A not-Mitt finally catches on? Despite his flaws, Gingrich (r.) may have a bigger lead over Romney (2nd l.) than Perry or Cain ever achieved. (Getty Images)
The Newt surge isn’t about Newt Gingrich. It’s about Mitt Romney.
Oh, it’s about Newt to the extent that he’s done an amazing job filing away his own rough edges since his campaign nearly imploded in June. At 68, Gingrich has achieved a striking emotional equilibrium in public, a condition of relaxation and ease that had eluded him during his period of greatest prominence two decades ago.
Gingrich is not a good retail campaigner and is, by all accounts, a disastrous manager, and those are the qualities that usually matter most in the early going of a presidential primary season. But he’s been the most entertaining candidate in a race dominated by TV debates.
The debates have allowed Gingrich to transform his presidential bid from a comic embarrassment, featuring a senior staff mass resignation, in the spring into something more formidable than anyone could have anticipated, including him.
A Rasmussen poll puts Gingrich 20 points ahead of Mitt Romney nationally; if other polling supports that finding in the next few days, it will constitute a staggering reversal of fortune for both men.
Perhaps even more telling is that in two concurrent polls in the key state of Florida, Gingrich is garnering support from anywhere from 41 to 50 percent of likely Republican primary voters, with Romney in the teens.
If these numbers are halfway real, Gingrich is doing twice as well as any of the other “not-Romneys” — Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain — ever did.
That’s especially remarkable because Gingrich’s weaknesses and liabilities are well-known to Republican voters, who fell madly in love him in the early 1990s, and then fell out of love with him by the time he resigned from Congress after the 1998 election — and were given many reasons over the years to continue to stay out of love with him.
It would be fair to assume that even Republicans who’ve fallen in love with him all over again know how questionable a general-election candidate Gingrich — who was not so long ago the least popular major politician in the United States — would be.
Under normal conditions, Newt Gingrich could not be a serious candidate for the Republican nomination. But he has a secret weapon — Mitt Romney.
Romney’s solid 20 to 25 percent in the polls all year hasn’t grown, no matter what else has happened. That is, his lead is a flatline. What’s more, Romney knows it, and is entirely at a loss about what to do. How else can one explain his peculiar level of agitation with Fox News’ Bret Baier during a respectful and sober interview on Wednesday?
Baier asked a series of fair and judicious questions relating to his health-care plan in Massachusetts and his shifting stance on immigration. Romney acted as though Baier were Dan Rather calling him a wimp.
He didn’t yell; yelling is not in his wheelhouse. But he had a furious smile painted on his lips as he grew flustered and annoyed.
Watching this very polished pol try to figure out how to talk about the fact that his health-care plan forced everyone in Massachusetts to buy an insurance policy, just as Obama’s health-care plan will force everyone in America to do so, makes it clear what a relatively easy time he has had of it so far.
Such questions should have been the focus of the campaign in the summer, given Romney’s front-runner status, but there were a series of weird distractions. The debates compelled media types to spread the questions around to eight or nine people, thus allowing Romney to stay conveniently on the sidelines when he wanted to be. Meanwhile, other candidates feuded, rose and fell in the bid to be the not-Romney.
Romney did well in the debates because he couldn’t be pinned down, and knew how to escape the noose when it was dangling over him. Sitting across from Bret Baier in a Florida warehouse, he couldn’t dance around his own ideological contradictions. He was trapped, and he acted that way.
It’s hard to say what Romney should have done differently this year. He has navigated the waters brilliantly, given the problematic nature of his candidacy. But he hasn’t been able to solve the problem only he can solve — the problem of Mitt Romney.