GETTING MY HOPES UP EVEN MORE

If there were a God, surely He/She/It wouldn't like me enough to give me an early Christmas present like this:

Newt: A GOP Dark Horse?

... conservatives could be faced with backing either McCain, or Romney, or Huckabee or even Rudy.

Or they could end up backing none of them.

Who, then, could conservatives end up backing? ...

Newt Gingrich, that's who....

Why Newt? Ask yourself why Ronald Reagan won. He won because he was able to excite a group of people in America that the liberal wing of the Republican party has never excited -- the grass roots.

Newt Gingrich is the last Republican to have done that -- to reach out to the grass roots, to all those conservative Republicans and Reagan Democrats. Remember, it was Newt who engineered the miraculous Republican take-over of Congress in 1994 -- something that was deemed impossible two years after Bill Clinton won the White House.

I wouldn't be surprised if he was out there quietly working the phones and hoping for a wide-open convention where the delegates -- not the primaries that selected many of them -- decide for themselves who they want to carry the GOP banner in the presidential election in November.

If Newt throws his hat in the ring he knows that in the blink of an eye he will have the grass roots behind him....

That's from Michael Reagan, writing in Human Events. I think Ronnie's son is nuts to think this could happen -- but the fact that he would put forth a nutball idea like this with no fear of being laughed out of the room reaffirms my sense that the best result possible for Democrats would be a brokered Republican convention. I really believe that the various more-purist-than-thou wings of Wingnuttia might scuttle any attempt to unify behind a remotely electable nominee. I'm not entirely sure they wouldn't emerge with a Limbaugh-Coulter ticket. (Or, given the official line these days that Coulter is de trop, maybe it would have to be Limbaugh-Malkin.)

But ... Gingrich. Wow. Just wow. And imagine if this happened along with a Hillary Clinton victory -- we had Barack Obama entering the race after expressing exasperation at having watched the Clinton/Gingrich wars in the 1990s, and this would be that war all over again. Talk about age and treachery overcoming youth and skill.

(Though I probably shouldn't discount Newt's chances -- after all, in the mainstream media, Gingrich fans David Broder and Joe Klein would just plotz.)