Peggy Noonan

The Romney campaign is better at dismantling than mantling. They’re better at taking opponents apart than building a compelling candidate of their own. They do not seem capable of deepening his meaning, making his stands and statements more textured and interesting. He comes across like a businessman who studied the data and came up with the formula that will make the deal.

A particular problem is that he betrays little indignation at any of our problems and their causes. He’s always sunny, pleasant, untouched by anger. This leaves people thinking, “Excuse me, but we are in crisis. Financially and culturally we fear our country is going down the drain. This guy doesn’t seem to be feeling it. So why’s he running? Maybe he thinks it’s his personal destiny to be president. But if the animating passion of his candidacy is about him, not us, who needs him?”

Mitt Romney’s aides are making the classic mistake of thinking the voters want maturity, serenity and a jolly spirit. What they want is a man who knows what time it is, who has a passion to reform our country, and who yet holds these qualities within a temperament that is mature, serene and jolly. Newt Gingrich has half the package: He has a passion to reform, but it exists inside a crazy suit. Mitt has no particular passion within an obviously sane suit.

Which leads to Rick Santorum. Nobody in the conservative base hates Rick. Newt is hated by many and Mitt by some. Mr. Santorum is liked. He has real indignation about what’s happened to America, and he brings passion to his ideas about reform. He’s got little money, little organization—there’s no broad assumption he can pull it off. And by the time the Romney campaign is done dismantling him, he may have some people who hate him. But this will only underscore the Romney campaign’s reputation for destroying, not creating. And nobody loves a Death Star.

Newt’s not done and could rise again. I keep thinking of what a sage old pol, a veteran former GOP governor, said two weeks ago. He turned to me in conversation and said, “By the way, don’t call it a brokered convention. That’s what the media and the Democrats will call it because it implies there are brokers. Call it a contested convention because that’s what it will be, contested.” Could it really come to that? The odds, he said, are still way against it. “But they’re probably the best in my lifetime.”

[DINGBATS]

Let’s turn to low turnout in the Republican races. Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri this week were all down, Iowa and New Hampshire were flat, Florida, that Little America, was down almost 15%. All this in a volatile race, in a time of crisis.

What are the reasons? Maybe it’s the increasing negativity of the campaign, maybe it’s widespread dissatisfaction with the field. Maybe it’s that, and more.

There are some small indicators something else may be going on. Cable news ratings, which should spike in an election year, and which indicate interest on both the left and the right, are relatively flat, with mild increases here and there. Broadcast evening news ratings continue their gradual decline. One network anchor, on being urged to capture more of the joy and ferocity of the Republican contest, sighed. “Every time we show those guys, our numbers go down.” A major website operator tells me people aren’t clicking on political stories.

But it’s not confined to the Republican side. Look at President Obama’s State of the Union numbers. That speech famously blankets all television and radio networks. His first speech to a joint session of Congress, in February 2009, drew 52 million viewers. A year later the State of the Union had an understandable fall-off to about 48 million. In 2011, another fall: 43 million watched. A few weeks ago his 2012 State of the Union drew just 38 million. From 52 to 38: That’s quite a decline. And again, during an continuing crisis and in a presidential election year. As for the president’s interviews and other speeches, well, when was the last time you heard someone ask excitedly, “Did you hear what Obama said?”

Whose numbers are up? The NFL’s.

Maybe the story the political class is missing is not “They don’t like the Republican field,” or “They don’t like Obama.” Maybe the story is that people are tuning out altogether. Maybe they’re bored with politics, and most especially with politicians. Maybe they don’t think our government can’t solve anything. Maybe, even, our political class has done such a good job depicting the crisis we’re in that the American people, with their low faith in institutions, think nothing, really, can be done about it. So let’s check out. Let’s watch the game.

[DINGBATS]

An update on the furor surrounding ObamaCare and the Catholic Church. The Obama White House was surprised by the pushback but hopes it will blow over. Their thinking: The Catholics had their little eruption, letters were read from pulpits, the pundits came out, and then the pols. But life goes on, new issues arise, we’ll hunker down, it’ll go away. Meanwhile, play for time. Send David Axelod out to purr about possible new negotiations.

That would be a trap for the church. Any new talks would no doubt go past Election Day, at which time, if the president wins, he’ll be able to give the church the back of his hand.

The short-term White House strategy is to confuse and obfuscate, to spread a thick web of untruths about the decision and let opponents exhaust themselves trying to fight from under the web.

The church must be resolute and press harder. Now is the time to keep pounding—from the pulpit, in all Catholic publications and media, in statements and meetings. For how long? As long as it takes. The president and the more radical part of his base clearly thought the church was a paper tiger, a hollow shell, an entity demoralized and finished by the scandals of the past 20 years.

Now is the time for the church to show it’s alive. How?

• Educate. Unconfuse the issues. Take a different aspect of the ruling and its deeper meanings every week, and pound away.

• Reach out. This is bigger than the Catholic Church. Go to the mainline Protestant churches, evangelicals, synagogues and mosques. Plead for vocal, public and immediate support: “If the church is forced to go against its conscience, religious liberty in America is not safe. If religious liberty is not safe, you are not safe.”

• Know your people. Mr. Obama carried secular Catholics overwhelmingly in 2008. But churchgoing Catholics were evenly split, 51% to 49% for John McCain. These are the voters the president could lose by huge margins over the ruling. And he will, if they fully understand it. Such a loss could determine the 2012 outcome. He knows it, you know it. Have faith in the people in the pews. Give it to them straight, week after week, and they’ll back the church overwhelmingly. The White House is watching. Pound away.

• Call for Democratic support. Religious liberty should not be a partisan issue. Republicans have come to the fore, but it’s better for the church if Democrats do too. They’re starting to come over. Make clear from the pulpit that members of both parties are absolutely essential in this fight. “All hands on deck.”

You can win. Keep the faith. Literally: Keep it.

What a faux pas, how inept, how removed from the essential realities of America. Yes, I’m referring to President Obama.

But let’s do Mitt Romney first.

He’s taken heavy fire for his statement, in an interview with CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, in which he said, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.”

Every criticism has been true. It was politically inept, playing into stereotypes about Republicans and about his own candidacy. It was Martian-like in its seeming remove from the concerns of everyday citizens. We’re in a recession here! It was at odds both with longtime American tradition and with rising conservative concern over the growth and changing nature of what used to be called the underclass.

So: inept.

Advice? Treat the mistake as an opportunity. First, admit the blunder. A political communications expert would add, “And move on.” But don’t. Use this mistake, and others—”I like being able to fire people”—as the basis for a true, thoughtful and extended statement that will allow people more deeply into the mind of Mitt Romney. Call it “Let me tell you about my gaffes.” Use it to deepen people’s understanding of your views not only on poverty but on the whole American picture.

Three reasons to do this. First, the networks, in their Romney gaffe reels, will have to use some of the lengthier address for the appearance of fairness. Second, it’s good to dwell on this problem now because Democrats want it to go away. That’s because they want to bring it back fresh in the fall, when people have forgotten it. The third reason has to do with still-widespread conservative unease with what Mr. Romney really thinks and why he thinks it. He should set himself to giving a fuller picture of his thoughts.

[DINGBATS]

Which leads us to the Republican establishment, and how it feels about Mr. Romney.

