-old acceptance letter from Harvard he had never received, and imagining the life he could have had. That man is Santorum. He has to wonder if the Iowa vote counters were gay.

But Dan Dreher looks at the bigger picture:

Note that a few days after national Evangelical leaders endorsed Rick Santorum, Santorum’s poll numbers have declined in South Carolina. More South Carolina Evangelicals support Mormon Mitt Romney and mistress-having Newt Gingrich than support Santorum. What does this tell you about the power of the Religious Right old guard to move voters?

Maybe that one news story can be dismissed now. Iowa didn’t matter. And as for what when wrong for Rick Perry, Ross Douthat argues that it was his debate performances:

Perry was fundamentally incapable of exercising the office of the presidency. We don’t elect a debater-in-chief, but the idea, floated by George Will of all people, that debates “test nothing pertinent to presidential duties” is equally false. They establish a minimal threshold that any politician seeking an office whose chief weapon is often the bully pulpit needs to be able to clear.

And at Buzzfeed Politics the argument is that Perry just didn’t understand that running for president is hard:

Perry could have spent a couple of years as Barack Obama did: Using his elected office to conduct rolling seminars with policy experts; developing a years-long plan for national office; carefully picking the national issues with which to engage. Instead, Perry got into the race on what amounts to a lark. He leaves it badly damaged, limping home to Texas where he’ll struggle to regain the clout and swagger he projected six months ago.

But Daniel Larison says it was Perry’s foreign policy nonsense:

What hardly anyone anticipated was that Perry’s candidacy would make George W. Bush look good by comparison. No one would have confused the original candidate Bush with a foreign affairs expert, but even Bush at his most ridiculous in the 2000 campaign never blundered so badly on foreign policy questions.

And Jonathan Bernstein thinks the problem was actually George Bush:

Perhaps it was the memory of George W. Bush – before Perry entered, a lot of pundits (but not me) said that there was no way another Texas governor would be nominated so soon after Bush, and perhaps there was something to that. Perhaps Perry’s gaffes would have been excused a little more easily if they didn’t remind people, somehow, of what happened the last time Republicans decided that policy knowledge was irrelevant and nominated Bush.

There are many other assessments – but he’s gone. What does it matter now?

As for Newt Gingrich’s second ex-wife, there is this comment in the Economist:

There is a difference between reading an article about Mrs. Gingrich and watching her tell her story, in her own words, on network television, two days before a primary election. The conventional wisdom is that Mr Gingrich is already inoculated against the effects of damaging revelations about his personal life. He had better hope that wisdom holds.

But Slate’s Jessica Grose thinks not much will come of this:

Marianne’s interview may even have a positive effect on South Carolina voters. They may see her as a bitter woman who’s just attempting revenge-by-network news, and this may galvanize their wavering support for Newt. They may not even believe whatever Marianne has to say. Unless Marianne has photographic evidence of Newt drop-kicking several puppies and then peeing on Ronald Reagan’s headstone, I don’t think the interview will make much of a difference.

And John Cassidy says Gingrich lucked out on the timing here:

The ex-wife bomb was going to explode in Newt’s face at some point, and Perry’s endorsement did a good job of relegating it to the second story of the day – or third if you count the news from Iowa. … Still, Newt is going to have to react to the ABC interview, and in a fuller manner than he did this morning, when, speaking on NBC, he criticized ABC News for “intruding into family things that are more than a decade old,” and adding, “I’m not going to say anything negative about Marianne.”

But a fast and furious news day does help, as does a debate in the evening, the biggest news story of the day. And those have been getting odder, as Howard Fineman explains here:

The long string of debates have shown viewers a Republican Party in the raw, not in the words of the candidates but in the groans, boos, cheers and applause of crowds who blithely ignore halfhearted TV network admonitions to keep quiet.

The audiences have been loudly patriotic and enthusiastic about the campaign. But their outbursts have also uncovered a GOP id that cheers for Texas’ vigorous use of the death penalty; cheers repeated attacks on the national media, even when it is embodied by Fox News moderators; boos at the suggestion that the federal government, not the states, should enforce immigration laws; boos at anything less than a send-them-all-back immigration policy; boos a gay soldier who asks a question about gay rights; cheers at the mention of waterboarding and torture as a means of interrogating terrorism suspects; and boos at an African-American reporter who asks repeated questions about race, poverty, inequality and racial stereotypes.

