Two days after Newt Gingrich’s stunning victory in the South Carolina primary, the Republican presidential race has been transformed. The latest poll conducted by Insider Advantage/Majority Opinion Research for Newsmax shows Gingrich has taken an eight-point lead over Mitt Romney in Florida, the next state to hold a primary. Gingrich’s momentum is showing up in national tracking polls as well. If Gingrich wins Florida and builds from there, we may soon hear the former speaker once again speaking of himself as the inevitable nominee.
If all of this sounds a bit familiar, it’s because it is. Gingrich was way ahead in the polls back in mid-December. Before that, it was Herman Cain — the guy who spent some of last week being a foil for comedian Stephen Colbert in a sideshow act that flopped in South Carolina — who was surging. Before that it was Rick Perry’s turn to be the certain winner. And before that, Michele Bachmann had a couple of weeks when she appeared to be a formidable contender. The point is, momentum has swung so many times in this race, giving us days and even weeks when most of us were sure the race was all but decided, it is hard to know when the wheel will stop turning. Though at the moment Gingrich is coming on like gangbusters and Romney can’t get out of his own way, there’s no real reason to believe all this won’t change again sometime soon.
That is, no doubt, what Romney is hoping this morning as he sets to work to try to retrieve his fortunes in Florida. That won’t be easy given the impression the last week has left on many Republican voters about Romney’s faltering answers on his taxes and Gingrich’s virtuoso crowd-pleasing media bashing. But he is also right to think there’s no reason to believe the pendulum has stopped swinging in what has proved to be the most volatile presidential nomination contest in memory. The obvious reason for this is the same it has always been: there is no one candidate who embodies what Republicans want in a presidential candidate.
Romney is competent, experienced and business-savvy, a key virtue in hard economic times. But he is also a passionless and non-ideological technocrat with a record of flip-flopping on core issues that leaves the GOP grass roots ice cold. Gingrich is a brilliant speaker who is, as he modestly said on Saturday night, able to articulate the values of the electorate. But he is also deeply flawed as both a person and a leader with a train of baggage a mile long. If Democrats believe they can tear Romney apart by demagoguery about his business career and wealth, Gingrich provides them with so many negative lines of attack they may have trouble knowing where to begin.
So every time Romney looks set to sweep to the nomination, his inability to connect with the voters and Gingrich’s rabble-rousing turns the tables. And every time Gingrich seems ready to roll, the public (helped along by Romney and the media) is reminded of his unsuitability for the presidency and he crashes. Though Rick Santorum, who had a moment of his own in Iowa, would like to disrupt the pattern, it doesn’t appear he has the ability to do so given his poor showing in South Carolina and dim prospects in Florida.
It will be no surprise if this pattern repeats itself more than once before either Romney or Gingrich emerges with enough delegates to claim the nomination. Until then, we will hear more chatter about brokered conventions and dark horse late emerging alternatives. But in the end, Republicans are probably going to be stuck with one of the two. There will be those who say this process will strengthen the winner, but what we are seeing now is a race that is defined by the contenders’ weaknesses, not their strengths. No matter when the GOP wheel stops spinning, whoever emerges from this contest will be someone Barack Obama believes he can beat in November.
