South Carolina recap and Gingrich surprise - the road to Florida is paved with Super PAC slime.

The votes have been counted in South Carolina and Newt Gingrich – after 10 days of pandering and slandering – has come from behind and overtaken presumptive nominee Mitt Romney, winning the primary there with about 40% of the vote to Mitt’s 28 and Saint Santorum’s 17.  It’s a dramatic reversal of fortune for a man who dragged his sorry ass to a 4^th place finish in New Hampshire and could barely form complete sentences as he headed out of town.   But a change of a few degrees of latitude has served to fundamentally change the campaign as it heads further south still to the swampy land of blue-haired women, Jewish retirement homes, red-necks and Cubans.  How did Newt manage it?  This dog has a few ideas...

Romney waffling on the release of his tax returns during the last debate may have been what swung the vote to Gingrich.  Exit polls suggest that over 50% of voters made up their minds in the last few days and Mitt was roundly booed for his dissembling during the second South Carolina debate.   The guy is a zillionaire, has more money than god but he's awfully shy about those returns and not very good at making up the reason why.

Also a factor was the fact that over 30% of South Carolina voters had someone in their family lose their jobs and they’re pissed about it.  Gingrich seems pissed when he gets out of bed in the morning and his typical snarling debate “performance” dovetails nicely with that anger.  They want to support someone who has a pulse and who can play the avenging “Everyman” ; someone who will go Washington to smite the Beltway criminals who are fiddling while Rome burns.  Unfortunately for the republican nominee – angry Newt or robot Mitt – the “do nothings” conducting the fiddlers are the republican congressional leadership. 

It’s also starting to seem like maybe the power brokers of the republican party are becoming disenchanted with Mitt Romney, as talk of a brokered convention and a “long, tough slog” is becoming an increasingly prominent narrative.  Mitt’s stumbling performance on stage while under attack by Newt, the angry Pekinese, may be causing some second thoughts in the Presumptive Nominee Lounge.  And it seems that the fewer candidates on stage along with him, the weaker his performances.  He can’t hide in the corner while the who’s craziest contest goes on all around him – he has 20% less cover than he started with; cover that allowed him to skate along, placidly playing the front runner and standing above it all; being presidential.

 At the same time his massively funded Super-PAC dumped tons of toxic waste on the other candidates – Gingrich in particular – in a scorched earth policy that now seems to be blowing back at him.  Pissing Newt off played right to his strengths in a state crawling with pissed off working class voters – voters who made up the audience in the two feisty debates where Newt took off the gloves in an all-in strategy designed primarily as a Romney beat-down and if it happened to help Newt as a peripheral benefit, fine.   I realized I also misinterpreted the Gingrich campaign’s use of the infomercial-like anti-Bain Capital video he bought (from some mad genius who made it on spec). 

Gingrich – already a man well schooled in the use of code words and images – succeeded in taking what should have been a strength for Mitt and turning him into a cartoon of a carpet-bagger in the state where the civil war started.  In retrospect I mistook the amateurishness, wild exaggeration and selective use of facts in the video as a misstep but it played right into the out-of-touch patrician Yankee image that is Mitt’s greatest liability.  Gingrich also came out in the late rounds, swinging wildly at the usual monsters under his bed:  judges intent on making the US into a secular sanctuary for agnostic academics, bureaucrats and the “Hollywood elites”.  And of course Obama.  

Even in a state with 40,000 more jobs than a year ago, Obama is still reliably the enemy.  You can speculate till tomorrow about why that is and I have plenty of ideas.  But the simple fact is, showing contempt and disrespect for Obama is a guaranteed applause line with even employed republicans, who have never forgiven him for being black and getting elected in the first place, fundamentally shattering their world view and giving them the worst and longest lasting case of heartburn in modern medical history. 

So Newt wins a round, guaranteeing the race will continue for months.  Santorum is dead and really never was alive except in his mind and the desperate yearnings of the Family Research Council, et al.  Maybe Newt’s backhand across the chops will get Mitt’s attention and convince him and his genius circle to come clean about his various financial dealings.  They are what they are, Mitt, and you can’t pretend you don’t know what people are talking about.  The angry Pekinese is going to alternate snapping at your ankles and power humping your leg for the foreseeable future and right on into the madness of a wide open convention in Tampa unless you close the deal in the next month. 

He finally messed up your hair, Mitt.  What are you going to do about it?