To a degree not seen since before the days of television (and the foundational Kennedy-Nixon debates of 1960), candidate debates are now a theatrical exercise, in which the Greek chorus of the crowd plays as much of a part as the give-and-take among the candidates and the moderators.

And Fineman thinks he knows why this is so:

The changing role of the “mainstream” media is one explanation for the Vox Populi tone. Facing conservative suspicion, some networks decided to partner with Tea Party, state party or other grassroots organizations to stage the debates, and part of the co-sponsors’ price was to bring along a partisan audience. (Thursday night’s CNN debate is co-sponsored by the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.)

And Digby agrees:

Well, yeah. CNN has been especially whorish in this regard, not only sponsoring debates with the Tea Party but hiring their spokespeople as “analysts” and catering to them as Real Americans in contrast to everyone else. But nonetheless, I can’t imagine anyone expected that these audiences would be quite as gratuitously cruel, crude and bigoted as they’ve been. And it’s not just South Carolina – it’s been in Iowa, California and New Hampshire too.

This is modern conservatism stripped down to its essence. This is who they are and they aren’t embarrassed or ashamed of their throwback attitudes and retrograde politics. And why should they be? They’ve been validated by talk radio and Fox News and more recently by CNN and the entire GOP establishment. They aren’t delusional in thinking that this behavior is thoroughly acceptable and mainstream. It is.

And then there was, of course, the debate itself – the fourth, or fifth or whatever Big News Story of the Day. And it was amazing, as we see from Andrew Sullivan’s notes:

8.12 pm. Newt’s response to the open marriage is turned into a tour de force against the media. He calls John King’s questions “as close to despicable as I can imagine.” The crowd loves it. The first response as to whether he wanted to talk about it: “No, but I will.”Perfect. Then he rounds on King and gets another standing ovation. I think he may have won the primary tonight with that response.

And Romney was hammered on healthcare, and said that even if Obama’s plan was much like his in Massachusetts, he would certainly get rid of Obama’s monstrosity:

8.36 pm. Romney hasn’t yet told us what would happen when he throws 2.5 million young adults off their parents’ insurance. Romney then says that he wants market forces in healthcare, like he did in Massachusetts, and which Obama has adopted in his healthcare proposal. Note that Romney would prevent anyone without insurance who has a pre-existing condition from getting a policy. Gingrich then rouses the crowd – by attacking the president for wanting to keep young people dependent on their parents.

And there was Gingrich’s massive ego:

8.44 pm. A classic Gingrich phrase: “Mildly amazing.” Classic passive aggression from the “shy boy” who’s now so angry he explodes spontaneously. Then Newt tickles the Southern g-spot, by saying that his debating Obama will be a battle between “knowledge” and a “TelePrompTer.” I don’t think Newt realizes how his contempt and condescension toward Obama is riddled with racism.

And who pays what in taxes came up too:

9.03 pm. Ron Paul says he doesn’t want to release his tax returns because he’d be embarrassed over his low earnings. Romney then just uses desperate anti-Obama rhetoric as a way to distract. When challenged to provide full information now he balks. Man he’s having a bad night.

The reason he won’t release his taxes is because he’s paying 15 percent on income, or because he has so arranged his income to shield a huge amount of it from taxation. It’s not as if it’s about the sheer money involved – we already know it’s about $26 million a year for doing nothing.

Romney then completely flounders in response to John King’s brilliant citation of George Romney’s position on the matter. And that word – “maybe” – in answer to a direct and simple question is devastating. It not only makes him look shifty; it makes him look as if he doesn’t respect his own father’s honorable example. Just a dreadful few minutes for Romney…

I may be crazy but I think Romney loses South Carolina after tonight. And that means this thing blows wide open again.

And there’s this curious business:

9.40 pm. And now the last brutal death throe as Newt savages Romney on abortion. Mitt responds by using the phrase “scintilla of truth.” And then he has to get in the weeds of his abortion record. Every minute he speaks about this in this forum he loses votes. Then he says this: “Now is not the time to question someone’s words.”

Really? In a presidential primary? When on earth would be the right time to question someone’s words? The arrogance there is striking. “I’m not used to defending myself against attacks on my character.” Again: really? Hasn’t that been the continuing thread of his entire career?

