“...Gingrich can emerge as the one candidate who can unite social, economic and national security conservatives (a fact which is borne out by polling).”
Pure, unadulterated nonsense. This signals the end of the beginning for Gingrich. Polling at 5% in WI, it’s all over for him.
Newt is BY FAR the most electable candidate against Barack Obama of the current 4 contenders for the nomination. He, alone among the candidates, has been able to put Obama on the ropes for a long, sustained period of time, over the energy issue. He helped actually push Obama’s poll numbers down to a painful level that made national news headlines.
Interviews in Lousiana showed many people liked Gingrich the best, but simply voted for Santorum out of strategy because they thought Newt couldn’t win. This is the same stuff we were hearing last Fall while Newt was low in the polls. People liked him, but didn’t think he could win the nomination, so they were backing someone else.
A lot of this is coming from RINO media mind control, Romney’s negative attack ads, etc. This stuff would not occur in the general election, at least I hope the Republicans wouldn’t undermine Newt in favor of Obama. If they would do that, then I CERTAINLY don’t want to nominate their hand-picked candidate anyway. Obama can only attack Newt from the left, not erroneously from the right trying to claim Newt’s a liberal like lying liberal RINO Romney does to all of his opponents.
Newt is also suffering because the debates have stopped. He would have 3 debates with Obama, which would almost certainly redefine him on the national stage the same way it redefined him in the primaries.
Newt can speak English, unlike Santorum. Newt is a real conservative contrast against Obama, unlike Romney. He has more policy depth than both Romney and Santorum put together.
If Newt’s had a weakness, it has been in his fundraising and money management. That is the advantage both Romney and Paul have had. They’ve run primary campaigns before and have a better handle on how to manage their resources. Again, the same amount of money is going to come in for any Republican nominee, more or less. So that isn’t a factor in the general. Some of the less informed Republican primary voters seem to think because Romney has more money now, that he would be able to raise significantly more money than any other Republican in the general campaign. That’s obviously not true.
The bottom line, Obama is most likely going to lose no matter who we put up. What we know for sure is that Gingrich would actually be THE MOST EFFECTIVE PRESIDENT of all of these men. He has the right experience, the right political beliefs, and the right guts for dealing with the left and with America’s enemies.
I think it’s probably essential that in most states, people vote for Santorum now. Votes need to be unified behind a single conservative in most states because Romney can only be denied enough delegates if one candidate is able to take advantage of winner-take-all rules, e.g. getting over 50% in states where that matters and winning winner-take-all districts where splitting the vote hands Romney all the delegates even when Santorum’s and Gingrich’s combined votes were higher. Santorum needs to get those delegates in order to deny Romney the nomination. But in a contested convention, I certainly hope that a ticket emerges with Newt’s name on it.