Here are three reasons you can count on tonight’s Republican debate being a lively one.

a) The latest poll shows Romney retaking the lead over Gingrich. Newt is always more feisty in the underdog role.

b) Gingrich has the entire Republican establishment battling him. They understand that a Gingrich win in the primary, not only guarantees an Obama victory in November but just about rips open the Republican party. Gingrich needs to win Florida to keep the momentum going…and the cash flowing in.

c) They’re allowing the crazies in the audience to applaud and boo at tonight’s show and no one plays an audience better than Gingrich.

In the preshow war of words Romney got things rolling by questioning Newt’s mental state.

He’s gone from pillar to post almost like a pinball machine, from item to item in a way which is highly erratic…It does not suggest a stable, thoughtful course, which is normally associated with leadership.”

Moon-man Gingrich fired back.

“We are not going to beat Barack Obama with some guy who has Swiss bank accounts, Cayman Island accounts, owns shares of Goldman Sachs who have foreclosed on Florida and is himself a stock holder in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while he tries to think the rest of us are too stupid to put the dots together and understand what this is all about,” Gingrich declared in a preamble to a decidedly angry stump speech.

“In 1992, he gave money to Democrats for Congress,” he added at another point. “He voted in the Democratic primary for Paul Tsongas, the most liberal candidate. This is the man who stood up the other night and questioned my credentials as a Reaganite? This is the kind of gall they have, to think we are so stupid and we are so timid that we will let someone who voted for Paul Tsongas -– in 1994 he is running for the U.S. Senate to the left of Teddy Kennedy. Do you know how hard it is to run to the left of Teddy Kennedy? And he says, ‘You know, I don’t want to go back to the Reagan-Bush years, I was an independent then.’”

“He won’t tell you that now, because he is counting on us not having YouTube,” Gingrich said. “That’s how much he thinks we are stupid. And we are not stupid. The message we should give Mitt Romney is: we aren’t that stupid and you aren’t that clever.”

All of which has hardcore conservatives saying stuff like this:

I am a firm believer that primaries make stronger candidates. But at some point you just have to stand back, take a sip of bourbon, and sigh “Damn” under your breath as you behold the carnage being wrought within the Republican Party.

How pretty is that?

Very.

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It appears that the South Carolina verdict is forcing Romney to start taking Gingrich seriously.

“We’re not choosing a talk show host, we’re choosing a leader,” Romney said, saying that their nominee should exhibit “integrity,” “sobriety,” and “ethics.”

He called Gingrich a “failed leader” as Speaker who “had to resign in disgrace” and criticized his work as a highly paid consultant for Freddie Mac in his years out of office. “He said he was just a historian there,” Romney said. “I’d like him to release his records there.”

Gingrich was able to take South Carolina by expertly flipping any criticism about his character and past into an attack on the media and the left. In a game where perception is everything and integrity takes a back seat to hubris, it’s not what one has actually done that counts but rather the manner in which one denies having done any wrong. Romney’s poor performance in that regard was his downfall in South Carolina. He came off as weak and defensive in defending his role at Bain Capital and was unable to articulate in a convincing manner his reluctance to release his tax records.  As for Gingrich, he was able to deflect the issue of his gross hypocrisy and infidelities by deftly going on the offensive with blows to CNN’s John King and the mainstream media. After that, it was game over.

And so, the call for Romney to remove the mittens has begun.

Another reason why Gingrich won is that Romney has been playing it safe, believing that the nomination will be his, and that he can train his fire on President Obama. That thought should be banished from Romney’s head; he has to use the upcoming contests to decisively put away his competition. He can do so by going on the offensive against Gingrich, who actually represents a target-rich environment for Romney. Romney has to campaign as though he is a million votes behind, so that commentators will stop talking about how Romney might feel that he is entitled to the nomination, and so that they will start talking instead about the grit and fire which Romney needs to display from here on out.

Romney has the backing of the Republican establishment to take out Gingrich as quickly as he can. The thought of Newt possibly winning the nomination is creating serious headaches for every thinking conservative who hopes to defeat Barack Obama in November.

If Gingrich wins Florida, the Republican Establishment is going to have a meltdown that makes Three Mile Island look like a marshmallow roast. Why? Because the Establishment will be staring down the barrel of two utterly unpalatable choices. On the one hand, Gingrich’s national favorable-unfavorable ratings of 26.5 and 58.6 percent, respectively make him not just unelectable against Obama but also mean that he would likely be a ten-ton millstone around the necks of down-ballot Republican candidates across the country. And on the other, Romney will have shown in two successive contests—one in a bellwether Republican state, the other in a key swing state—an inability to beat his deeply unpopular rival. If this scenario unfolds, the sound of GOP grandees whispering calls for a white knight, be it Indiana governor Mitch Daniels (who, conveniently, is delivering the Republican response to Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night) or Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan or even Jeb Bush, will be deafening.

Tonight’s debate will indicate whether Mitt Romney is willing to take the fight to Gingrich face to face. Tune in, it should be interesting.

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Here’s what you missed:

Santorum, Paul and Perry – more of the same.

Gingrich was in fine form giving the raucous conservative crowd exactly what they wanted – red meat. Tainted and slimy? Of course. Is there any other kind offered at a Republican debate? Oh, and in case you were not aware, Gingrich Perry  informed the world that, “South Carolina is at war with this federal government.”  SC Gov. Nikki Haley nodded in agreement. To the barricades!

As for Romney, the following observation by a conservative blogger pretty much sums up not only Romney’s performance in the debate but it also gives an apt description of the essence of the man.

So far I’m pretty horrified.  The low point was when Santorum asked Romney if Romney believed that felons who had completed their sentence should be allowed to vote.  Romney froze and tried to change the subject since apparently Romney didn’t know what he was supposed to pretend to believe.

Nice.

As for the audience in attendance last night, they booed when it was mentioned that Romney’s father was born in Mexico. Some people just can’t hate enough.

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The boxing gloves are on and the fun level has just gone up a notch.

“This is a man whose staff created the PAC, his millionaire friends fund the PAC, he pretends he has nothing to do with the PAC – it’s baloney. He’s not telling the American people the truth.

“It’s just like this pretense that he’s a conservative. Here’s a Massachusetts moderate who has tax-paid abortions in ‘Romneycare,’ puts Planned Parenthood in ‘Romneycare,’ raises hundreds of millions of dollars of taxes on businesses, appoints liberal judges to appease Democrats, and wants the rest of us to believe somehow he’s magically a conservative.

“I just think he ought to be honest with the American people and try to win as the real Mitt Romney, not try to invent a poll-driven, consultant-guided version that goes around with talking points, and I think he ought to be candid. I don’t think he’s being candid and that will be a major issue. From here on out from the rest of this campaign, the country has to decide: Do you really want a Massachusetts moderate who won’t level with you to run against Barack Obama who, frankly, will just tear him apart? He will not survive against the Obama machine.”

Gingrich has taken a beating at the expense of Romney’s PAC attack ads and it’s showing.  If the polls are right and Romney wins Iowa with Gingrich taking 4th position, the next couple of debates should be interesting.  Expect Gingrich to go full throttle against Romney, who is every bit the lying, duplicitous, poll-driven politician Gingrich says he is.

Yes, I know…pot, kettle, etc., but Gingrich’s words are true nonetheless.

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