And then it (mercifully) ends:

Paul’s summary: freedom is awesome! Gingrich: Obama is a dangerous Alinksy Manchurian candidate who can only be stopped by my world-historical genius. Romney: Obama is turning us into Europe. Santorum: I’m the real purist right-winger who can defeat Democratic incumbents – and then lose by the biggest margin in history.

And so ends a fast and furious news day, with additional comments from Josh Marshall here:

I think Newt basically won this debate and maybe the primary with the opening fusillade against John King about the Marianne tell-all interview. Shameless, hubris, chutzpah – whatever. It was pitch-perfect for his intended audience. He took control of the debate and drew down all the tension about when the debate would turn to the open marriage stuff.

Will Wilkinson sees that quite another way:

Newt’s desperate opening attack on the media for daring to listen to what his ex-wife has to say about him was enthusiastically received by the crowd, but I thought made him look like a snarling, cornered dog.

And there’s Andrew Sprung:

Newt’s little show of high moral dudgeon when asked at the opening gun about his ex-wife’s allegations of cruel, self-serving betrayal is getting rave reviews as performance art. And it was an astounding display of the Audacity of Hubris. In the space of a minute or two, Gingrich managed to blame or condemn questioner John King, the news media, his ex-wife and Barack Obama for his being forced to address the consequences of his serial adultery.

And there’s P. M. Carpenter:

Gingrich’s opening Joe McCarthy offensive – he reveled in assaulting Bill Clinton’s personal transgressions, but his are unfairly targeted by the vindictive media – was perhaps the most despicable display of grotesque demagoguery I have ever witnessed.

And on the taxes-paid matter, there’s Jonathan Cohn:

What is in Mitt Romney’s tax returns? I have no idea, but I’m starting to wonder if it’s even more damning than speculation has suggested. Romney’s answers on the tax questions were rambling and unclear, which is remarkable for a candidate who is so intellectually sharp, who prides himself on careful preparation, and who had to know the question was coming. This issue has rattled him, obviously, and I’m eager to find out why.

And Michael Medved, the second-rate movie critic turned super-duper far-right pundit, thought Santorum simply blew it:

The big loser: Rick Santorum, whose insufferably sanctimonious demeanor answered all questions about why social conservatives have begun to coalesce around Newt Gingrich rather than the former Pennsylvania senator. His decision to issue smug, full-bore attacks on every one of his rivals backfired badly.

Well, maybe so – but who knows, really? Rick Santorum did win Iowa after all, sort of, maybe. Let’s think about this.

But there were just too many breaking news stories to allow for thinking all this through. There are days like that. But a slow news day will come along soon enough. We can figure it out then.

But it seems that Congress is weighing two bills – one called Stop Online Piracy Act (the House bill) and the other called the Protect IP Act (the Senate bill) – both designed to stop online piracy. The Hollywood movie and television folks, and the recording industry, and the big cable companies, have been lobbying for such legislation. Bad guys have been posting their copyrighted material online – movies, television shows, music – and letting any download it for free. And they want to protect their intellectual property, their content. That’s what people pay for, and if anyone can just download that stuff for free they’ll be out of business soon enough. All that is lost sales. And when people grab what you spend a lot of money creating and just hand it out for free there’s no point in being in business at all.

But the devil is in the details. The House bill would allow the Department of Justice, and copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement. Then the court could bar online advertising networks and payment services from doing business with the infringing website, and bar search engines from linking to those sites, and require internet service providers to block access to such sites. Those sites would disappear. They’d be gone. And unauthorized streaming of copyrighted content would be a crime, with a penalty of five years in prison for ten infringements within six months. The Senate bill is much the same. It’s time to get serious about the theft of intellectual property.

But enabling or facilitating copyright infringement is kind of vague. If Wikipedia has an article explaining the history and development of some offshore site that offers free downloads of copyrighted material, are they enabling or facilitating copyright infringement? Does Wikipedia get penalized, or shut down? And what if some writer, whose newspaper article also appears online, quotes copyrighted material, perhaps a key quote from a movie, to make a point? Yes, doing that is covered by Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair Use – but is that changing now? And then there’s YouTube – folks upload copyrighted stuff to YouTube all the time, and often the copyright-holder fires off a note to YouTube and demands that it be taken down, and it is, immediately. That process works fine, but now we’re talking jail and shutting down YouTube permanently, for allowing such a system to exist at all. The same might apply to what folks paste on Facebook – say an amusing political cartoon. Do you shut down Facebook, for having an architecture that allows enabling or facilitating copyright infringement? How much do you want to shut down?

