What Happened in SC?

UPDATE III: This is priceless.

One Pulitzer Prize-winnering conservative political commentator begs Obamney to step up his game before The Great Lecherer 'cripples the Republican brand.' Read the Washington Post, Can Romney the turnaround artist do it again?

The Republi-con establishment has no one to blame but itself for their Newtenstein.


UPDATE: Has the right-wing media been too successful in dumbing-down the base? Read The Atlantic, Who Is to Blame for Newt Gingrich's Rise?, which notes:

"People bear responsibility for the media they consume. Voters ultimately own the politicians they elevate. But if you're wondering to which "thought leaders" his rise can be attributed, best to ask, "Whose approach to politics produces, as its logical conclusion, a candidacy like Gingrich 2012?" Surveying the centrality of attacks on the mainstream media, the casting of President Obama as a radical other, and the trick where you shrewdly repeat a racially provocative line, get accused of racism, and cast yourself as an aggrieved victim for political advantage, Gingrich '12 is modeled after the successful tactics of movement conservatism's demagogues. Is there any candidate in memory whose persona so closely resembles an egomaniacal talk-radio host? The rank-and-file in South Carolina accept a would-be president behaving that way because they're used to their "thought leaders" talking like that. They aren't in on the reality that a lot of what they hear on talk radio resembles performance art; they don't presume that the rhetoric and arguments employed daily on Fox News are often contrived or disingenuous.

What a political movement gets when it spends years marshaling more demagoguery than sound arguments against its opponents, what it gets when its intellectuals are deposed by its entertainers, what it gets when Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh are its agenda-setting personalities; what it gets when all these factors and more prevail, is a Newt Gingrich victory in South Carolina, where the voters, having been trained to elevate emotion and style over substance, didn't even realize that they've chosen as their champion a man who is neither conservative nor capable of leading anyone."

This election is teaching Republi-cons that what goes around comes around.

Do the "traditional rules of engagement in a nomination race still apply . . .

[That is] the nomination is technically decided by delegate counts, and somewhat less literally by the preferences of rank-and-file voters, ultimately the nominee is determined by a sort of open negotiation among the party elite, which includes elected officials, major donors and the partisan news media, among others.

Voter preferences can make some difference, but more as a lagging than a leading indicator. Being well-credentialed and building a traditional campaign matters, and candidates who do not do so may soar in polls but inevitably fall back to earth. Moreover, parties tend to come to fairly rational decisions about their nominee, placing heavy emphasis on electability. (This view is eloquently explained in the book The Party Decides, by the political scientists Marty Cohen and others.)

[Or has a paradigm shift] occurred in America’s political culture . . .

Under this interpretation, elite support and the ground game do not matter as much as usual. Instead, success is more idiosyncratic: personalities matter a lot, and nominations are determined based primarily on momentum and news media coverage."

Read The New York Times, Did Gingrich’s Win Break the Paradigm?