With the South Carolina primary on tap this Saturday, Mitt Romney is breathtakingly close to a victory that would likely all but clinch the presidential nomination. He’s been ahead in every public poll taken in South Carolina since his win in New Hampshire. His conservative opposition remains divided. And the one candidate who did drop out after New Hampshire, Jon Huntsman, promptly endorsed Romney after months of badmouthing him.

But a strong debate performance by Newt Gingrich on Monday, and the $3.4 million his Super-PAC invested in attack ads on Romney that have generated a lot of even more powerful “earned media,” have placed the outcome in South Carolina in some doubt. A final debate on Thursday, along with the decision—or indecision—of conservative opinion-leaders to consolidate support behind a single candidate, could make a difference.

Romney and his own Super-PAC have clearly concluded Gingrich is the main, and perhaps the only, real threat, and have resumed the intense fire on the former Speaker (heavily utilizing former House colleagues) that cut him down to size in the run-up to the Iowa Caucuses.

Meanwhile, the candidate who came out of Iowa with a strong claim to have finally become the “true conservative alternative” to Romney, Rick Santorum, is struggling a bit, though still, along with Ron Paul, showing up in the mid-teens in South Carolina polls. Santorum appeared to have obtained a real breakthrough last Saturday, when a sizable group of conservative religious leaders convened in Texas by Christian Right warhorse Tony Perkins announced it had reached a “consensus” to back the Pennsylvanian. But almost immediately, backers of Newt Gingrich who attended Perkins’ conclave contested this interpretation of events, and suggested the group was evenly divided between Gingrich and Santorum, with the vote to endorse Santorum only occurring after a big percentage of attendees had already left. In Monday’s debate, Santorum didn’t exactly shine, and found himself on the defensive for voting against a national “right-to-work” bill in the Senate (not a popular position among union-hating South Carolina Republicans).

Lost in the shuffle has been Texas governor Rick Perry, who hasn’t registered double-digit support in Palmetto State in any poll since October. Though he’s campaigning heavily around the state, the main publicity coming out of his campaign this week was the request made by one of his earliest and most prominent South Carolina supporters, state senator Larry Grooms, that he withdraw from the race and enable someone else to beat Romney. South Carolina looks to be Perry’s last stand, and it isn’t going well.

If Gingrich does somehow catch up with Romney, or perhaps even if Romney narrowly wins but Perry and Santorum do poorly enough that they are forced to drop out (no one expects Ron Paul to withdraw until the Convention itself), the next question will be whether Gingrich’s latest rise from the political grave will inspire a national renaissance of his campaign, or at least make him competitive in Florida, which votes on January 31. Until today, polls in Florida and nationally were showing Romney building huge leads over the field. But a Rasmussen survey released today, the first taken since Monday’s debate, shows Gingrich suddenly within three points of Romney nationally.

One note of encouragement for Gingrich might have gained a lot more attention earlier in the year: Sarah Palin told Fox viewers that were she voting in South Carolina, she’d vote for Newt. This was, however, the most indirect endorsement yet from Palin, famous for sometimes phoning in endorsements: she said she wishes Newt well so that the campaign can continue, and the winner can receive a more thorough vetting. Well, there’s no question she is an expert on the need for candidate vetting.

Assuming Romney survives South Carolina and other early tests to become the nominee, it’s worth wondering how much general-election damage he’s suffered from attacks on him by Gingrich and others. Aside from the Bain Capital issues raised so visibly by Gingrich’s Super-PAC (complicated most recently by allegations that one Bain beneficiary was a company that disposed of “biomedical wastes” from abortion clinics), his reluctance to release his tax records is turning heads, and each day he has to spend precious general election capital reassuring conservatives that he’ll be sufficiently loyal to their priorities in office. And in general, the nomination campaign continues to shine light on the gap between GOP “base” preoccupations and more mainstream sentiments, as illustrated by Monday’s debate. Democrats couldn’t have been happier with the spectacle of wealthy Republican candidates spending the Martin Luther King holiday lecturing poor and unemployed people on how to develop a work ethic while the audience howled for blood like Romans.