That establishment is not what it was decades ago, when it was peopled by seasoned veterans who made decisions and got people in line. That’s gone. What has replaced it is a loose confederation of groups and professionals—current and former elected officials and their staffs, activists, the old party machinery, bundlers and contributors, journalists, radio and TV stars, mostly but not exclusively based in Washington.

The great myth of the election year is that they are for Mitt Romney. They are not. They are almost all against Newt Gingrich because they know him, they’ve worked with him. But they mostly do not love Mr. Romney.

The establishment didn’t get its candidate: Mitch Daniels or Jeb Bush, John Thune or Paul Ryan, Haley Barbour or Chris Christie. It is, secretly, as bereft as some of the grassroots.

Why doesn’t the establishment like Mr. Romney? Because they fear he won’t win, that he’ll get clobbered on such issues as Bain, wealth, taxes. Because when they listen to him, they get the impression he’s reciting lines his aides came up with in debate prep. Because if he wins, they’re not sure he’ll have a meaning or mandate.

But mostly because his insides are unknown to them. They don’t know what’s in there. They fear he hasn’t absorbed any philosophy along the way, that he’ll be herky-jerky, unanchored, merely tactical as president. And they think that now of all times more is needed. They want to reform the tax system and begin reining in the entitlement spending that is bankrupting us. They don’t read him as the guy who can perform those two Herculean jobs, each of which will demand first-rate political talent. And shrewdness. And guts.

Mr. Romney doesn’t have the establishment in his pocket. He needs to win it. All the more reason for him to get serious now. If he is serious.

This is the authentic sound of the establishment: At a gathering in Washington last week, I spoke to a grand old man of the party who enjoyed high and historic appointed position. “Where is the Republican Party right now?” I asked.

“Waiting for Jeb,” he said. Waiting for rescue.

That’s what Mitt Romney’s up against, not Newt.

[DINGBATS]

But the big political news of the week isn’t Mr. Romney’s gaffe, or even his victory in Florida. The big story took place in Washington. That’s where a bomb went off that not many in the political class heard, or understood.

But President Obama just may have lost the election.

The president signed off on a Health and Human Services ruling that says under ObamaCare Catholic Institutions—including its charities, hospitals and schools—will be required by law, for the first time ever, to provide and pay for insurance coverage that includes contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization procedures. If they do not, they will face ruinous fines in the millions of dollars. Or they can always go out of business.

In other words, the Catholic Church was told this week that its institutions can’t be Catholic anymore.

I invite you to imagine the moment we are living in without the church’s charities, hospitals and schools. And if you know anything about those organizations, you know it is a fantasy that they can afford millions in fines.

There was no reason to make this ruling—none. Except ideology.

The conscience clause, which keeps the church itself from having to bow to such decisions, has always been assumed to cover the church’s institutions.

Now the church is fighting back. Priests in an estimated 70% of parishes last Sunday came forward to read strongly worded protests from the church’s bishops. The ruling asks the church to abandon Catholic principals and beliefs; it is an abridgement of the First Amendment; it is not acceptable. They say they will not bow to it. They should never bow to it, not only because they are Catholic and cannot be told to take actions that deny their faith, but because they are citizens of the United States.

If they stay strong and fight, they will win. This is in fact a potentially unifying moment for American Catholics, long split left, right and center. Catholic conservatives will immediately and fully oppose the administration’s decision. But Catholic liberals, who feel embarrassed and undercut, have also come out in opposition.

The church is split on many things. But do Catholics in the pews want the government telling their church to contravene its beliefs? A president affronting the leadership of the church, and blithely threatening its great institutions? No, they don’t want that. They will unite against that.

The smallest part of this story is political. There are 77.7 million Catholics in the United States. In 2008 they made up 27% of the electorate, about 35 million people. Mr. Obama carried the Catholic vote, 54% to 45%. They helped him win.

They won’t this year. And guess where a lot of Catholics live? In the battleground states.

There was no reason to pick this fight. It reflects political incompetence on a scale so great as to make Mitt Romney’s gaffes a little bitty thing.

There was nothing for the president to gain, except, perhaps, the pleasure of making a great church bow to him.

Enjoy it while you can. You have awakened a sleeping giant.

This is the most volatile and tumultuous presidential primary race of our lifetimes. Look at these numbers. In June 2011, in South Carolina, Mitt Romney led Newt Gingrich by 15 points, 27% to 12%, in a Public Policy Polling survey. Two months later, PPP had Rick Perry leading Mr. Romney by 20 points, 36% to 16%, with Mr. Gingrich running third. In early December Mr. Gingrich vaulted to the top, leading Mr. Romney by 23 points (CNN). A month later Mr. Romney led by 18.

Last Saturday, South Carolina voted. Mr. Gingrich won in a 12-point blowout.
Jump to Florida. In late November, Mr. Gingrich led Mr. Romney by 30 points. (PPP). In mid-January, Mr. Romney led by 26 points (Sunshine State News). A week later Mr. Gingrich was back on top by nine (Rasmussen). This Thursday Rasmussen said Romney was leading Gingrich by eight, 39% to 32%.

This isn’t “different polls say different things,” this is tumult, and it’s left almost everyone in politics scratching their heads: What the heck is going on? An unusually high number of voters have reported making up their minds late, just before the voting. Never before have three different candidates won the first three races in a GOP nomination contest.
We are in uncharted territory.

[DINGBATS]

What it appears we are seeing is a new iteration of the age-old split between the grassroots and a perceived GOP establishment. It is like split between the Goldwater forces and the Eastern Rockefeller wing of the party in the 1960s. It is an update of the split between the Buchanan brigades and the establishment in 1992. It is the old True Conservative versus Ambivalent Accomodationist split.

Thursday’s debate: Romney had a better night than Gingrich.

Actually it’s more a wound than a split, and the only one who healed it in our time was Ronald Reagan. He did it in three ways. He did it by being definitive: We believe in this and this, not that. He healed it by winning: Two landslides told everyone in the party who’d resisted him what time it was. And he healed it by governing well: By 1989, everyone who’d fought him within the party had to look at the results of what he’d done—the comeback of the U.S. economy, the fall of the Berlin Wall—and admit that it worked.

The healing lasted roughly a quarter-century, until the second Bush administration, when everything began to come apart again. The GOP was now a party split on spending, immigration, a dozen other issues. It was rocked even more than it knew by the crash of 2008, and further sundered.

The question now is whether the old split, the old wound, is tearing open in a deeper and more definitive way, in the first real presidential contest since the great healing went fully by the boards.

[DINGBATS]

The issue of Ronald Reagan himself, in the Florida primary, has been a sideshow and mildly absurd. Newt says he is Reagan’s successor, that he helped him rout the Soviet Union and create 16 million jobs. The Romney forces say Newt attacked Reagan, called him a failure, he’s nothing like the Gipper.

Newt is not Reagan, Mitt is not Reagan, and, by the way, President Obama isn’t Truman. People are themselves. They live in the era they live in.

One way Newt is unlike Reagan is that Reagan was a constructive figure, not destructive. If Newt is the donkey who knocked down the barn, Reagan’s the guy who’d build it. He wasn’t driven by need, and anger wasn’t his fuel. He was equable, even-tempered, personally content. Martin Anderson always said Ronald Reagan didn’t need high office to feel good, Ronald Reagan dated Lana Turner. He already thought he was quite a fella.

