Mitt Romney pulled out a big win in Nevada. Right now with 43% reporting, these are the results:

Mitt Romney 42.4%

Newt Gingrich 26.1%

Ron Paul 18.3%

Rick Santorum 13.0%

The only county left is Clark County, where Mitt currently has 59.8% of the vote reported, so I expect his lead to grow throughout the night. This is a big win that should give him a good boost going into the contests on Tuesday.

In other news, Newt Gingrich continues to say that he’ll run a positive campaign and then continues to attack Mitt Romney. His vitriol is becoming sickening as he seems to continue a suicide mission to take out Mitt Romney. For the sake of the party, I hope his supporters eventually switch to Rick Santorum, so that they will have a much more positive connection once Mitt Romney raps this up. The media is becoming more and more vocal about Gingrich’s ridiculous rhetoric. Watching Fox and CNN tonight, both channels were saying that Newt had a bad night (referring to his self-proclaimed “positive” speech that continued to assault Governor Romney. Honestly, I used to really like Newt. But this process has shown me that he should be nowhere near the presidency. He can’t drop out of the race soon enough.

Here’s one person’s take on Newt’s speech tonight:

Gingrich should carefully play a tape of his post–Nevada caucus performance, and then he would quickly grasp that it was little more than a litany of excuses, whining, and accusations — characterized by stream-of-conscious confessionals and rambling repetitions. And, I think, will hurt him more than anything yet in the campaign.

Gotta wonder what this is all about.  Does he want to distract people from his second electoral drubbing in one week or is he taking his ball and going home?  We shall see.

Instead of the traditional election night party, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich will hold a press conference after the Nevada Caucus on Saturday, raising new speculation about his future in the race.

An e-mail sent to reporters on Saturday morning set the Las Vegas press conference for 11 p.m. to midnight

Gingrich has had a rough time on the trail ahead of the Nevada Caucus, the first presidential contest in the West. Sources in or close to his campaign gave reporters incorrect information that Donald Trump would endorse Gingrich (he endorsed rival Mitt Romney). Gingrich also missed a meeting with the Silver State’s popular governor, Brian Sandoval, a Rick Perry supporter who was viewed as a possible Gingrich endorsement after Perry dropped out and endorsed the former House Speaker, according to The New York Times.

A Las Vegas Review-Journal—KLAS-TV poll released on Friday gave Romney a large 20-point lead over Gingrich heading into Saturday’s caucus.

National Journal

I couldn’t agree more with this analysis from Dick Morris:

For students of American politics, following the way the Romney campaign played Newt Gingrich in Florida is a lesson to learn and to keep. Romney’s people must have realized that Newt does best when he is positive. His bold ideas, clear vision, revolutionary insights and extraordinary perspectives resonate with voters and win him millions of supporters.

Romney, less compelling but more consistent, doesn’t need stellar debate performances or bold vision to win. The case for the former Massachusetts governor is more circumstantial: He can reach out to independents by virtue of his past apostasies on healthcare and abortion. He looks, talks and acts like a president. His record of job creation is exemplary.

But Newt needs the bold sally, the breathtaking moment of rhetorical clarity, to prevail.

So Romney’s people set out to mire Newt in negatives so he couldn’t and wouldn’t get out the positive message he needed to project to prevail. They tormented him with negative ads in Iowa. While the ads were generally accurate — the allegation about backing China’s forced-abortion policy aside — they presented only one side of the story and were stinging in their impact. Without funds, Gingrich couldn’t answer the negative ads. He fumed but watched, in impotence, as his vote share fell away.

In Spanish bullfights, the picadors torment the bull by sticking darts into his shoulders. Enraged, bleeding, frustrated and in pain, he lowers his head, snorts, paws the ground and charges straight at the matador, oblivious to the sword awaiting him behind the red cape. That’s about what Romney did to Gingrich in the January primaries.

The Hill

Mr. Morris is right.  Newt Gingrich is a higly educated, articulate man.  But he is also a man with an enormous ego and accompanying temper that he has great difficulty controlling.  As I have said in other posts, he simply does not have the temperment to go up against Barak Obama.  If he was whining about unfair treatment from Mitt Romney, he would literally self-combust against the President and his Chicago buddies.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, has proven that he can not only dish it out with the best of them, but can take it as well and he can do so without losing his head.  He has shown, as Mr. Morris points out, “consistency” through out the campaign and “he looks, talks and acts like a president.”  He has also demonstrated a strong committment to traditional family values which the hard right values.  Mitt Romney’s “apostasies” are in the past.  In FL, Newt Gingrich proved that he hasn’t really changed all that much from his inconsistent, fiery, ego induced gaffe filled career and that turned voters off.

