Oh man, is that humiliating, or what? I cannot believe I’m typing these words, but with the start of the primary and caucus season only a few weeks away, it looks like the only way Mitt Romney, with many millions in the bank and years of experience running for president in his background, can win this thing is if Newt Gingrich blows himself up. Fortunately for Romney, there’s a significant chance of that happening, Newt being Newt. But still! Ed Kilgore:

But even more importantly, Romney’s shocking weakness against Gingrich suggests that his supposed trump card, “electability,” doesn’t really matter all that much to Republican voters. Given present trends, that’s not as surprising as it might seem. Ever-increasing majorities of likely Republican primary voters are expressing the opinion that they’d prefer a nominee who reflects their values and views to one with a better chance of winning next November. And even among the minority who say they care most about electability, it should by no means be assumed that that concern translates into support for Romney, given the recent ascendancy of the conservative dogma that run-to-the-center moderates are guaranteed losers and the parallel belief—born of the party’s exceptional contempt for Barack Obama—that any true conservative is destined to win in 2012. To put it bluntly, the conservative activists who dominate the Republican presidential nominating contest are split between those who simply don’t believe adverse polls about Gingrich, and those who would rather control the GOP than the White House, if forced to choose.

People are starting to say that a Gingrich nomination would be a Goldwater ’64 moment for the Republican Party: a walloping defeat suffered by an ideologically pure candidate whose candidacy opened the door for a thorough transformation of the GOP, and the ultimate rise and triumph of Ronald Reagan. I can’t see it. Love him or hate him, Barry Goldwater was a conviction politician. Far as I can tell, the only thing that distinguishes Gingrich, a creature of Washington who has extraordinarily slippery principles, is that he’s an articulate despiser of the things and people that GOP ideologues despise. That’s not much of a base for rebuilding anything.