This wasn’t thought through very carefully. And Wikipedia and many other sites went dark for a day, protesting these bills. Stop online piracy, fine – but don’t burn down the village to save it. It was Hollywood versus Silicon Valley, and Hollywood has money to burn to get these bills passed – and that should have been that, given how things work in Washington. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA) should have passed easily. In Washington you get what you pay for, as the Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are people and money is free speech. And the “people spoke.”

But the odd thing is that hundreds of millions of people use Wikipedia and reference Google’s YouTube all the time, and the blackout woke up the carbon-based people, who also didn’t have a division of well-paid lobbyists. All the major sites going dark for a day and the others with the urgent banners and pop-ups raised a ruckus and suddenly everyone in Washington was caving:

An Internet blackout Wednesday by Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla and thousands of other sites against two anti-piracy bills in Congress has started to have its desired effect: Co-sponsors of the legislation have changed sides and other lawmakers have called for more debate before any vote.

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) – who was a co-sponsor of the PROTECT IP Act – became the latest lawmaker Wednesday to pull his support. In the House, Rep. Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.), originally a co-sponsor of the Stop Online Piracy Act, pulled his name from the list of sponsors on Tuesday. A spokesman for Rep. Lee Terry (R-Neb.), meanwhile, told the Omaha World-Herald on Wednesday that the congressman is also unable to support SOPA as written.

The widespread Internet protest is even bringing new Washington voices into the fray. Mostly silent in the debate, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) tweeted Wednesday he doesn’t back the bills.

Score one for Silicon Valley over Hollywood – or for carbon-based life forms over corporate-based life forms.

And this was cute:

At least one member of Congress will also join the blackout protest unfolding across the Web. Freshman Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), who represents the libertarian wing of the GOP, changed his Facebook profile photo to a logo of the words SOPA and PIPA crossed out and he also disabled his Facebook wall so people cannot post content to it.

“These bills give the federal government unprecedented power to censor Internet content and will stifle the free flow of information and ideas,” Amash wrote in a post on his profile. “Demand that Congress and the president keep the Internet open and free.”

There are better ways to deal with online piracy. There must be. Everyone will go back and work on that. And even the corporations said so:

Backing down from bullish support of efforts to block access to rogue sites peddling stolen movies and music, two industry leaders at the State of the Net conference Tuesday urged Congress to continue work on copyright legislation.

Paul Brigner, senior vice president and chief technology policy officer with the Motion Picture Association of America, began the session with a conciliatory note, acknowledging that so-called DNS blocking is “off the table” in the debate over the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and PROTECT IP Act in the Senate.

In fact, Brigner even stressed the movie studios’ lobby has a “commitment to technologies” that undergird the structure of the Internet – though he did stress any bill to emerge from Congress must have teeth that would actually disrupt foreign rogue websites.

DNS blocking of course refers to Domain-Name Severs – those route traffic to specific domains, and thus specific sites – and that where you can make the bad guys just disappear. You remove their domain and no one can get to them at all. And the item also cites the chief intellectual property counsel with the Global Intellectual Property Center, an arm of the US Chamber of Commerce. He’s with the guy from Hollywood. Let’s rethink this.

And here’s what’s behind that:

A spokeswoman for Google confirmed that 4.5 million people added their names to the company’s anti-SOPA petition today.

A total of 103,785 people signed We the People petitions asking the Obama Administration to protect an open and innovative internet. A petition asking President Obama to veto the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) got 51,689 signatures, while 52,096 people signed the “Stop the E-PARSITE Act” petition.

At one point today there were more than 270,000 Tweets per hour related to SOPA and PIPA, up 500 percent over Tuesday. There were over 2.4 million related tweets so far today.

The carbon-based life forms were quite active, including who you’d least expect:

A group of artists including Hollywood actors, Saturday Night Live comedians, comic-book authors, musicians and others signed an open letter opposing the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its sister bill in the Senate, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Actor Aziz Ansari from Parks & Recreation, fantasy author Neil Gaiman, and the Lonely Island comedy troupe – including comedian Andy Samberg from SNL all signed the letter, posted on the site Stop the Wall… The letter expresses “serious concerns” about the two bills, calling on Congress to exercise “extreme caution” before regulating the Internet.