The New York Times has a fascinating article about what has been happening behind the scenes in the Romney Camp this week leading up to Florida primary in order to ensure that Mitt Romney is able to defeat Newt Gingrich there. Having read this description of the power behind Mitt Romney’s campaign, I feel a lot better about his chances going up against the Obama machine next fall. Here are a couple highlights, but I highly recommend reading the whole thing:

Mr. Romney, meanwhile, had been receiving help from a new debate adviser — Brett O’Donnell, a longtime leader of the Liberty University debate team who advised Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota in her campaign last year — and assumed a new role as the campaign’s chief attacker, relinquishing his old approach of leaving the dirty work to supporters and a friendly super PAC.

A team of some of the most fearsome researchers in the business, led by Mr. Romney’s campaign manager, Matt Rhoades, spent days dispensing negative information about Mr. Gingrich, much of it finding its way to the influential Drudge Report, which often serves as a guide for conservative talk radio and television assignment editors and to which Mr. Rhoades has close ties.

The effort hit a peak by Thursday, when the site was virtually taken over by headlines assailing Mr. Gingrich, whose advisers said they eventually gave up on trying to persuade the Drudge staff to spare them, acknowledging, in the words of one aide, that “very little can be done.”

Personally, this next section about the debate prep was probably my favorite. I loved this part of the debate on Thursday:

The Romney team was also carefully tracking Mr. Gingrich’s every utterance for a potential opening. What an aide described as a “eureka moment” came just hours before the debate on Thursday night. At a Tea Party rally in the Central Florida town of Mount Dora that day, Mr. Gingrich had opened a new line of attack, noting that Mr. Romney had investments in funds that included shares of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage lenders.

Mr. Romney’s opposition-research team in Boston quickly dug into Mr. Gingrich’s own publicly disclosed holdings to find that he, too, had mutual funds invested in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. The information was quickly fed to Mr. Romney during his private debate preparation session at a hotel in downtown Jacksonville.

When Mr. Romney delivered the attack against Mr. Gingrich that evening, Mr. Gingrich was left with no substantive response, a killer blow that helped keep Mr. Gingrich from commanding the debate stage as he had in South Carolina.

But, most of all, the attempt to regain an advantage rested on Mr. Romney’s own shoulders and his ability to deliver sharper distinctions, as an aide put it.

Mr. Romney was still in South Carolina when the team, led by Mr. Rhoades, presented the plan to him. “He was on the road, and there was a call with him on Sunday morning where we laid out all the different pieces of what was going on,” Mr. Schriefer said. “He asked questions, but it wasn’t a particularly long call; it was very calm, sort of ‘O.K., guys, let’s go win in Florida.’ ”

Like I said, read the whole thing.

It’s come to this…

Romney’s little joke suggests that he understands that his most glaring weakness may be his lack of a poetic flaw, a useful element in a politician’s essential task of connecting with other human beings. Romney’s perfect hair and perfect family, his abstinence from petty vices (alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine), and his relentless good cheer invite easy caricature (Wedding Cake Man) and somehow further distance him from ordinary Americans. Gingrich, ever able to turn flaws into virtues, touched on this last week, when he said that his own obvious imperfections, such as his past infidelities, may actually have helped him with evangelicals in South Carolina. “It may make me more normal,” he told the Christian Broadcasting Network, “than somebody who wanders around seeming perfect.”

Newsweek

Just how sad a comment is this on today’s society?  Someone who not only talks about family values but actually strives to live them in his own life and has apparently successfully taught his children the same values is now abnormal and suspect behavior?  Are Newsweek and Mr. Gingrich actually serious in suggesting that a Presidential candidate needs a couple of divorces under his/her belt to be “normal?”

Not only that, but some in the press have expressed some serious concern that Mitt Romney is a – gasp! – full tithe payer.  This makes him even “weirder” apparently.  Only in the Left-wing media could obeying a commandment be viewed as suspicious behavior.  Yikes!  Can there be any doubt now that there is now and has been for many years now, a concerted effort to undermine and destroy the traditional family unit?  I was surprised enough by the author’s statement but then Mr. Gingrich’s claim that his infidelity to two previous wives made him “more normal” and more electable is a stunner to say the least.

Just to be clear here, my understanding of what the author and Mr. Gingrich are saying is: a man who has been married to his high-school sweetheart for over 30 years, has a happy family with children and grand children who love him, who doesn’t smoke, drink, swear, cheat on his taxes or wife, pays a faithful tithe as the Bible commands and is “relentlessly cheerful,” is abnormal?  Are we really that far gone as a society?  And if we are, shouldn’t we be doing something about it?  Like, say, voting for someone who takes Family Values seriously for a change?  I know the Left has certainly gone down the “bad is good/good is bad” road but are we to follow them as Newt seems to have done?  As for me and my not so perfect family, its nice to know that at least someone is doing it right and I look forward to voting for someone who doesn’t just talk the talk but walks the walk.