As for the history, Newt was new to Washington and had been in Congress two years, a back-bencher, when Reagan was sworn in. He had almost nothing to do with Reagan’s achievements. He was a politician looking for attention. He talked a lot, took to the floor a lot, and was sometimes impressive. He was excited by C-Span: It showed America he was there. Usually he said things that were supportive of conservative aims, sometimes not; sometimes he lauded Reagan, sometimes not. Henry Hyde summed up the bopping of Newt’s brain with a uniquely conservative putdown: “Him and his new ideas—there are no new ideas!”

Mr. Gingrich in the 1980s was hungry and ambitious, and no one had prepared the way for him, which is actually his firmest claim on outsiderness: he was no fortunate son. He was on his own, self-invented; he made the mistakes young men make when no wise, sophisticated hand is available to guide them.

It was after Reagan left that Mr. Gingrich became a leader, spearheading the insurgency that resulted in the 1994 Republican takeover of the House. It was a breathtaking achievement. It was what inspired Nancy Reagan’s statement that her husband’s torch was passed to him. But he could not govern, could not build the barn, and was ousted four years later.

During those years he concluded the growth area within the party was a critique of Reaganism from the right, and sometimes the left. So that’s where he was. By the mid-2000s, when Reagans dominance as an iconic GOP figure was fully established, Mr. Gingrich was aligning himself with him fully and enthusiastically, in films and books. He is an entrepreneur; it was where the business was.

Mr. Gingrich does not disdain Reagan and surely never did. He says he loves him and he probably does, in the way that people come to love what they need to love. They come up with reasons!

But the point is Newt senses the lay of the land. If a new and modern strain of Rockefeller Republicanism looked like it was about to take hold, he’d see the virtues in that. Right now the growth area looks like it’s in opposition to elites and establishments. So that’s where he is.

[DINGBATS]

To Thursday night’s debate, the 19th of the primary year.

First, Rick Santorum’s mother for president—93 years old and she sprang from her seat beaming like the sun when her son called out her name.

It was a good night for Mr. Romney. He seemed stronger, more in command than in the recent past, polished. Actually he looked tall again. It was OK for Mr. Gingrich, no great moments—they’re almost expected of him now, especially when the audience is allowed to applaud—but fine. He seemed sluggish and off his game the first 45 minutes, but sort of caught up.

Mr. Santorum had a great night, scoring points on health care and South America, and giving a silent thumbs up to answer a time-wasting question. Ron Paul had three good lines. On his health records, he warned Wolf Blitzer: “There are laws against age discrimination.” On whether we should return to the moon: “Maybe we should send the politicians to space.” On the battle of the blind trusts he gave voice to the thoughts of a grateful nation: “That subject really doesn’t interest me a whole lot.”

Mr. Gingrich decried “the Romney attack machine.” Mr. Romney more or less let it go, which was wise since he’s got quite an attack machine there.

One senses Mr. Romney stabilized his situation. But who knows? The first big sound at the debate came from the audience. At first it sounded like boos, but it wasn’t, it was a chant. “Newt, Newt, Newt!”

We have entered a new phase, the Republican primary as John Grisham novel. Secret offshore bank accounts, broken love, the testimony of anguished ex-wives: “He wanted an open marriage.” A battered old veteran emerges from the background and, in his electoral death throes, provides secret information—“I’m for Newt”—that he hopes will upend a dirty, rotten establishment. A vest-wearing choir boy turns out to have been the unknown winner of that case back in Iowa. And all this against the backdrop of a mysterious firm that moves in and destroys communities—”When Mitt Romney came to town . . .”—while its CEO pays nothing in taxes.

If you are a Republican who hates a mess, or if you are a member of that real but elusive and hydra-headed thing, the GOP establishment, you are beside yourself with anxiety and unhappiness. You think: “They’re losing this thing! They’re going to limp out of South Carolina, they’ll limp through Florida, they’re killing each other and killing the party’s chances. How will they look by the fall? What are independents going to think of the guy we finally put up? We all know politics ain’t beanbag, but it’s not supposed to be a clown-car Indy 500 with cars hitting the wall and guys in wigs littering the track!”

There’s been a lot of damage. We lose sense of it in the day to day, but in the aggregate it’s going to prove considerable.

[DINGBATS]

Rick Perry didn’t have much of a following, but he had some points on the board, and a few points could make a difference. His endorsement of Newt Gingrich was timed for maximum assistance and maximum damage. As an early-afternoon story it might help diminish the impact of the revelations of Marianne Gingrich, whose testimony about her marriage to the former speaker would break on ABC that evening. Mr. Perry’s words of support would follow that story on all the networks, or be twinned with it. And the endorsement was given less than 48 hours before the polls opened in South Carolina, enough time to be fresh yet fully absorbed.

Mr. Perry’s speech was strong. He didn’t go out wan and sad but with impact, looking as if a burden had fallen away. It was a cliché within an hour, but only because it was true: If he had talked with that kind of fluidity, conviction and sincerity throughout the campaign, he’d be getting endorsements now, not giving them.

“I ran for president because I love America,” he said. “What’s broken in America is not our people but our politics.” Washington should be “humbler.” He has never believed “the cause of conservatism” is embodied in any one person. The mission for the GOP is “not only to defeat President Obama” but to elect someone who can make the changes that are needed. “There is no viable path forward for me,” but there is another candidate who is “a conservative visionary” who can “transform” our country. He’ll tell Washington interests “to take a hike.” He’s a conservative who means it. He’s Newt Gingrich.

This was a direct shot at Mr. Romney’s biggest vulnerability: Deep down, conservatives are not certain he is one of them. Deep down they’re not sure he has a deep down. While Perry was talking, a Rasmussen poll came out showing Mr. Gingrich in the lead in South Carolina for the first time in weeks. He had 33%, Mr. Romney 31%, Ron Paul 15% and Rick Santorum 11%.
Other polls have Mr. Romney in the lead, some solidly so. If Newt is rising, if he has real momentum, what are the reasons? One obvious answer: his strong debate Monday night. He was Good Newt—creative, bold, in command of the issues and of himself—and not Bad Newt, the whiny, slightly mad one. An obvious reason for Mr. Romney’s decline is the fallout from the attacks on Bain Capital, his old firm. Those attacks have not been ringingly answered, except by Dan Henninger in these pages. And there would be damage from the issue of Mr. Romney’s personal tax returns (why didn’t the Romney campaign see this coming?), the comparatively low income taxes he’s apparently paid, and revelations that he has kept offshore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. None of these issues has been answered or explained at any length, and all are good news for the Obama campaign, whose 2012 themes will center on the rich versus the rest.

It’s possible that a solid week of pounding on these issues is dinging the main argument South Carolina Republicans give for supporting Romney: that he is the most electable candidate.

[DINGBATS]

But everything shifts in this shifting race, and roughly a third of Saturday’s primary voters say they’re not certain how they’ll vote. And so a word on the Marianne Gingrich interview. Newt hit Mr. Romney hard on Bain, which became transmuted into a question of personal character, and now he is getting hit hard by his former wife. It has long been assumed within the political-media complex that the story of his second marriage is old news, that nobody’s interested. But to a lot of people—some of them evangelicals, some of them women, some of them young or newly interested in politics—it will be news. For them, the particulars of the story as she tells it have the potential to be explosive. The argument that Mrs. Gingrich already said most of it ago two years ago to Esquire is off point. She’s never said it on television, at a high-stakes moment, in her own way and in her own words. That will make it more compelling and dramatic. It will make it new. It is going to have an impact.