It seems this stuff is tricky:

The artists say that their livelihoods in large part depend on copyright law, and that piracy is “deeply unfair.” At the same time, they point out that many of them have found new fans and connect with their audiences with services like YouTube and Twitter. They fear the new bills, if they were made law, could harm those sites and others, causing “collateral damage” to legitimate users – them.

“As creative professionals, we experience copyright infringement on a very personal level,” the letter reads. “We are grateful for the measures policymakers have enacted to protect our works.”

They’re grateful, but not dumb:

“These bills would allow entire websites to be blocked without due process…. Artists and creators like us who would be censored as a result.”

Ah, complexity – you have to love it – and the New York Times’ Jonathan Weisman adds another layer:

When the powerful world of old media mobilized to win passage of an online antipiracy bill, it marshaled the reliable giants of K Street – the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Recording Industry Association of America and, of course, the motion picture lobby, with its new chairman, former Senator Christopher J. Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat and an insider’s insider.

Yet on Wednesday this formidable old guard was forced to make way for the new as Web powerhouses backed by Internet activists rallied opposition to the legislation through Internet blackouts and cascading criticism, sending an unmistakable message to lawmakers grappling with new media issues: Don’t mess with the Internet.

As a result, the legislative battle over two once-obscure bills to combat the piracy of American movies, music, books and writing on the World Wide Web may prove to be a turning point for the way business is done in Washington. It represented a moment when the new economy rose up against the old.

And two can play at that game:

Google, Facebook and Twitter have political muscle of their own, with in-house lobbying shops and trade associations just like traditional media’s. Facebook has hired the former Clinton White House press secretary Joe Lockhart. Google’s Washington operations are headed by Pablo Chavez, a former counsel to Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and a veteran of the Senate Commerce Committee.

And for all the campaign contributions, Washington parties and high-priced lobbyists the old economy could muster, nothing could compare to the tentacles the new economy can reach into Americans’ everyday lives through sites like Wikipedia.

It’s a new world:

“The problem for the content industry is they just don’t know how to mobilize people,” said John P. Feehery, a former House Republican leadership aide who previously worked at the motion picture association. “They have a small group of content makers, a few unions, whereas the Internet world, the social media world especially, can reach people in ways we never dreamed of before.”

Yes, corporations are people, my friends – as Mitt Romney famously said. But they’re outnumbered. That is a problem that the few giant corporations – with all their money (free speech) – didn’t anticipate.

But Matthew Yglesias has an even more interesting take on this:

There’s no evidence that the United States is currently suffering from an excessive amount of online piracy, and there is ample reason to believe that a non-zero level of copyright infringement is socially beneficial. Online piracy is like fouling in basketball. You want to penalize it to prevent it from getting out of control, but any effort to actually eliminate it would be a cure much worse than the disease.

And by that he means this:

Much of the debate about SOPA and PIPA has thus far centered around the entertainment industry’s absurdly inflated claims about the economic harm of copyright infringement. When making these calculations, intellectual property owners tend to assume that every unauthorized download represents a lost sale. This is clearly false. Often people copy a file illegally precisely because they’re unwilling to pay the market price. Were unauthorized copying not an option, they would simply not watch the movie or listen to the album.

Critics of industry estimates have repeatedly made this point and argued against the inflated figures used by SOPA and Protect IP boosters. But an equally large problem is the failure to consider the benefits to illegal downloading. These benefits can be a simple reduction of what economists call “deadweight loss.” Deadweight loss exists any time the profit-maximizing price of a unit of something exceeds the cost of producing an extra unit. In a highly competitive market in which many sellers are offering largely undifferentiated goods, profit margins are low and deadweight loss is tiny. But the whole point of copyright is that the owner of the rights to, say, Breaking Bad has a monopoly on sales of new episodes of the show. At the same time, producing an extra copy of a Breaking Bad episode is nearly free. So when the powers that be decide that the profit-maximizing strategy is to charge more than $100 to download all four seasons of Breaking Bad from iTunes, they’re creating a situation in which lots of people who’d gain $15 or $85 worth of enjoyment from watching the show can’t watch it. This is “deadweight loss,” and to the extent that copyright infringement reduces it, infringement is a boon to society.

