I agree with Josh Marshall here:

It would be quite difficult for Newt Gingrich to beat President Obama. The bigger story is that he would likely devastate the congressional Republican party. He’d probably weigh down the GOP up and down the ticket. And that puts the whole thing in much sharper relief for Republican officeholders, committee chairs and money folks.

If I’m right about that, that means they have to and will do virtually everything possible now to crush Gingrich and make Romney the nominee.

But I’m not sure it matters.

We buy a lot of crap in this country. We buy a lot of things we don’t need, and in many cases haven’t even known for very long that we wanted. Much of what we buy is of terrible quality and questionable value, and there is an entire, multi-billion dollar industry – a science, really – devoted to making us want to make that crap our very own. And then, when it turns out to be, well, crap, to make us want to turn around and buy the next shimmery thing, and so on.

To my mind it’s impossible to understand US presidential elections – any elections, really, but especially the presidential races – without understanding that the candidate is a product. Every word, every gesture, every tic we see from a presidential candidate is quite possibly part of a conscious and very detailed strategy to get you to “want” – to vote for, or even to send money to or volunteer for – his or her campaign. The idea that voters are searching for authenticity is, in this context, somewhat laughable, because all it means is that the top-flight marketing gurus who run presidential campaigns spend months figuring out what the best way to project authenticity is.

(cont’d)

As with certain other types of brands where authenticity is prized – some types of pop music, for example – it’s enormously helpful if you have a politician who really is authentic. One of the reasons Obama was a strong candidate in 2008 was that he seemed to be who we saw, and seemed comfortable in his own skin and less beholden to his phalanx of advisors than, say, Hillary Clinton. (McCain was authentic, too – but, unlike Obama, he seemed like an authentic, erratic, pandering asshole. Obama seemed not only authentic, but competent and likeable.)

Genuine authenticity, of course, can be faked. Reagan, for example, was derided in his day for being a “mere” actor, but his acting skills as a genial, likeable “great communicator” were a core reason for his success. They masked policies and priorities that had nothing in common with his projected demeanor. As in the consumer world, just because a product is crap doesn’t mean it won’t sell.

But sometimes – rarely, but every now and then – a product is so bad it can’t be sold effectively, even with all the hype in the world. New Coke. Heaven’s Gate.

Mitt Romney?

For the last year, I’ve been pretty confident that Romney would be the Republican nominee in 2012. He fits the pattern of Republicans nominating their previous runner-up, but more importantly, he’s had a lock from the start on the big money and DC/New York establishment party support that is usually essential for a GOP nominee. And Marshall is right that in a Gingrich v. Romney showdown, all that muscle will mobilize frantically for Romney.

Nobody else in the Republican field, at any point, has shown any level of acceptability to that crowd, and there’s really no modern precedent on the GOP side for a nominee being chosen over establishment preferences – even when there is a viable alternative. My assumption all along has been that however flawed a human being, however inconsistent on his record, however wooden and arrogant his presentation, Romney could be crafted by all that money and power into a product that would at least get enough GOP voter support to win him the nomination against the worst batch of competitors in memory.

I’m starting to wonder. Last week was a brutal week for Romney, after a less than inspiring performance all through the debate season. There was a moment, after his New Hampshire win, when the inevitability of his nomination seemed very close to assured, mostly due to the complete lack of viable alternatives. But even without those viable alternatives in place, it sure feels like the grass roots Republican base, which much more closely resembles the South Carolina or Florida GOP electorate than the voters in New Hampshire, is rejecting Romney with the vehemence of a mismatched organ transplant. (Remember the month when the Frank Luntz talking point du jour was for GOP talking heads to object to things being rammed down their throats? Like that.)

Romney’s newfound attacks on Gingrich tonight and in his new TV ads, attacks which destroyed Newt in Iowa but were never deployed in South Carolina, will help erode Gingrich’s Florida support. But by how much? The Mittster’s bizarre combination of being an unapologetic banner-carrier for the one percent and a panderer to the basest of the Republican base seems designed to project an image of a person so inauthentic and unlikeable he could unite the country, with people despising him across the political spectrum.

At this point, the conventional DC wisdom – that Romney, as the most relatively sane GOP candidate, would be the most difficult matchup for Obama in November – has been stood on its head. First impressions are everything in politics (or any other product launch), and the first impression many people are getting of Romney as a potential GOP standard-bearer is of a guy nobody much likes and a lot of people hate for a lot of different reasons. Of course, a lot of people hate Newt, too. But they’re not the ones, generally, voting in Republican primaries, and we now have enough of a closed universe in GOP media that Newt’s huge negatives in the larger (read: real) world don’t really figure.

Romney has still got all that money and establishment support – and right now that money and establishment support has nowhere else to go. But no matter the promotional budget, some products just can’t be sold. And we may be seeing one of them. Either in the next couple of months, or, if he survives the nomination process, in the general election this fall, Romney has the potential to be a truly epic fail.