Newt Gingrich's woman problem may be finally catching up with him, just like his ex-wives ultimately seem to.

Exit polls of Florida's Republican primary voters exposed a distinct gender gap between reinvigorated front-runner Mitt Romney and Gingrich. Although Romney beat Gingrich among most demographic groups, Romney's yawning lead among women, especially married women, was noteworthy. Romney beat Gingrich with men, 41 percent to 36 percent, but he beat him with women, 52 percent to 28 percent.

The gender gap was even more pronounced among married couples. Married men split about evenly between the two, giving Romney 37 percent and Gingrich 36 percent. But married women preferred Romney, 51 percent to 28 percent.

In his victory speech in Florida on Tuesday night, Mitt Romney gave us the clearest preview yet of his general election strategy. He displayed magnanimity toward Newt Gingrich -- without naming him of course -- and his other vanquished GOP opponents, and then proceeded to deliver his familiar broadside against Barack Obama in the usual, over-the-top-way.

Romney's attack on Obama, predictable by now, was so extreme -- he's weak, he's incompetent, he's a European socialist (though the Europeans are now pursuing a Romneyesque austerity) -- that all it did was to make you wonder: Is he protesting too much? Is he worried?

President Obama's reelection team has spun multiple pathways to an electoral vote majority, but a glance at his state-by-state approval ratings throughout 2011 suggests the campaign has been doing a lot of bluffing.

First, the good news for Team Obama: His political standing is in respectable shape in traditionally Democratic Midwestern battlegrounds, like Wisconsin, Michigan and the more Republican heartland state of Iowa (46 approval/46 disapproval). Obama's numbers in Virginia are better than in other battleground states - 45 percent approve, 49 percent disapprove.  And his numbers in North Carolina (44/49 approve/disapprove) and Florida (44/48 approve/disapprove) and even Georgia (45/48 approve/disapprove) aren't good, but given his overall numbers, they are relatively decent.

The bad news: His job approval ratings in the other battleground states are solidly underwater and, in many states, worse than publicly perceived. In Colorado, seen as a gateway to aggressively contesting the Southwest, Obama scored a net -12 job approval (40/52) throughout the year. In Nevada, also seen as a major bellwether, Obama has a 41 percent approval rating, with 50 percent of respondents disapproving. In the critical battleground state of Ohio, 50 percent of voters disapprove of his performance, with only 42 percent approving.   In the must-win state of Pennsylvania, Obama's job approval is underwater, with 45 percent approving and 48 percent disapproving.

Some unpleasant surprises abound for the Obama campaign, too. New Mexico has been seen as a Democratic-leaning state because of its voting history and significant Hispanic population.  But Obama's performance there -- 42 percent favorable, 51 percent unfavorable -- isn't much different than his weak standing in the other Southwestern battlegrounds.  The Obama campaign has been arguing it has an outside shot at contesting Arizona, but his approval rating is at 40 percent, with 52 percent disapproving.

President Obama's re-election team has been focused on Mitt Romney's record at Bain Capital as a major part of its offensive against the former Massachusetts governor, hoping to portray him as a heartless capitalist who laid off workers while restructuring companies

Two new polls conducted over the last week -- one nationally and one in Florida -- raise questions on the potency of that message.  A new ABC News/Washington Post poll, released today, finds that a narrow 40 percent plurality view Romney's work "buying and restructuring companies" unfavorably, with 35 percent viewing it favorably. Among independents, it's a near-even split: 35 percent view Romney's work at Bain favorably, while 36 percent view it unfavorably.

In the battleground state of Florida, a Mason-Dixon poll conducted for the Tampa Times and Miami Herald, showed favorable results for Romney. Nearly half (46 percent) of Florida voters viewed Romney's business background positively, while just 30 percent negatively. This is despite lots of scrutiny in the news media about Romney's record at Bain over the last several weeks.

MIAMI -- When Newt Gingrich pounded Mitt Romney's immigration policy as inhumane and unrealistic at last Thursday night's GOP debate, the sound of silence was deafening at the debate-watching party of a prominent Republican Hispanic group here.

After tonight's debate, I'd say Newt Gingrich has a better chance of being elected governor of America's 51^st state--the Moon, presumably--than he does of getting to the White House.