And this analogy explains this even better:

After all, things like public libraries, used bookstores, and the widespread practice of lending books to friends all cost publishers money. But nobody (I hope) is going to introduce the Stop Used Bookstores Now Act purely on these grounds. The public policy question is not whether the libraries are bad for publishers, but whether libraries are beneficial on balance.

And the benefits of forcing copyright holders to compete with free-but-illegal downloads are considerable. Yglesias argues that the pirated market has pressured the entertainment industry to create legal options – iTunes and Hulu. So the illegal competition is a valuable consumer pressure on the industry.

And there’s this:

This is not to say that we should have no copyright law or that there should be no penalties for piracy. Used book stores may slightly depress sales of new books, but they don’t threaten to destroy the entire publishing industry. Large-scale, unimpeded, commercialized digital reproduction of other people’s works really could destroy America’s creative industries. But the question to ask about the state of intellectual property policy is whether there’s a problem from the consumer side. If infringement got out of hand, we might face a bleak scenario in which bands stop recording albums and no new TV shows are released.

But we’re clearly not living in that world. There are plenty of books to read, things to watch, and music to listen to. Indeed, the American consumer has never been better-entertained than she is today. The same digital frontier that’s created the piracy-pseudo-problem has created whole new companies and made it infinitely easier for small operations to distribute their products. Digital technology has reduced the price we pay for new works and made them cheaper to create. I can watch a feature film on my telephone.

And his final judgment:

The American economy has plenty of problems, but lack of adequate entertainment options is not on the list. SOPA isn’t just an overly intrusive way to solve a problem – it’s a “solution” to a problem that’s not a problem.

Ah, so there was no problem – and two nasty bills that had been designed to solve the nonexistent problem, badly, at great cost to how people live their lives these days – and much of the internet went dark for a day. And many millions of the pesky carbon-based life forms rose up and saved the day. And corporations aren’t people after all.

Hey, it wasn’t that dark a day after all. At least that’s how it seemed from the sidelines, where some of us just watched, trying to figure out what the real issue was. And it was, in the end, the uprising of the actual people, not the fake ones. Cool.

And at the foot of those famous white chalk cliffs there are the narrow beaches – shingle beaches – rough pebbles, not sand. And back in the middle of the nineteenth century, the poet Matthew Arnold walked those beaches, or at least imagined them, and wrote his famous poem of despair, Dover Beach – where it’s twilight, and low tide, and on the French coast the light gleams and is gone, and it seems everything anyone ever believed in is gone now too:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

That’s not exactly cheery, and he ends with this:

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Bummer! But Matthew Arnold wasn’t a bluebirds-in-the-sunshine kind of guy. He is the poet of loss – cultural loss, societal loss, loss of faith – all of that. The world just isn’t what it used to be.

But many feel that way, and of course any former English teacher thinks of Dover Beach when he comes across a comment like this from David Brooks – “I sometimes wonder if the Republican Party has become the receding roar of white America as it pines for a way of life that will never return.”

Yes, Brooks slyly echoes Arnold, but that’s just a throwaway line in Brooks’ chatty notes on mixing with the crowds and the candidates on the trail in South Carolina, the week before the Republican primary there this year. Brooks doesn’t run with it. But it captures quite a bit, as odd things were happening down there, particularly in the candidates’ debate on Martin Luther King Day. And in his New York Times blog, Charles Blow covers that:

That’s the way I like to spend my Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: watching Newt Gingrich sneer at Juan Williams, a black man, for having the temerity to ask him if his condescending remarks about the work ethic of poor black people are indeed condescending…

The actual exchange was this:

Juan Williams:  Speaker Gingrich, you recently said black Americans should demand jobs, not food stamps. You also say poor kids lack a strong work ethic and proposed having them work as janitors in their schools. Can’t you see that this is viewed as at a minimum as insulting to all Americans but particularly to black Americans?

Newt Gingrich: No, I don’t see that (applause).

And then there was the real sneer:

Gingrich went on to say that the children would be “getting money, which is a good thing if you’re poor. Only the elites despise earning money.”

The world just isn’t what it used to be, of course, and Blow adds this:

The first implication here is that elites are liberals, not men like Gingrich – whose net worth The Los Angeles Times has estimated to be $6.7 million, who was a history professor, who was paid $1.6 million dollars by Freddie Mac for “advice,” and who had a half million dollar line of credit at Tiffany’s.

