Grover Norquist, in his CPAC speech, revealed exactly why the GOP establishment favors a Romney win.

All we have to do is replace Obama. …  We are not auditioning for fearless leader. We don’t need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We want the Ryan budget. … We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don’t need someone to think it up or design it. The leadership now for the modern conservative movement for the next 20 years will be coming out of the House and the Senate.

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Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.

How’s that for in-your-face honesty?

Choose Rick Santorum and Republicans are stuck with a Christian Taliban leader whose top priority will be to enact a ‘Sex For Procreation Only‘ law.

Go with Newt Gingrich and and they’re facing an ego of untold proportion who takes orders from a single god. Clue: initials are N.G.

Ron Paul and they have a man who has no intention of listening to anyone or anything except the intergalactic voices in his head – the very same voices that have commanded his every move of the last four decades.

And then, of course, there’s Mitt Romney – the man who will in all likelihood become the Republican nominee in the general election. If ever there existed a politician lacking any trace of core convictions, a man more than willing to say whatever it took to be accepted by those from whom he craves recognition, a man who would strap the family dog to the hood of his car if it helped him get to where he so desperately wanted to go…if that’s what Republicans want or need, then Mitt Romney is their man.

If I was running the DNC ad campaign to reelect Barack Obama, I would have that Norquist quote playing every day between now and November.

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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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