No, its not exactly the same thing as we are experiencing now between Newt and Mitt but, it does remind us that Ronald Reagan never took himself too seriously (unlike a certain former Speaker of the House) as evidenced by his invitation to Mr. Rickles to perform at his inaugural.  Besides, its good to lighten things up from time to time.  That and I’m a big Don Rickles fan.

Well, the whining from the Gingrich campaign is reaching “can’t look away” embarrassing .  We first heard today that Mr. Gingrich’s less than stellar performance at last night’s debate was due to the Romney campaign “stacking the deck” with their supporters.  Well, even if this were the case, if the Gingrich campaign couldn’t muster enough people to attend the debate then, whose fault is that?

Now we hear that Newt believes Mitt’s performance last night was “totally dishonest.”  He didn’t bring this “dishonesty” up last night because “he wanted to be sure” of Romney’s dishonesty.  Riiight.

Gingrich professes shock at Romney’s ‘dishonest’ debate performance

By Amy Gardner and Philip Rucker, Updated: Friday, January 27, 4:03 PM

MIAMI —Former House speaker Newt Gingrich said Friday that the reason he seemed less combative during Thursday’s televised debate was that he was shocked by what he described as rival Mitt Romney’s “totally dishonest” replies to several questions.

In a telephone interview, Gingrich cited Romney’s remarks on immigration, his vote for Democrat Paul Tsongas in 1992 and whether he knew about an ad his campaign is running against Gingrich.

“I think it’s the most blatantly dishonest performance by a presidential candidate I’ve ever seen,” Gingrich said. At several moments during the debate, Gingrich simply leaned away from his lectern and looked down at his feet because he was so stunned by some of Romney’s statements, he said. He didn’t engage Romney at the time, he said, because “I wanted to fact check. I wanted to make sure he was as totally dishonest as I thought he was…”

Washington Post

Mr. Gingrich is at his best when he is expounding on a subject he knows about.  He comes across as intelligent and highly informative.  However, when his ego takes over, he comes across as an arrogant, condescending, stuck up whiner who is going to take his ball and go home just because he didn’t get his way.  And, unfortunately, we have been seeing more and more of his ego since Iowa; it is not attractive and the polls are beginning to reflect this.

America needs someone who can separate his ego from the job at hand.  We need a candidate who is level headed enough to take criticism, fair or unfair, and yet still get the job done.  Mitt Romney has demonstrated that he has the experience and maturity to do this.  Newt Gingrich has yet to demonstrate this ability in his entire career let alone this campaign.

Virtually everyone who has a television or uses a computer or smart phone has been subject to listening to the angry and bitter attacks by Newt Gingrich on Mitt Romney, Capitalism and Free Enterprise.  It’s one thing for Gingrich to be angry for negative ads run against him in Iowa, but it’s a whole other thing to switch party ideology in order to make your opponent look bad.  Gingrich’s attacks on Romney and Free Enterprise are not only reprehensible to anyone who cares about Republican values, but they are also the height of hypocrisy.  Remember, this is they guy who accepted 1.8 Million dollars in lobbying cash from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac!

From their press release:

“Newt Gingrich’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s record at Bain Capital are disgusting,” said Club for Growth President Chris Chocola. “There are a number of issues for Mitt Romney’s Republican opponents to attack him for, but attacking him for making investments in companies to create a profit for his investors is just wrong. Because of the efforts of Bain Capital, major companies like Staples, Domino’s Pizza, and the Sports Authority now employ thousands of people and have created billions in wealth in the private economy. Attacking Governor Romney for participating in free-market capitalism is just beyond the pale for any purported ‘Reagan Conservative.’ Newt Gingrich should stop his attacks on free markets and apologize to Governor Romney for them.”

http://www.clubforgrowth.org/perm/pr/?postID=1008

Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, and Rick Perry are all sounding like a bunch of ignorant Occupy Wall Street clowns lately. I have a feeling the voters of New Hampshire (where I was born, and visit monthly to see my family) are going to reject all three of them handily. I expect Romney to lose a few independents from these attack lines, but to gain some among registered Republicans.

I also want to commend Rick Santorum (of whom I have been very critical) for refusing to bash the free market economy and job creators. And we all know Ron Paul doesn’t hate the free market.

Perhaps the good part of all this is, the voters will be able to hear Romney’s counters to what we all KNOW Obama and his allies are going to use to attack Romney. If Mitt comes through all this, he will have won over many Conservatives who opposed him previously by showing his strength and giving them confidence in his electability. We are already hearing strong words of support from Romney critics like Michael Savage, Michelle Malkin, and many, many Conservative bloggers all over the internet.

Hypocrite