If Gingrich isn’t among America’s elite, the word no longer has meaning.

The second implication about those “elite” liberals, like President Obama, is even more explicit.

And Blow points out that Gingrich said that outright earlier in the evening – on the issue of how long former workers should be allowed to collect unemployment benefits:

It tells you everything you need to know about the difference between Barack Obama and the five of us: that we actually think work is good (applause). We actually think saying to somebody “I’ll help you if you’re willing to help yourself” is good (applause). And we think unconditional efforts by the best food-stamp-president in American history, to maximize dependency, is terrible for the future of this country (applause).

Blow:

The phrase “maximize dependency” is a particularly interesting one because it suggests a systematic, orchestrated campaign by the president and liberals in general to keep blacks poor and dependent on “big government” as a way of insuring their continued political support. This is a classic, right-wing, race-based argument in a new suit.

And here is Blow’s transcription of the key moment in all this:

Williams: Speaker Gingrich, the suggestion you made was about a lack of work ethic, and I’ve got to tell you that my e-mail account and twitter account has been inundated with people of all races who are asking if your comments are not intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities. We saw some of this reaction during your visit to a black church in South Carolina.

(Boos from the crowd drown Williams out as Gingrich smirks. When the boos subside, Williams continues.)

You saw some of this during your visit to a black church in South Carolina where a woman asked you why you refer to President Obama as “the food stamp president.” It sounds as if you’re seeking to belittle people.

(More boos from the crowd.)

Gingrich: Well, first of all, Juan -

(Crowd giggles. Talk about belittling people. “Juan.”)

The fact is that more people have been put on food stamps by Barack Obama than any president in American history (applause). Now, I know among the politically correct you are not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable (more applause and laughter).

Gingrich went on to say that he was going to continue to “find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn someday to own the job.”

Blow notes that also got applause “as if poor people don’t work.” Blow has pointed out before that most of them do. But that doesn’t matter:

These exchanges, and the audience’s response to them, underscore how Republicans’ gut reactions and their official rhetoric diverge, particularly in the south. They also underscore the fact that a clever politician like Gingrich, who understands this cleavage and knows how to exploit it in subtle and sophisticated ways, still has a chance to cause Mitt Romney some headaches on his presumptive march to the nomination.

And there’s history:

Gingrich seems to understand the historical weight of the view among some southern whites, many of whom have migrated to the Republican Party, that blacks are lazy and addicted to handouts. He is able to give voice to those feelings without using those words. He is able to make people believe that a fundamentally flawed and prejudicial argument that demeans minorities is actually for their uplift. It is Gingrich’s gift: He is able to make ill will sound like good will.

But maybe it’s just the receding roar of white America as it pines for a way of life that will never return – where blacks were lazy and shiftless, and not Harvard Law grads who become presidents.

But Peter Beinart offers this:

I’m sure Gingrich also sees nothing offensive in calling Obama the “food stamp” president. After all, under Obama the number of people using food stamps has gone up! So because Alan Greenspan presided over predatory lending policies by banks, perhaps we should have called him the “Shylock” chairman of the Federal Reserve. And if child molestations by priests rise on this administration’s watch, perhaps we should call Joseph Biden the “pedophilia” vice president.

Gingrich would never use those phrases, of course, because he’s familiar enough with Jews and Catholics to understand why they’d find them offensive. But for Gingrich – a veteran politician from the state of Georgia, speaking at a debate in South Carolina on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday – not to understand why calling the first African-American in the Oval Office the “food stamp” president would offend African-Americans is simply amazing. The most plausible explanation is that Gingrich inhabits a cultural and intellectual bubble. A bubble called the Republican Party.

And then there’s David Frum, who seems disgusted:

Food stamp usage is an indicator of an economy in crisis. The non-incumbent party will of course want to use that crisis to arraign the incumbent party and to argue for a change in direction: that’s normal politics.

But it’s not normal to imply that the people cast into the position where they must use food stamps to feed themselves are somehow the villain of the piece – or to depict blacks as somehow uniquely undeserving of the aid they get.

But that’s the world Gingrich knows, and he misses it – or he assumes that’s still the way things are. But with a melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, retreating, to the breath of the night-wind, that world is leaving us, and Frum asks this:

Shouldn’t a man who wants to be president of the whole country show equal understanding of the troubles and dangers facing all those who depend on government assistance: the poor as well as the old, the black as well as the white?