Photo credit: DonkeyHotey

Mitt Romney’s campaign for the Republican nomination is unfolding like a well-crafted business plan. He hit his numbers in New Hampshire last night, saw his most dangerous rivals tumble, and reinforced the aura of inevitability that surrounds his candidacy.

Everything seemed to fall Romney’s way. After his dizzying ascent in Iowa, Rick Santorum fell back to earth with a fifth-place finish. Newt Gingrich, who went snarling across New Hampshire like a wounded beast, flamed out. Ron Paul came in second, which suits Romney just fine. Paul’s libertarian purism inspires cult-like fervor among his young followers, but it will never command majorities in GOP primaries.

Yes, it was a good night for John Huntsman, but probably the best he’ll have this year. He did well among independents, moderates and voters who don’t like the Tea Party, a not-so-representative sample of the GOP electorate. He has nowhere to go, and it seems unlikely Romney would put another Mormon on his ticket.

Now it’s on to South Carolina, where Romney already leads, and where Paul’s useful presence will inhibit last-ditch attempts by conservatives to form an “anybody but Mitt” coalition. If he wins in the South, the race is effectively over.

What are the implications for progressives of Romney’s emergence as President Obama’s likely opponent in November? Let me offer four:

First, don’t underestimate Romney. It’s hard not to be impressed by Romney’s methodical, disciplined march to the nomination, even if, like me, you are appalled by his willingness to change positions that get in his way.

On the other hand, Romney has a big structural advantage that is usually decisive in Republican nominating battles. No, it’s not money, it’s the fact that he’s the establishment candidate. Romney ran second to John McCain in 2008, paying his dues and learning lessons that have helped him avoid mistakes this time around. Now he’s the GOP heirarchy’s presumptive choice, even if most conservatives don’t much like or trust him.

Romney may have tepid support from the GOP base, he may be pathetically unable to connect with ordinary Americans, but he is a competent, calculating machine who knows how to map and adapt to challenging political terrain, whether it’s very liberal Massachusetts or the radically conservative Iowa caucuses.

Second, electability is trumping ideology. Nearly 60 percent of New Hampshire voters said their top priority was a candidate who could defeat President Obama. Only 14 percent said they were looking for a “true conservative.”

This of course is bad news for President Obama, who would have loved to face a Tea Party favorite like Michele Bachman, Rick Perry, or even Newt Gingrich. Then the fall campaign would have been about GOP extremism rather than the economy. That the Tea Party’s least favorite candidate appears headed toward nomination is a tacit admission that the party has veered dangerously from the political mainstream.

Third, an Obama-Romney match-up will be a fight for the political center. Newt Gingrich is right: Romney began his career as a “Massachusetts moderate.” That means he will have more “crossover appeal” to swing voters than his GOP rivals, which he’ll need to offset minimal enthusiasm from conservatives. Given his now legendary “flexibility,” it shouldn’t be hard for Romney to pivot back to the center. He might even warm to Romneycare again, to demonstrate his pragmatic acceptance of government’s role in health care, and of his willingness to work across the aisle to get things done.

In any case, neither candidate can rely on a mobilizing their base to win election. That means Obama will have to work harder to win back independent and moderate voters who deserted his party in 2010.

Fourth, the economy is the issue. Much of Romney’s “electability” stems from his cred as a successful businessman and manager who knows how the real economy works. As he made clear in his victory remarks last night, Romney intends to make the 2012 election another referendum on Obama’s economic performance.

Democrats hope to turn Romney’s success as a corporate turnaround artist against him, echoing Gingrich’s claims Bain Capital “looted” firms and cost workers their jobs. But Obama should be leery of hitting the “vulture capitalism” theme too hard.

The swing voters who will decide the election want action to fix the economy, not scapegoating. Rather than allow himself to be lured into a debate over what’s he done to fix it, Obama needs to frame the race prospectively, as a choice between competing paths to economic renewal. His top priority must be to develop a bolder, more compelling plan for reviving jobs, spurring economic innovation, and restoring U.S. competitiveness.