[DINGBATS]

We close with two thoughts, one bleak. This space has long supported the existence of the GOP debates. They’ve done their job of winnowing, showcasing candidates’ strengths, allowing them to shine if they’re capable of shining. They’ve toughened each candidate, preparing the winner to meet the president in the fall. He’s just endured three years of constant deference and soft questions. It will be interesting to see him get in the ring on fight night with a guy who’s been there for a year. But I didn’t understand how valuable the debates had been until a longtime GOP operative told me her view: “Without the debates we’d have nothing but the Super PACs.” Without them, most voters would have nothing but information filtered through media, and propaganda from Super PACs. This from a woman who’s exactly the kind of person who contributes to Super PACs.

The bleak thought: Mr. Obama this week blocked Keystone pipeline, a decision that means tens of thousands of jobs lost, new energy possibilities rejected. It is a decision so bad, so political, that it amounts to a scandal. But it just sort of eased through the news, blurrily. All the cameras were focused on the Republicans, who were distracted by their own dramas. They did not, together, in one voice, protest, as they should have. Keystone happened while they were busy looking like the Keystone Kops.

What’s happening out there on the trail is a great story. But it’s not a good story. And the past few days it didn’t feel like a story that was going to end well.

Columbia, S.C.

Newt’s a battering ram who’ll wind up in splinters, but he can do plenty of damage along the way. The candidate people immediately speak of here when talk turns to the GOP primary is a man named Romneybut. “I like Romney but I could change my mind.” “I like Romney but I like Santorum too.” People take a kind of chagrined pride in the state’s past reputation for crazed, malice-laden, bare-knuckle political brawling; they look away and laugh if you speak of Lee Atwater’s old charge that a Democratic candidate had a “psychotic neurosis” and received electroshock therapy “hooked up to jumper cables.”

But that was two generations ago, the old world. South Carolina’s modern now, fully wired, demographically on the move. They still open up the first meeting of the statehouse GOP caucus with unifying prayer—”My wife’s being operated on at 2 p.m. today, I’d ask you to pray that the Lord guide the surgeon’s hands,” “Bob Smith died in a car accident last weekend, please pray for his family”—but some people are looking down not only with reverence. They’re also checking their BlackBerrys.

No one knows what’s going to happen, because South Carolina takes pride in being prickly. They have a 30-year history of picking presidents, and nobody tells them who to pick. “New Hampshire thinks it’s independent? Our great-great-great-great-grandfathers fired on the flag!” That’s state GOP chairman Chad Connelly, sunny and garrulous. He’s building up excitement and running out of breath doing it. “This thing is wide open. It’s a battle royal. People are undecided. The debates will be decisive. South Carolina is the focal point of the world the next 10 days!” It is a great talent in life to spin relentlessly and not at all alienate the spinee.

All that said, if Mitt Romney wins here, he will win the nomination. And it’s likely he will win here—that Romneybut will become Romney. But it’s a real question how much damage will be done to him along the way.

[DINGBATS]

People don’t embrace Mr. Romney, they circle back to him. They consider him, shop around for something better, decide the first product they looked at will last longest and give value, and buy.
The non-Mitt candidates continue, fracturing the conservative vote. Because no one dropped out after New Hampshire, no consolidation of the non-Mitt vote can begin here and get in the way of the buying. Newt Gingrich, tops in state polls a few weeks ago, has damaged himself by the means and manner of his campaign. Rick Santorum will have appeal, but he’s voted against right-to-work legislation, and South Carolina is a big right-to-work state. Ron Paul will have appeal too, not only in the coastal cities but among active and retired military personnel, who’ve been fighting the wars the past 10 years.

Mr. Romney has the support of Gov. Nikki Haley, 39, an Indian-American who rose with the Tea Party and won after receiving Sarah Palin’s endorsement. She backed him early, to signal to her supporters that it was OK. In an interview this week, she said the issues are “jobs, spending and the economy. Everyone in South Carolina knows somebody who’s out of work.” State unemployment is 9.9%, higher than the national average. “I’ve killed myself to bring jobs here. I need a president I can work with.” “I don’t want anyone tied to Washington. I have a great respect for business people to create jobs and make tough decisions. . . . Romney can do that.”
Mr. Romney has national organization that he can plug in locally, and money. And now momentum, which will prove crucial.

The chief argument here for Mr. Romney has been that he is electable, the most rightward viable candidate. That was powerfully reinforced by his victory in New Hampshire. “If he has a 25% ceiling, how come he just won with 39%?” His victory speech, more like an acceptance speech, was powerful: he finally brought all the strands together. This is what my candidacy means, this is what I’ll do. That speech will have positive reverberations.

[DINGBATS]

South Carolina continues to evolve. Retirees from the North increasingly populate the coastal towns and cities. They are economic conservatives, sympathetic to business. The top of the state, the Greenville/Spartanburg area is heavily Christian conservative, but less so. “It was the knot on the Bible Belt, now it’s the knot on the fiscal belt,” says a Romney backer. International companies, and their networks of suppliers, have had an impact.

The evangelical vote is split, and the economic calamity of the last four years has, in a way, become a values issue itself. Efforts to help the poor and the unborn, to have and raise children, to keep families together, are not made easier by a stressed economy. Social and economic issues are blending.

This is what you pick up about Mr. Romney in South Carolina: He is presentable, electable and a businessman. He knows what a spreadsheet is. He made money. He can help set up the circumstances where everyone else makes money too. And he is a conservative. He has the vibrations of a Massachusetts moderate—Newt isn’t wrong about that—because he was a Massachusetts moderate. But now he holds conservative positions. He’s not going to change them again, because you get only one chance to change in politics, not two. He is, therefore, perversely reliable. He’s not going to get into the White House and announce: “By the way, I’m pro-choice again, ha.”

[DINGBATS]

The factor the media expected to hurt Romney—evangelicals will, en masse, reject the Mormon—isn’t likely. Part of the reason is the big blend: Bias feels like self-indulgence in a time of crisis. What could hurt him, what actually promises to, is the Bain Capital attacks, the half hour minidocumentary and the commercials derived from its message. The documentary is first-rate agitprop: Mr. Romney has a nice smile but in real life he’s a pious, new-class operator who swoops in, buys companies, breaks them up, lines his pockets, and calls it freedom. Might this gain traction in a high-unemployment state with a long populist tradition? I think so. You should see the faces of the people who talk about being laid off.

It’s not clear whether Mr. Gingrich will air the documentary in South Carolina. If he does, he’s going for broke.

Those who run Romney campaign would be fools not to answer it, quickly and substantively, not only with a defense of free enterprise but with a defense of Bain. Are claims in the ad not true? Say it. Is there a case that more jobs were created by Bain than lost? Make it—with workers in front of workplaces that now exist because Bain existed.

A full-throated, detailed defense of Bain that is also a defense of economic freedom and free markets might not only benefit Mr. Romney. It just might help valorize, or rather revalorize, the reputation of capitalism, which has taken a beating the past few years and not recovered. That, actually, might be a public service.

