Given that Mitt Romney is the putative front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, you'd think yesterday's implosion of Newt Gingrich's campaign would have been good news for him, but the only news Romney made yesterday was announcing that he plans to skip straw polls in Iowa, Florida, and Michigan. That's not quite a Giuliani 2008 strategy, but it still smacks of weakness, especially coming on the same day that one of your key rivals appears down for the count.
Moreover, the first name that bubbled up after the mass resignations was that of Rick Perry, who isn't even a candidate, for the simple reason that some of the resigning staffers had once worked for Perry. And, later in the day, when Georgia governor Sonny Perdue dropped his support for Gingrich, he endorsed Tim Pawlenty. Romney wasn't even on the radar screen.
Making matters worse for Romney, earlier in the week Rush Limbaugh responded to Romney's acknowledgement that climate change is real by proclaiming the death of Romney's presidential aspirations:
Bye-bye, nomination.
Bye-bye nomination.
Another one down. We're in the midst here of discovering that this is all a hoax. The last year has established that the whole premise of manmade global warming is a hoax, and we still have presidential candidates who want to buy into it!
Not to toot my own horn too loudly, but I beat Limbaugh to the punch by more than one year. It's always possible that I'll be eating crow and that one year from now Romney will have locked up the nomination, but I'd be very surprised. He's doing well in polls right now because people know his name, but if there's any enthusiasm for his campaign anywhere inside the GOP, it's damn near impossible to detect it.