Well, yes – theoretically. But that’s just not Newt, and at salon.com Joan Walsh tells the tale this way:

Gingrich looked as happy about Williams’ questions as he looked deflated at the last New Hampshire debate. The former NPR analyst referenced Gingrich’s belittling comments about poor kids lacking role models with a work ethic, and the NAACP “demanding” food stamps not jobs, and asked, “Can’t you see that this is viewed at a minimum as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to African Americans?”

“No,” Gingrich said petulantly, with a slight pause. “I don’t see that.” The crowd screamed with glee. Gingrich went on to bash unionized janitors in public schools, and I realized that his student-janitor comments represent a right-wing political trifecta, bashing anti-business regulations like child labor laws, public sector unions and lazy “urban” kids. Oh, and he also got to attack elites this time around, insisting his janitor plans drew liberal disapproval because “only the elites despise earning money.”

But Williams didn’t back away. “The suggestion you made was about a lack of work ethic,” he told Gingrich. “It sounds as if you are seeking to belittle people.” The crowd booed Williams lustily, and Gingrich got a special twinkle in his eye. He looked at Williams like he was a soon-to-be ex-wife.

That wasn’t very nice. But it was apt. And as for Gingrich saying that he knows that among the politically correct, you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable (as he sees them), Steve Benen has this comment:

Even if we put aside the racial subtext, Gingrich is playing a dumb game and hoping voters won’t know the difference. The implication is that President Obama loves food stamps and wants more Americans to rely on them to “maximize dependency.” That’s ridiculous. The number of people on food stamps did go up in recent years, but that’s because there was an economic crash shortly before Obama was inaugurated. When the economy is devastated, more American families struggle and become eligible for benefits. And since the nation wants to help these families eat, the benefits are automatic. For that matter, food stamp participation was rising before Obama took office, in part because the Bush/Cheney administration “encouraged low-income people to seek aid for which they were eligible.”

If Gingrich believes food-stamp beneficiaries – nearly half of whom are children – should have less food, he should simply make the case.

But something else is going on here, which Digby explains by quoting the architect of the famous Republican “Southern Strategy” that netted them so many votes, those George Wallace votes, over all the years, and that would be the late Lee Atwater:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me – because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

Digby:

If Newtie were saying this about a white president, it would indicate sympathy or pandering to African Americans, a standard slam against liberals. But the president himself is a black man, which changes the context considerably. After all… he could have picked any number of ways to express the idea that he’s been bad for the economy: “foreclosure president”, “bailout president”, “pink-slip president”. Picking food-stamps goes directly to Atwater’s comments above, where the questioner even brings up food stamps as a way to appeal to the Wallace voter.

Atwater thought these racist appeals would be totally abstract by now, and for many people they still are. But when you have a black president in a time of economic turmoil in which millions of people have lost their jobs, using phrases like “food stamp president” isn’t abstract at all.

And then she quotes what Gingrich originally said:

More people are on food stamps today because of Obama’s policies than ever in history. I would like to be the best paycheck president in American history. Now, there’s no neighborhood I know of in America where if you went around and asked people, “Would you rather your children had food stamps or paychecks,” you wouldn’t [SIC] end up with a majority saying they’d rather have a paycheck.

And so I’m prepared, if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps. And I’ll go to them and explain a brand new Social Security opportunity for young people, which should be particularly good for African-American males – because they’re the group that gets the smallest return on Social Security because they have the shortest life span.

So, if the NAACP invites him, he’ll go to their convention and rip them a new one for being lazy bastards who demand food stamps, when, if they were more like good white folks, they’d demand jobs – and he’d scream at them for never ever wanting jobs – just food stamps. That should go over well.

As Digby says:

Food Stamps = African American. No daylight there. He couldn’t have been more clear. By Atwater’s standards, we’re going backwards.

Ah, but when you’re standing on the pebbly beach at low tide, in the fast-gathering darkness, and the Sea of Faith is receding, as are all things that once were but are no longer as they should be, you do want to go backward. You want what once was, or once should have been. Sigh.

But that Arnold poem is about how things just don’t work that way. And Newt and his Republican fans are waiting for those damned bluebirds. But there are no bluebirds in Dover. There never were.