It wasn't just that a tanned and confident Mitt Romney got the better of every exchange with Newt, at a time when Romney had begun surging ahead in the polls. (OMG, that's far too journalistically polite: he tore him to pieces!) Or that an inordinate amount of time was spent on Gingrich's loony idea of setting up a moon colony in the midst of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, reminding one and all of a trait that Gingrich was boasting about earlier today but which he didn't seem eager to bring up again: his "grandiosity."

The main problem for Gingrich was the complete absence of the fiery, base-rallying Newt that got him here in the first place.

Gingrich sounded peevish and defensive the whole night and barely landed a punch on Romney as the latter floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee. Whether the subject was Romney's taxes, his conservatism or even Romneycare--all badly tender spots for Mitt in past debates--Gingrich passed up chances to attack. (Rick Santorum, by contrast, was brutally effective once again in making the case that in an Obama-vs.-Romney race, Mitt would not be able to sufficiently distinguish himself as an alternative, that the president could simply turn to Mitt and say, "You say your plan worked in Massachusetts. So why not for the country?")

After a day in which he was blind-sided by multiple attacks and suggestions that he was never quite the Reagan disciple he has intimated during the campaign, Newt Gingrich fired back hard in the Jacksonville debate, blaming rival Mitt Romney for the broadside.

"It's increasingly interesting to watch the Romney attack machine coordinate things," said the former Speaker. "All of a sudden today there are four different articles by four different people that show up" questioning his Reagan credentials.

Perhaps the most biting article was written by former Reagan assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams, who said the young Gingrich "often spewed insulting rhetoric at Reagan, his top aides and his policies to defeat Communism." He quoted Gingrich in 1985 calling Reagan's Cold War policies "pathetically incompetent."

He didn't start the fight, but he certainly seemed intent on finishing it.

With Mitt Romney's recently released tax returns serving as a major story this week, many expected the issue to surface during Thursday's debate, putting him on the defensive over what Newt Gingrich described as Romney's world of "Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts."

Shortly after Rick Santorum criticized the continued questions about Gingrich's consulting work and Romney's personal wealth -- saying they are "distracting" voters from the "most important issues" -- CNN's Wolf Blitzer tossed a softball at Gingrich, asking him to expand on his criticism of Romney's lavish lifestyle.

Just after offering a robust defense of his hard-line immigration policy, Mitt Romney stepped in it when he claimed to have not seen his own ad attacking Newt Gingrich.

The ad airing on Spanish-language radio in Miami says Gingrich referred to Spanish as a "ghetto'' language. PolitiFact called the ad "mostly true.

"I haven't seen the ad,'' Romney said. "Did he say that?"'

Even if he was telling the truth, Romney came across as disingenuous. That's not helpful for a candidate who frequently struggles to come across as authentic. As CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer helpfully reminded the audience, at the end of the ad, Romney says, "I'm Mitt Romney and I approved this ad.''

As Rick Perry would say: "Oops.''

Minutes later, the Gingrich campaign was happy to e-mail blast a copy of the ad so anyone could hear Romney's disclaimer -- which he recites in not-too-shabby Spanish.

Just a side note: Gingrich has apologized for the "ghetto'' remark but in the heat of the debate he insisted it was "taken totally out of context.''

It turns out becoming president was not always Ron Paul's dream. Like so many other Americans in the 1960s, he wanted to be an astronaut. "I actually had a daydream of becoming the first physician to go into space," he confessed during the Jacksonville debate, noting that when he entered the Air Force in 1962, right after John Glenn's historic flight in February of that year, he studied aerospace medicine.

But even though he never became an astronaut, it doesn't mean he doesn't still have dreams about space. Now, he said with a laugh, he doesn't want the country to spend the money to return to the moon. But, he added, "I think we maybe should send some politicians up there sometimes."

Paul also was grilled about his age. Now 76, he would be the oldest president in U.S. history if elected, prompting moderator Wolf Blitzer to ask if he will release his medical records."Oh, obviously, because it's about one page, if even that long," he said. But then he challenged his younger rivals "to a 25-mile bike ride any time of the day in the heat of Texas."

More seriously - or at least, he seemed to be serious - he told Blitzer that questions about his health have come up "sometimes in fun, but sometimes not in fun." He warned Blitzer, "There are laws against age discrimination, so, if you push this too much, you better be careful."

