In one of the more apt analogies yet made in this comedy-drama year of Guess Who's Becoming the Winner, Politico's Glenn Thrush intriguingly evokes the martial image of Mitt Romney as an Axis power and Newt Gingrich as the Viet Cong:
[I]f Romney is a conventional enemy, Gingrich poses an asymmetrical threat [to President Obama]: He’s simply a more dangerous, talented and unpredictable political actor than Romney.
It's true, as Thrush readily points out, that the White House nonetheless prefers Gingrich at the top of the enemy's ticket. As his party's nominee, the former speaker possesses every undesirable trait in the GOP Establishment's mind and virtually every desirable trait in David Axelrod's mind. Yet there is something about the imagery of the Romney war machine as a lumbering giant of fixed fortifications and indefensible lines, and of the Gingrich insurgency as a black-pajama-clad peasant of booby traps and rat holes, that gives one pause.
Or we can jump to another metaphor: chess. I recall Bobby Fischer once saying that he had played a game against Bob Hope -- that Bob Hope, the comedian Bob Hope -- and found it particularly rough going. While Fischer was thinking 10 masterful moves ahead, as he would against any conventional professional, Hope was darting around the board in unsophisticated whimsy, which invariably made mincemeat of Fischer's best-laid plans. Fischer of course won, but his was an unexpectedly ugly victory.
A final caveat. Don't anticipate that all those horrified, furious Establishment voices would dig in and continue to withhold logistical support from Newt Gingrich in the general campaign. Most, I'd wager, would find a way to reverse course -- "Oh heavens, that? Oh that was just good-natured primary battling" -- and unleash a reasonably unified, pro-Gingrich barrage against Obama.