The Obama campaign wanted to launch its Bain attack in the fall. Mr. Romney can face the attack now, head on, and begin not inoculating himself from the issue but exhausting it.

Mitt Romney’s victory in Iowa is underappreciated. It was a well-run campaign and no one thought the day of the Ames straw poll, in August, that it would happen. The victory of Rick Santorum is a pundit-humbler: No one saw that coming even six weeks ago, except perhaps Mr. Santorum.

The Iowa results almost perfectly reflect the Republican Party, which, roughly speaking, is split into three parts—libertarians, social conservatives and moderate conservatives, who went for Ron Paul, Mr. Santorum and Mr. Romney respectively. The three parts of the party have been held together by agreement on three big issues: spending (which must be cut), taxing (which must be reformed), and President Obama (who must be removed).

These three issues have force. Taxes and spending are the ties that bind, the top and bottom crust that holds the pie together. They’re the reason the party is still the party, and not the splinter groups. The third element, Mr. Obama, is this year equally important.

But there’s no denying the Republicans are in a brawl, and it is becoming ferocious.

In New Hampshire the question isn’t whether Mr. Romney is in the lead—he is, famously. A poll Wednesday from Suffolk University and WHDH-TV had Mr. Romney with 43%, trailed by Mr. Paul at 14%, Newt Gingrich at 9% and Mr. Santorum at 6%. The coming week will answer two questions and begin to answer a third. First, how committed to Mr. Romney are those who tell pollsters they support him? If less than firmly, the other candidates will succeed in doing what they’re trying to do, bleed his lead. Second, how much does Mr. Romney have to win by to be called the winner? Is 15 points enough? Twenty? If he wins by 10, did he “lose”? Third, how much damage is going to be done on the way to the convention?

Right now Mr. Romney’s taking a beating. He’s everyone’s target, and in a way that speaks of something beyond the usual campaign ferocity. There’s something else going on, a taunting: “If you’re so inevitable how come I’m not afraid of you?” Newt Gingrich, angry little attack muffin, called Mr. Romney a liar. A Santorum fund-raising letter this week called Mr. Romney a “bland and boring career politician.” A radio ad for Mr. Paul: Nominating Romney is “a recipe for defeat.” Newt, in an interview: “He’s not truthful.”

In a conference call in Manchester Thursday, Bob Smith and Bob McEwen, who formerly served as a New Hampshire senator and an Ohio congressman respectively, said Mr. Romney was unacceptable to 75% of the GOP. Mr. Smith associated Mr. Romney with establishment types who’d opposed Ronald Reagan: “He’s not a true conservative.” Mr. Smith said Newt has been called “unfit and unstable” by Romney surrogates, and that Mr. Romney had “mocked” the former speaker in Iowa. Mr. McEwen said Mr. Romney represents the “failed wing,” of the party: “A Massachusetts moderate is not going to make the clarion call.”

The campaign ads have been tough too, the best a refound commercial John McCain did in 2008, which calls Mr. Romney a “Masterpiece Theatre”-level flip-flopper. A question, however, is how much prime-time air time is left to buy on TV stations in New Hampshire and neighboring Massachusetts.

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Rick Perry, who’s not in New Hampshire, is a confusing guy. The night he tanked, as expected, in Iowa, he said he was going home to “reassess.” That made sense. His campaign hadn’t worked. It may work in four or eight years, but it’s not going to work now. So you go home, and you put some time into a serious, prepared speech about why you ran, what it meant, and why you’re leaving. It’s so good it makes everyone who wasn’t nice to you, including the press, feel bad. And you’re gracious, and you smile, and you say you’ll consider endorsing down the road, but now you’re going to go back to the work of the state you love. And then you make all the candidates come to you. And you greet them affably on the porch and sit down in white wicker chairs and have iced tea. And at the end, at some clever moment, you back the one you’re backing. By the August convention, you’re a new man. People are nice to you and you work very hard and very publicly for the party’s nominee and secretly hope he fails so you can go again in 2016 and get it right this time, and show your enemies.

Instead, Mr. Perry tweeted the morning after Iowa that he was going into South Carolina.

Maybe he is going to roar back down South, gut his way through and pick up the pieces when everyone’s battered. But maybe he’s not seeing that every few cycles the political gods choose someone who’s got everything—attractive, lots of money, a big state, a machine of sorts, or at least a bunch of operatives and hangers-on—and embarrass him. Just for fun. Because it pleases them. The most famous case was John Connally, also a Texas governor. Do not fight the gods! The gods are fickle! They change their minds! But only later.

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Rick Santorum has a lot going for him, most especially a deep identification with and caring for the working class, for the displaced and unempowered people who once worked in steel mills and factories and have seen it all go away. He is a Catholic who sees society not as an agglomeration of random Randian individualists but as part of a community, part of a whole. He cares about the American family and walks the walk. All of this has such appeal! His weak spots are supposedly money, organization, a flinty personality and past inflammatory comments. Fair enough. But his weakest spot is foreign policy, where he is not thoughtful but reflexively hard-line. It is one thing to say, as all candidates do and must, that America must be strong, well defended, ready for any challenge. It is another to be aggressive, to be too burly, to be all George W. Bush and no George H.W. Bush. I’m not sure that’s going to play so well in 2012 with New Hampshire Republicans.

We end with a New Hampshire memory and a thought on how time moves. In 1988, in the furious New Hampshire race between Vice President Bush and Bob Dole, stakes were high. Mr. Dole had taken Iowa; if he took New Hampshire he’d win the nomination. Mr. Bush needed a comeback or he was over. What a fight. The weekend before the voting there was a huge snowstorm, and the candidates and their operatives were marooned in hotel suites in Manchester, fidgeting. Lee Atwater, who worked for Mr. Bush, spent his days furiously phoning around for information. Between calls he’d phone his two young daughters. “This’s Daddy!” They’d talk for 45 seconds, an aide would tell him a congressman or governor was on the other line, and he’d abruptly ring off: “Daddy’s gotta go!” He’d talk to the congressman and then call his daughters again. “This’s Daddy! Whatcha doin’ now?”

This week I was talking to a South Carolina Republican activist, the state chairman of Students With Newt. She believes in him: “He’s the most experienced.” She is Sally T. Atwater, the younger sister of the children on the phone long ago.

So the first third of the Republican presidential race is ending. The first third is the introduction: “This is who I am, this is what I want to do, this is why you want to choose me.”

The campaign is announced, organized, and goes forward in key early states.

The second phase is the long slog through the primary states to the convention next August in Tampa, Fla. The third and final is the election proper, in the autumn of 2012.

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The first phase was clouded by an overlay of frustration and dissatisfaction: The best weren’t in the game. Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan, John Thune, Haley Barbour, none of them reporting for duty. But in the past few weeks another mood has begun to dig in: You fight with the army you have. You pick from the possible candidates. You make a choice and back him hard.

Part of this is simple realism. Time is passing, and the contenders have been at least initially inspected. Every four years the potential nominees on either side look smaller than the sitting president who, whether or not you like him, is the president. You’re used to him. He’s on TV. They play Hail to the Chief when he walks in. The office is big and imparts bigness.

But less so this year than past years. There’s a lot of 1980 in the 2012 presidential election, which doesn’t mean it will end the same way, but still. The incumbent looks smaller than previous sitting presidents, as did Jimmy Carter. His efforts in the Oval Office have not been generally understood as successful. There’s a broad sense it hasn’t worked. And Democrats don’t like him, as they didn’t Jimmy Carter.

