Romney is in serious trouble if he can’t put Gingrich back on his heels. And soon.

While Newt Gingrich has skillfully used the long series of GOP primary debates to keep himself alive, mount at least three unanticipated returns from the dead and, most recently, to trounce his South Carolina opponents, Mitt Romney—the once-presumptive front runner—has been mostly flummoxed in his one-on-one debate engagements with Gingrich (in the same sense that Bikini Attol was mostly flummoxed in its engagements with the hydrogen bombs being tested there).

As a result, Romney has tended to treat the former Speaker…ummm… gingerly…in direct encounters throughout most of the early debates, relying instead on a large field of contenders to bash each other while he manfully deployed ‘third-party-sponsored’ attack ads—especially in Iowa—to blast at Gingrich from the safety of a duck blind (or whatever it is Romney uses as cover when he goes out hunting ‘small varmints’ as he has claimed he likes to do—apparently in hopes of calling up associations with Jed Clampett thereby to expunge more proximate but less helpful associations with Mr. Drysdale).

In more recent debates, however, Gingrich has gone directly at the carefully coiffed, silvering-at-the-temples titan of Bain Capital—calling him out for ‘pious baloney’ and taunting him as a Massachusetts moderate (‘moderate’ now apparently being a GOP pejorative on the order of ‘baby-raping Kenyan homosexual’). Thus has Governor Romney been increasingly forced to directly confront Chief Defender of the Faith Gingrich.

While these confrontations were notably effective in rattling Romney (who displayed the kind of prim and petulant touchiness and impatience with being directly challenged typically associated with schoolmarms, spinster librarians, and fussy ‘bachelors’ in movies of yesteryear) he at least had the benefit of counter-punching rather than taking the offensive (taking the offensive being a mode of verbal combat which leaves the Governor looking as awkwardly discomfited as Thurston Howell, III being taught how to tie a proper sailing knot by the Skipper).

But now that Newt has (re)found the right-wing sweet spot in attacking media elites and ‘the political establishment’ (apparently now bi-located in New York and Washington) and has focused his attention on carefully staging spontaneous direct confrontations with their surrogates in the debate-moderator corps, Romney will no longer be able to play rope-a-dope with Gingrich, since the Gentlemen from K Street is now likely to ignore Romney unless Romney decides to start something.

Thus Romney has two choices if he wants to impede the gathering momentum of the Grandiose Thinker of Tulane and West Georgia College. He can gamble on taking a position ‘above the fray’ in hopes that Santorum and Paul will direct withering fire on Gingrich as the new front runner—a tactic not usually very effective for someone who was just publicly shoved aside by a surging opponent (who is now triumphantly pounding his chest, calling for maidens, and waving his penis at his vanquished opponents), or he will be compelled to instigate a face-to-face confrontation

Thus pre-debate entertainment involves guessing the direction from which Romney will strike.

Will he go after Gingrich’s exposed hypocrisy as a family-values conservative? Not likely, since the most ‘family values’ (read: socially bigoted) state in the nation just joined in that same hypocrisy by handing Open Marriage Newt ‘The Playboy’ Gingrich a decisive victory. (Would the alleged family-values voters of the South Carolina GOP slowed by even a step in handing the crown to Gingrich if he’d actually been filmed bullying Marianne into throwing the family car keys into the swap bowl at a swingers’ party?)

How about Gingrich’s role as a Washington influence peddler taking heaps of money from favorite boogeymen of the right, Freddie and Fannie? Not unless Romney wants to slug it out over whose career is more odious—a decidedly less than optimum mano-a-mano field of single-combat for a corporate-raiding private equities god of the universe who ‘enjoys firing people’ and can’t help himself from spitting out idiotic claims—in some sort of bizarre display of Panderer’s Tourettes—to common-man experiences like worrying that he might give himself a pinkslip.

How about Gingrich’s history as an unreliable thugocrat loathed by his closest political allies for his arrogance? Well, that could be okay, but does this John Kerry of the GOP really want to charge into that arena where qualities of persona are examined? In this Republican Party, does Willard ‘Mitt’ Romney of Bloomfield Hills, Cranbrook Preparatory School, Havard Business and Harvard Law really want to open up a battle front where his background of elitist privilege (with its assumptions about preserving gentlemanly manners while destroying careers) is measured against that of a rhetorical street-fighter who would likely look far more appealing to the goons of the Republican base as a contender against the urbane and sophisticated (uppity) President Obama? This is probably not the election cycle for that approach.

Look for Romney to look flustered, phony, and frightened.[1]

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• Gingrich Says He Can ‘Shake Up’ Nation’s Capital (tampa.cbslocal.com)
• Romney vs. Gingrich in Florida and some VP picks (billyluff.wordpress.com)
• Romney Bashes Gingrich as “Disgrace” (markamerica.com)
• Romney Planning to Make Florida Painful for Newt (thewesternexperience.com)