Photo credit: WEBN-TV

So voters finally got into the act in the Republican presidential nominating contest, and the results from Iowa were about what anyone reading the late polls might have expected. With Ron Paul apparently taking a bit of a hit from bad publicity about his extremist past and attacks on his current foreign policy views by other candidates, he fell just short of Romney and Santorum, who almost literally tied. In many respects, the caucuses were a re-run of 2008: turnout was very much the same despite all the talk about a super-psyched GOP base; the composition of caucus-goers was very similar; and Mitt Romney got about the same number of votes. The main difference is that Romney spent much less time in Iowa than in 2008, and more crucially, the non-Romney vote was more divided. It’s also significant as a sign of politics to come that Mitt didn’t have to spend nearly as much of his own money in 2012, because a “Super PAC” supporting him did the dirty work of destroying Newt Gingrich’s credibility with Iowa conservatives (with some help from Ron Paul’s campaign).

The free-falling Gingrich campaign did have enough energy left to beat Rick Perry in Iowa (Newt got 13 percent of the vote, Perry 10 percent), dealing a huge blow to the candidate still generally thought to be the only enduring threat to a Romney nomination (Perry considered dropping out of the race Tuesday night, but reconsidered, probably after taking a good long look at the poor positioning of the rest of the field in South Carolina and Florida). Michele Bachmann, the winner of the Iowa GOP straw poll back in August, which croaked Tim Pawlenty’s candidacy, had the wheels fall off in the final week before the caucuses and finished a poor sixth, subsequently folding what was left of her campaign.

So technically, at least, Rick Santorum, who benefitted mightily from a last-minute consolidation of social conservative support, is the unlikely winner of the conservative-alternative-to-Romney sweepstakes that Iowa hosted for so many months. I qualify his victory because there are many doubts about his post-Iowa viability, and aside from Paul, who will be in the race to the bitter end, there remains a slim possibility that Perry or Gingrich can rise from the dead to attempt one more comeback when the calendar turns to the South after New Hampshire. Indeed, one of the grand ironies of this entire contest is that perceptions of Romney’s weakness have kept candidates in the field who are mainly keeping each other from consolidating non-Romney support.

Santorum has spent little time outside Iowa, and does not have deep pockets. More importantly, he’s a career politician with a domestic policy record that troubles some conservatives (notably pundit Erick Erickson, who has taken to attacking Santorum regularly and savagely). As a conservative Catholic, he has ties to evangelical activists via the anti-abortion movement (in which he is heavily involved, taking positions that won’t wear well with more moderate voters), but does not have the kind of natural connections to southern political culture that 2008 winner Mike Huckabee enjoyed.

Given Romney’s big lead in New Hampshire, it’s unlikely Santorum will take the time and money to seriously challenge him there, though Newt Gingrich is promising to launch a vengeful attack on Mitt in the Granite State. But the next critical (and perhaps final) phase of the campaign could well be played out behind the scenes, as conservative opinion-leaders decide whether or not to get behind Romney and end the contest before it gets truly ugly and expensive. South Carolina’s Jim DeMint, for example, could send a very big signal that the battle to deny Romney the nomination has become too dangerous for the conservative movement to sustain. A Romney win in the Palmetto State would pretty much wrap things up unless Mitt does or says something uncharacteristically stupid, though rivals (obviously Paul, probably Gingrich, and perhaps even Huntsman if he chooses to spend his family fortune) may stick around in case that happens.

It bears repeating at this point that there are few signs of a general-election “conservative revolt” against a Romney-led ticket, beyond a smattering of evangelicals who really don’t like Mormons. The best way to describe the wingnut mood about this contest is that a Romney nomination would deny them their ideal aspiration of a Goldwater-style candidacy (one, of course, that won this time) aimed at repealing the entire Great Society/New Deal legacy. But that would be considered a tactical setback other than an intolerable defeat, simply delaying the great-gittin’-up-morning they are convinced is on the horizon once those vote-buying socialists in the Democratic Party are driven from power. An early Romney nomination victory, on the other hand, might save the candidate a lot of heartburn by giving conservative activists time to heal their wounds and get used to him as the nominee, while limiting the gestures he will have to make to earn their enthusiastic support, if not their trust or affection.