This continues as one of the most amazing and underappreciated facts of 2012—the sitting president’s own party doesn’t like him. The party’s constituent pieces will stick with him, having no choice, but with a feeling of dissatisfaction. It is not only the Republicans who have been unhappy this year. All this will have some bearing on the coming year.

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Debates arrived in a new way, with a new power. Candidates rose and fell depending on how they did in nationally televised forums. The whole primary season this year has been more wholesale than retail, more national than local.

Mitt Romney (left) debates Newt Gingrich during the ABC News GOP presidential debate on the campus of Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, Dec. 10.

In the past, state issues were important, but now only one issue—the nation’s economy—is important. An hour with the Grand Rapids Rotary Club is still nice, but not as nice as an eight-minute, prime-time cable hit. This marks the continuation of a half century-long trend. National trumps local, federal squashes state, the force of national culture washes out local culture. Primaries are fully national now.

The most memorable line of the first phase? There’s “9-9-9” and “Oops,” but the best came from Mitt Romney when he was asked about the Gingrich campaign’s failure to qualify for the Virginia ballot. Mr. Gingrich had compared it to Pearl Harbor, a setback, but we’ll recover. Mr. Romney, breezily, to a reporter: “I think it’s more like Lucille Ball at the chocolate factory.”

It made people laugh. It made them want to repeat it, which is the best free media of all, the line people can’t resist saying in the office. And they laughed because it pinged off a truth: Gingrich is ad hoc, disorganized.

The put-down underscored Romney’s polite little zinger of a week before, that Mr. Gingrich was “zany.” And it was a multi-generationally effective: People who are 70-years-old remember “I Love Lucy,” but so do people who are 30 and grew up with its reruns. Mr. Romney’s known for being organized but not for being deft. This was deft. It’s an old commonplace in politics that if you’re explaining you’re losing, but it’s also true that if they’re laughing you’re losing. The campaign trail has been pretty much a wit-free zone. It’s odd that people who care so much about politics rarely use one of politics’ biggest tools, humor. Mr. Romney did and scored. More please, from everyone.

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Newt Gingrich in the end will likely prove to be a gift to Mitt Romney. He was a heavyweight. This isn’t Herman Cain, this is a guy everyone on the ground in every primary state knows and has seen on TV and remembers from the past. But his emergence scared a lot of people—”Not him!’—and made some of them think, ‘OK, I guess I better get off the sidelines and make a decision. Compared to Newt, Romney looks pretty reasonable.”

Mr. Gingrich took some of the sting out of Romney-as-flip-flopper because he is a flip flopper too. He also, for a few weeks there, made Mr. Romney look like he might be over. He made Mr. Romney fight for it, not against an unknown businessman but against a serious political figure whose face and persona said: “I mean business.” In the end it will turn out he was a gift to the Romney campaign, a foe big enough that when you beat him it means something.

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The worst trend in politics that fully emerged during phase one? People running for president not to be president but as a branding exercise, to sell books and get a cable contract and be a public figure and have people who heretofore hadn’t noticed you now stopping you in the airport to get a picture and an autograph. In an endeavor like this you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. You’re not held back by any sense of realism as to your positions, you don’t have to worry about them being used against you down the road because there won’t be a down the road. You can say anything. And because you do you seem refreshing. People start to like you—you’re not like all the others, who are so careful. You rise, run your mouth for a month and fall.

Maybe this is harmless. But America is in crisis. The world is in crisis. Everywhere you look establishments and old arrangements are falling, toppling to the ground. Does it help, in this context, to lower the standing of the American political process by inserting your buffoonish, unserious self into it? Or does it make things just a little bit worse?

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The continuing mystery of phase one? The failure of Jon Huntsman to gain traction. It’s not precisely a mystery—he didn’t run as a successful conservative two-term governor but as a striped pants diplomat—but it is a frustration. Democrats like him, a lot. New Hampshire has an open primary. Democrats can vote for him there. Maybe they will. But will that make him a contender or an oddity?

What seemed true at the start of phase one seems true now. A number of the Republicans on the debate stage could beat Mr. Obama. But if there is a serious third-party challenger the president will likely be reelected.

Predictions? The essential message of phase one was, “I am a credible candidate, and I can win.” Phase two will be “I not only can win but my victory will have meaning.” Phase three? There will be some “He made it worse.” But watch for another argument. “In a second Obama administration he will be operating without any of the constraints that limited his actions in the first. He will never have to face the voters again. Obama unbound, with interest groups to reward. America, you don’t want to go there.”

The great words of the year? “Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.”

They are the last words of Steve Jobs, reported by his sister, the novelist Mona Simpson, who was at his bedside. In her eulogy, a version of which was published in the New York Times, she spoke of how he looked at his children “as if he couldn’t unlock his gaze.” He’d said goodbye to her, told her of his sorrow that they wouldn’t be able to be old together, “that he was going to a better place.” In his final hours his breathing was deep, uneven, as if he were climbing.

“Before embarking, he’d looked at his sister Patty, then for a long time at his children, then at his life’s partner, Laurene, and then over their shoulders past them. Steve’s final words were: ‘OH WOW. OH WOW. OH WOW.’”

The caps are Simpson’s, and if she meant to impart a sense of wonder and mystery she succeeded. “Oh wow” is not a bad way to express the bigness, power and force of life, and death. And of love, by which he was literally surrounded.

I wondered too, after reading the eulogy, if I was right to infer that Jobs saw something, and if so, what did he see? What happened there that he looked away from his family and expressed what sounds like awe? I thought of a story told by a friend, whose grown son had died, at home, in a hospice. The family was ringed around his bed. As Robert breathed his last an infant in the room let out a great baby laugh as if he saw something joyous, wonderful, and gestured toward the area above Robert’s head. The infant’s mother, startled, moved to shush him but my friend, her mother, said no, maybe he’s just reacting to . . . something only babies see.

Anyway I sent Ms. Simpson’s eulogy to a number of people and spoke to some of them, and they all had two things in common in terms of their reaction. They’d get a faraway look, and think. And if they had a thought to share they did it with modesty. No one said, “I think I can guess what he saw,” “I know who he saw,” or “Believe me, if he saw anything it was the product of the last, disordered sparks of misfiring neurons.”

They were always modest, reflective. One just said, “Wow.”

Modesty when contemplating death is a good thing.

When words leave people silent and thinking they are powerful words. Steve Jobs’ last words were the best thing said in 2011.

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The unexpected cinematic gift of the year? “The Iron Lady,” the movie about Margaret Thatcher, starring Meryl Streep, that’s opening in this country on Dec. 30.

When words leave people yapping and not thinking they are often political words, but there isn’t much that is, really, political about this film. Its makers don’t seem that interested in politics, or particularly well-informed about it. They were interested in the development of character, thought they had seized on a great one, and were right. It’s a well-meaning and at times deeply moving meditation on old age and the enduring nature of love. It is good, not great, and contains within it a masterpiece.

“The Iron Lady” locates class as an important and largely ignored element of Mrs. Thatcher’s struggle. The leftist intelligentsia of her day, which claimed loyalty to and identification with the poor and marginalized, was shot through with snobs and snobbery. Underneath their egalitarian chatter was (and to some degree still is) a hidden, hungry admiration for and desire to be associated with the well-named and well-connected. The top of the right, the Tories, who said they stood for tradition, the rights of the oppressed middle and the greatness of England, was heavily populated by a more familiar kind of snob, those who took more overt pleasure in their titles and pedigree, and wealth. They were not eager for change.

