Newt's an OG, "Original Grinch." His baggage is said to have baggage, or as my favorite Cajun lefty puts it "his herpes has aids." He'd been book-touring for president as a cartoonish snake-oil salesman, but each of his fellow vanity candidates in turn jumped into the lead in and flamed out. In early December, he finds himself improbably in the lead against the establishment's reluctantly anointed champion, and selling himself as the man to "put Obama in his place" to his party's gut, it's "George Wallace" base who physically loath this president and everything for which he stands. So far, he's defying gravity in the polls and being ignored by his party's moneymen. A recent National Journal survey of a hundred democratic insiders and a hundred republicans agreed in the high 80s that he's likely to flame out before the first vote. It's only such universal agreement among the "experts" and Romney's uncomfortable wierdness that casts some shadow of doubt on my similar expectation.
Willard Romney is such a personification of other-worldly wholesomeness, that his bobblehead is more identifiably human than his magnificently groomed person. He's as focus grouped, consulted and edited as a nomination speech; his only obvious core conviction is ambition. Willard can't seem to get above 20% in the polls, and his unsuitability as a candidate - a progressive Massachusetts Mormon in a reactionary Southern Christianist party- has propelled a chain of comical opportunists into temporary leads against him. Nevertheless, he's the most viably funded and organized on the ground in a grueling race where being the tortoise is probably better than being hare of the month.
