I always enjoy reading Jennifer Rubin, if for no other reason then as a window into establishment conservative thinking. Her column from Sunday,
An open letter to Republican leaders, is a plea for current party "leaders", namely:
Govs. Haley Barbour, Mitch Daniels, John Kasich, Bobby Jindal; Sens. Jon Kyl, Marco Rubio and Jim DeMint; and Reps. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and Mike Pence (R-Ind.)
to do something, anything to stop Newt Gingrich.
It seems, gentlemen, it’s time to get off your . . . er . . . time to get off the bench and into the game. It is time to make the case for winning conservatism — a conservatism attractive to centrist voters that can be translated into a reform agenda. If conservatism becomes a movement of anti-media bashing and hyperbolic rhetoric, it will cease to be a force in American politics. And if it is led by an egomaniac whose personal advancement takes precedence over any principle, the GOP will be (correctly) mocked.
So how about it? One of you can run yourself. Or you can instead collectively get behind a not-Gingrich candidate. But really, if you are to have a Republican Party to lead one day in the future, you can’t very well do nothing.
It's as good a gauge as any to get a sense of where the Republican party is at.
Nate Silver, in a particularly interesting piece, gets at it from a mechanistic point of view, separating the game plan from the “More of the Same” Romney march to the pivot of “This Time Is Different,” meaning that Newt's lack of money and organization can be compensated for by populist anger. If so, it's only because Romney is an awful candidate, reminding me of this earlier Dana Milbank column (Mitt Romney’s Al Gore problem) about the charisma-challenged former Massachusetts Governor and former front runner.
Before South Carolina, Charles Krauthammer was in despair:
How quickly has the zeitgeist changed? Wednesday, the Republican House reconvened to reject Obama’s planned $1.2 trillion debt-ceiling increase. (Lacking Senate concurrence, the debt ceiling will be raised nonetheless.) Barely noticed. All eyes are on South Carolina and Romney’s taxes.
This is no mainstream media conspiracy. This is the GOP maneuvering itself right onto Obama terrain.
The president is a very smart man. But if he wins in November, that won’t be the reason. It will be luck. He could not have chosen more self-destructive adversaries.
We've written about the coming Republican civil war for some time, as the tea party small government anti-bailout forces clash with the Wall Street big business people who run the party.
The Wall Street crowd is a lot less unhappy with bank bailouts than the tea party is, and the populist strain that Newt is riding to victory on is not making them happy. Nor is Romney's bumbling response to pressure from his right, something he has no track record of handling successfully (he certainly didn't impress anyone in 2008.)
EJ Dionne has an especially insightful column about how Newt is exploiting conservative populism to surge:
Gingrich skillfully set up his opponent to step on the landmine of class by transforming Romney from his self-cast role as a successful businessman into a heartless financier more interested in profits than in job creation.
The conventional view is that Gingrich’s critique of Bain Capital, Romney’s old company, didn’t work because Republicans dislike assaults on “free enterprise,” a phrase Romney still hopes to use as a self-protective mantra. But while Gingrich softened his attacks on Bain, he did so only after creating the context in which Romney was forced to answer query after query about his financial status, and he repeatedly fumbled questions about releasing his tax returns. Romney finally announced Sunday he’d make public his 2010 return and a 2011 estimate this week.
All this allowed Gingrich to draw a class line across South Carolina. Exit polls showed Romney carrying only one income group, voters earning more than $200,000 a year. Voters earning less than $100,000 a year went strongly for Gingrich.
But as Newt surges and Mitt stumbles, expect a lot more open warfare as the not Romney candidate sparks an "anyone but Newt" backlash from the Republican party establishment that is scared to death of losing control of the process.
It's already begun. It's not going to be pretty. And it's not going to help them win in the fall.
So it goes.