Both left and right looked down on women, especially style-less grinds and grocers’ daughters who thought they were the equal of the boys. The movie suggests Mrs. Thatcher’s defiance of the snobs while depicting her defeat of the snobs.

Mrs. Thatcher’s political views are never granted any sympathetic legitimacy, though the movie subtly allows there may have been some legitimacy. Perhaps the great flaw is that it has too great a fear of exactly locating her greatness, and the meaning of her greatness. This is not so much a political as an aesthetic flaw: In the classic movies about Elizabeth I, for instnace you knew why you were watching the movie, why she was its subject, and how she changed history.

And yes, the film descends at the end to a bit of the Devil Wears Prada, as the prime minister berates her cabinet. I’ve actually seen her upbraid people. It was softer and sweeter and all the more cutting for that.

The masterpiece is Meryl Streep’s portrayal of Mrs. Thatcher, which is not so much a portrayal as an inhabitation. It doesn’t do justice to say Ms. Streep talks like her, looks like her, catches some of her spirit, though those things are true. It’s something deeper than that, something better and more important. She tried to be Margaret Thatcher, and there’s a real tribute in that.

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The left in America has largely thrown in the towel on Ronald Reagan, but in Britain Thatcher-hatred remains fresh. Why?

Because she was a woman. Because women in politics are always by definition seen as presumptuous: They presume to lead men. When they are as bright as the men they’re disliked by the men, and when they’re brighter and more serious they’re hated. Mrs Thatcher’s very presence was an insult to the left because it undermined the left’s insistence that only leftism and its protection of the weak and disadvantaged would allow women to rise. She rose without them while opposing what they stood for. On the other hand, some of the Tory men around her had been smacked on the head by her purse often enough to wish for revenge. What better revenge than to fail to fully stand up for her to posterity?

And so her difficult position. But one senses that is changing.

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Final note. We are at a point in our culture when we actually have to pull for grown-up movies, when we must try to encourage them and laud them when they come by. David Lean wouldn’t be allowed to make movies today, John Ford would be forced to turn John Wayne into a 30-something failure-to-launch hipster whose big moment is missing the toilet in the vomit scene in Hangover Ten. Our movie culture has descended into immaturity, deep and inhuman violence, a pervasive and flattened sexuality. It is an embarrassment.

In Iraq this year I asked an Iraqi military officer doing joint training at an American base what was the big thing he’d come to believe about Americans in the years they’d been there. He thought. “You are a better people than your movies say.” He had judged us by our exports. He had seen the low slag heap of our culture and assumed it was a true expression of who we are.

And so he’d assumed we were disgusting.

Credit, then, to those who make movies for grown-ups. I end with words I never expected to say: “Thank you, Harvey Weinstein. WELL DONE.”

I had a friend once who amused herself thinking up bumper stickers for states. The one she made up for California was brilliant. “California: It’s All True.” It is so vast and sprawling a place, so rich and various, that whatever you’ve heard about its wildness, weirdness and wonders, it’s true.

That’s the problem with Newt Gingrich: It’s all true. It’s part of the reason so many of those who know him are anxious about the thought of his becoming president. It’s also why people are looking at him, thinking about him, considering him as president.

Ethically dubious? True. Intelligent and accomplished? True. Has he known breathtaking success and contributed to real reforms in government? Yes. Presided over disasters? Absolutely. Can he lead? Yes. Is he erratic and unreliable as a leader? Yes. Egomaniacal? True. Original and focused, harebrained and impulsive—all true.

Do you want evidence he’s a Burkean conservative? Start with welfare reform in 1996. A sober, standard Republican? Go to the balanced budgets of the Clinton era. Is he a Tea Partier? Sure, he speaks the slashing lingo with relish. Is he moderate? Yes, that can be proved. Michele Bachmann this week called him a “frugal socialist,” and there’s plenty of evidence of that, too.

One way to view this is that he is so rich and varied as a character, as geniuses often are, that he contains worlds, multitudes. One senses that would be his way of looking at it. Another way to look at it: In a long career, one will shift views, adapt to circumstances, tack this way and that. Another way: He’s philosophically unanchored, an unstable element. There are too many storms within him, and he seeks out external storms in order to equalize his own atmosphere. He’s a trouble magnet, a starter of fights that need not be fought. He is the first modern potential president about whom there is too much information.

What is striking is the extraordinary divide in opinion between those who know Gingrich and those who don’t. Those who do are mostly not for him, and they were burning up the phone lines this week in Washington.

Those who’ve known and worked with Mitt Romney mostly seem to support him, but when they don’t they don’t say the reason is that his character and emotional soundness are off. Those who know Ron Paul and oppose him do so on the basis of his stands, they don’t say his temperament forecloses the possibility of his presidency. But that’s pretty much what a lot of those who’ve worked with Newt say.

Former New Hampshire governor and George H.W. Bush chief of staff John Sununu told The Wall Street Journal this week: “Listen to just about anyone who worked alongside Gingrich and you will hear that he’s inconsistent, erratic, untrustworthy and unprincipled.” In a conference call Thursday, Jim Talent, who served with Mr. Gingrich in the House from 1993 through 1999, said, “He’s not reliable as a leader.” Sen. Tom Coburn, a member of the House class of 1994, called the former speaker’s leadership “lacking,” and according to a local press report, he told Oklahoma constituents last year that Mr. Gingrich was “the last person I’d vote for for president of the United States.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham told a reporter that Mr. Gingrich could be a historic president if he has “matured as a person and is, for lack of a better word, calmed down.” That is as close as most of those who’ve worked with him get to a compliment.

Yet the reservations and criticisms of the politico-journalistic establishment are having zero effect on Gingrich’s support. In a Quinnipiac poll this week he moved into a double-digit lead over Mr. Romney in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

The antipathy of the establishment not only is not hurting him at this early date, it may be helping him. It may be part of the secret of his rise. Because establishments, especially the Washington establishment, famously count for little with the Republican base: “You’re the ones who got us into this mess.”

Republicans on the ground who view Mr. Gingrich from afar, who neither know nor have worked with him, are more likely to see him this way: “Who was the last person to actually cut government? Who was the last person who actually led a movement that balanced the federal budget? . . . The last time there was true welfare reform, the last time government was cut, Gingrich did it.” That is Rush Limbaugh, who has also criticized Mr. Gingrich.

And that is exactly what I’ve been hearing from Newt supporters who do not listen to talk radio. They are older voters, they are not all Republicans, and when government last made progress he was part of it. They have a very practical sense of politics now. The heroic era of the presidency is dead. They are not looking to like their president or admire him, they just want someone to fix the crisis. The last time helpful things happened in Washington, he was a big part of it. So they may hire him again. Are they put off by his scandals? No. They think all politicians are scandalous.

