Thomas Sowell‘s latest column examines the impact of the South Carolina primary results.
Mitt Romney’s supposed “electability” — his acceptability to moderates and independents — has been his biggest selling point. Moreover, he is just the kind of candidate that the Republican establishment has preferred for years: a nice, bland, moderate who offends nobody.
This is the kind of candidate that is supposed to be the key to victory, no matter how many such candidates have gone down to defeat. If the bland and inoffensive moderate was in fact the key to victory, Dewey would have won a landslide victory over Truman in 1948, and John McCain would have beaten Barack Obama in 2008.
Whomever the Republicans choose as their candidate is going to have to run against both Barack Obama and the pro-Obama media. Newt Gingrich has shown that he can do that. Romney? Not so much. Mitt Romney’s fumbling when trying to answer the simple question of whether he would or would not release his income-tax records is the kind of indecisiveness that is not going to cut it in a nationally televised debate with President Obama.
Gingrich is not just a guy who is fast and feisty on his feet. He has a depth of understanding of what issues are crucial, experience in how to deal with them, and — almost equally important — experience in how to shoot down the petty, irrelevant, and “gotcha” distractions of the media.
