Gene Lyons: "You know things are crazy when Ann Coulter starts making sense"

That's what he said in Why Gingrich Might Be Good For America National Memo 01/25/2012. The title refers to Gene's calculation on Newt's weakness as a candidate:

I think even the perception that Newt could get under Obama’s skin is badly mistaken. In a presidential debate, the guy sweating and glowering is the guy losing. The sorehead right, however, won’t believe it until they’ve lost the visceral confrontation they so crave.

In that sense, a Gingrich nomination could end up being very good for the country.

But he also looks unsentimentally at Newt's base in South Carolina during that primary:

Judging by the whooping and hollering of the CNN debate audience, the GOP’s neo-Confederate wing wishes for nothing less than an electoral replay of Pickett’s charge—the doomed infantry attack at Gettysburg most historians believe marked the beginning of the end of the Civil War. A sizeable proportion of South Carolinians have yearned for a rematch ever since.

And they don’t think they're going to get it with Mitt Romney, a Yankee’s Yankee who goes around babbling passionless truisms like this gem unearthed from his standard stump speech by the National Review’s Mark Steyn:

"I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.”

My favorite line comes immediately following: "Do what? (That’s Southern for what the hell?)"

Willard Romney clearly looks like a better candidate than Newt in the horse-race sense. Whether or not that's true, that rabid Republican base will almost certainly find themselves just as interested in getting Willard elected as they would be for Newt. Because he's going to be running against the guy they consider to be a Muslim Kenyan Marxist America-hating atheist.

Tags: 2012 election, gene lyons, newt gingrich

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