The biggest fear of those who’ve known Mr. Gingrich? He has gone through his political life making huge strides, rising in influence and achievement, and then been destabilized by success, or just after it. Maybe he’s made dizzy by the thin air at the top, maybe he has an inner urge to be tragic, to always be unrealized and misunderstood. But he goes too far, his rhetoric becomes too slashing, the musings he shares—when he rose to the speakership, in 1995, it was that women shouldn’t serve in combat because they’re prone to infections—are too strange. And he starts to write in his notes what Kirsten Powers, in the Daily Beast, remembered: he described himself as “definer of civilization . . . leader (possibly) of the civilizing forces.”

Those who know him fear—or hope—that he will be true to form in one respect: He will continue to lose to his No. 1 longtime foe, Newt Gingrich. He is a human hand grenade who walks around with his hand on the pin, saying, “Watch this!”

What they fear is that he will show just enough discipline over the next few months, just enough focus, to win the nomination. And then, in the fall of 2012, once party leaders have come around and the GOP is fully behind him, he will begin baying at the moon. He will start saying wild things and promising that he may bomb Iran but he may send a special SEAL team in at night to secretly dig Iran up, and fly it to Detroit, where we can keep it under guard, and Detroiters can all get jobs as guards, “solving two problems at once.” They’re afraid he’ll start saying, “John Paul was great, but most of that happened after I explained the Gospels to him,” and “Sure, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize, but only after I explained how people can think fast, slow and at warp speed. He owes me everything.”

There are many good things to say about Newt Gingrich. He is compelling and unique, and, as Margaret Thatcher once said, he has “tons of guts.”

But this is a walk on the wild side.

This is the week it became clear that nobody knows anything. Pretty much all the conventional wisdom about the 2012 presidential race has turned out to be wrong. Newt rules, Cain’s over, Romney’s rocked. Nobody knows what’s going to happen.

We’ll start with the president:

Gallup. Obama down. Forty-three percent approval. Lower than Jimmy Carter at this point. The Democratic spin: This is good, with the economy so bad you’d think his numbers would be lower! Actually you’d think an incumbent nobody likes would be exactly where Jimmy Carter was before he lost in a landslide. More to the point, the president’s numbers went downward, not upward. Why? Because the congressional super committee failed to cut $1.2 trillion out of $44 trillion in projected deficits.

Once again the president thought he was playing a shrewd game: The collapse of the super committee would serve his political purposes. Once again he misjudged.

What has occurred is an exact repeat of the summer’s debt ceiling fiasco. Then the president summoned a crisis, thinking people would blame it on the Republicans. Instead they blamed Washington, which is to say him, because he owns Washington. Immediately his numbers fell. As they did again this week.

The only way to win America right now is to govern selflessly and seriously. His top advisers, those knowing, winking bumpkins, cannot see this. America is in crisis. It knows it’s in crisis. It cannot tolerate the old moves anymore, the “every problem is just an issue to be manipulated for gain.” The president was once seen as an idealist. He was hired to be an idealist! His ignorant shrewdness, his small-time cleverness—it just won’t do. Nobody wants it. It’s why people want to fire him.

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On Newt Gingrich: If you’ve seen this week’s poll numbers from Iowa, Florida and South Caroline you know it doesn’t look like an increase in his support but an eruption. It is as if something that had been kept down had quietly been gathering energy, and suddenly burst through its bonds. The entire Washington journo-political complex has been taken by surprise by something that not only wasn’t predicted but couldn’t have been. Newt had no steady movement in the polls. He was regularly dressed down by the base. His staff had fled en masse when he left the campaign for an Aegean cruise with his wife.

What happened is a better story than the establishment didn’t know what the base was thinking. It’s that the base didn’t know what the base was thinking.

All it knew was it was only moderately enthusiastic about Mitt Romney. There were a lot of debates—they were history-changing this year, whatever happens. Six, seven or eight million people would watch them and talk about them afterwards, at work or in comment boxes and email groups. And after they said, “Romney held his own,” and, “Perry’s kind of a disappointment,” they’d come to agreement on this: “I really liked what Newt said when he said they shouldn’t bash each other and re-elect Obama.” “I liked when Newt confronted the moderator.” It was always at the end of the conversation that this got said. Because the base knew Mr. Gingrich couldn’t win, so why waste the breath or bandwidth?

“He’s incredibly lucky,” said a friend of his. “Bachmann, Cain, Perry went away. But Newt didn’t go away.” The friend said part of the reason for his rise is that “he’s been there forever. He’s spoken at every GOP dinner. People say, ‘I liked him back in ‘83!’ It all accrued.” He compared Gingrich to IBM. “He had more equity than we gave him credit for.”

Mitt Romney is obviously taking it seriously. He’s lost some of his equanimity. I knew he thought he was in trouble when he didn’t look at his competitors in the last debate like they were lovely little frolicking gerbils.

Even Mr. Gingrich’s biggest supporters begin conversations about him with, “Believe me, I know the downside, I understand the criticism.” They stress his strong points: experience, accomplishment, intelligence. But they are to a man surprised by his new appeal—they didn’t really know he had any—and surprised by his resurrection. They are impressed by his brains, and always have been, and impressed by his will. They also fear he will blow it, that he’ll prove unsteady, impulsive.

He is grandiose—he compares himself to Lincoln, Henry Clay, Churchill: “I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.” There are always two choices to make in modern, media-driven politics: claim you are like Lincoln, or be like Lincoln. Claim you are something and repeat it so people will think of it when they see you, or actually be that something and hope someone will notice. Mr. Gingrich tends to choose the first path. John Gaddis, in his biography of George Kennan, quotes him saying of himself: “I have the habit of seeing two opposing sides of a question, both of them wrong, and then overstating myself.” This sounds like Newt, though one writes it reluctantly, as he might hear about it and start saying “I am George Kennan.”

He often seems to be playing a part in a historical novel he’s dictating in his mind—Newt the underdog, Newt the visionary. He has a compulsion to be interesting, which accounts for some of his overheated language—things are always decayed, corrupt, sick, catastrophically tragic. He also often sounds like a cable TV political analyst, which he’s been for the past decade. He appraises his own candidacy instead of just being the candidate. The race used to be between “Mitt and Not Mitt,” but now it is between “Newt and Not Newt.” He is “the only one who can win.” This week in South Carolina: “I’m the one candidate who can bring together national-security conservatives and economic conservatives and social conservatives.” Candidates should let other people say that; serious candidates should let voters say it to exit pollers. He shouldn’t be making the grubby bottom-line calculations, he should be making an elegant case for his leadership.

His biggest problem? The millions he has made lobbying—sorry, teaching history—as a former speaker, Capitol Hill insider and member of the permanent political class. Some of his paychecks came from the very agencies (such as Freddie Mac) that succeeded for 20 years in operating without proper oversight due to the influence and protection of Capitol Hill insiders and members of the permanent political class. That is the great scandal of our time, and it helped tank our economy. He has been part of it.

Second, what is known as the baggage problem. Its impact on voters is harder to predict, in part because many of them have lived through and fully experienced the past 40 years in America. Bill Clinton, if he ran for president tomorrow, would probably win in a landslide, and he has enough baggage to break the trolley carts of 10 Amtrak porters. Mr. Gingrich’s people believe it won’t harm him because it’s all old news, he’s addressed it. On this, Mr. Gingrich may be helped by the current air of crisis, which itself may account for why he’s burst through now: People feel America’s problems are so huge, so scarifying and urgent that personal judgments feel like an indulgence. “Can he help turn things around? Then hire him. Obama is a devoted husband and incompetent. Let it go!”