In the almost six decades that Fidel Castro has ruled Cuba, Republican presidential candidates have elbowed each other and fought to portray themselves as the toughest on Castro - until Thursday night when Rep. Ron Paul showed again that he is quite willing to be different. To a question suggesting that the United States has not been involved enough in influencing governments in Latin America, Paul called for an end to the half-century-old U.S. trade embargo of Cuba.

"Free trade is an answer, the answer to a lot of conflicts around the world," he said. ""I'm always promoting free trade. And you might add Cuba, too. I think we'd be a lot better off... trading with Cuba." Later in his answer, he added, "I believe with friendship and trade you can have a lot of influence. And I strongly believe that it's time we had friendship and trade with Cuba."

None of the other three candidates - who have been ardently wooing the state's influential Cuban community, most of whom are stridently anti-Castro - jumped in to agree. Former Sen. Rick Santorum indicated he did not agree with Paul's response but turned his answer into an attack on President Obama. The president, he said, has a policy of "siding with leftists, siding with Marxists" and seeking common ground with Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez.

There is something quintessentially Newtish about Gingrich's gleeful embrace of the word "grandiose" on the campaign trail in Florida today. On one hand it is evidence of one of Newt's great strengths, that debater's agility at taking a criticism and redirecting it at his questioner. BAM! In this case it was Rick Santorum who, at the Jan. 19 debate in South Carolina, declared that "grandiosity has never been a problem with Newt Gingrich" and went on to question whether he was reality-based and stable enough to be president. Newt just smiled and said, "You're right, I think grandiose thoughts .... I spent 16 years on a grandiose project called creating a Republican majority in the House." 

Then he trounced Santorum in the primary.

Vying for the lead a week later in Florida, Gingrich has decided to paste the word across his ample abdomen. Now, apparently, he's the G-Man. At Cocoa, on Florida's "Space Coast," he declared: "I accept the charge--I am American and Americans are instinctively grandiose."  Gingrich then proposed a permanent moon base by 2020 (without saying how he would pay for it, of course, at a time when he and his fellow Republicans want to cut education and public services here on Earth).

Even more grandiosely, he compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, Orville and Wilbur Wright, and John F. Kennedy.

But in running with the word, Gingrich is also willfully ignoring its pejorative sense --which has gradually come to be the more accepted connotation, says Ben Zimmer, a linguist who formerly authored the "On Language" column at the New York Times and chairs the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society. That is to say, to be "grandiose" means one is delusional about one's importance, and exhibits behavior "characterized by affectation of grandeur or splendor or by absurd exaggeration," according to Merriam-Webster.

The word, says Zimmer, "has swung towards the negative [meaning] because grandiosity now has a specific meaning in the mental health literature." According to the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, grandiosity is a disorder indicating "an unrealistic sense of superiority, a sustained view of oneself as better than others that causes the narcissist to view others with disdain or as inferior. It also refers to a sense of uniqueness, the belief that few others have anything in common with oneself and that one can only be understood by a few or very special people."

The term grandiose first appeared in the 1994 edition of the manual to describe a "narcissistic personality disorder."

Isn't there something quintessentially Newtish about that too?

Nancy Friedman, a linguistic blogger, noted recently that "when grandiosity and grandiose entered English dictionaries, around 1840, the words already had both positive and negative connotations. As time went on, the disparaging meanings prevailed. George Eliot wrote in Daniel Deronda (1876) of a character's "grandiose air.'"

Now we have a new character on the scene with a grandiose air. As Zimmer says, Gingrich's unabashed use of the word to describe himself "is in itself a kind of grandiosity."

If President Obama were a television show, the network executives might start holding some serious meetings about how to turn his ratings around. Tuesday's State of the Union address was the third consecutive year Obama's overall audience has shrunk, even though the speech was carried on more networks than ever before.

37.569 million viewers tuned in to the speech, according to Nielsen's ratings, released late Wednesday. That translated into a 24.0 rating -- better than American Idol's show the following night, which 21.93 million people watched, but not as good as the NFC Championship game between the New York Giants and the San Francisco 49ers. 57.64 million people watched that game on Fox.

But Obama's numbers are getting worse. Fully 52.37 million watched his first address to a joint session of Congress, on Feb. 24, 2009 (technically not a State of the Union, but at a comparable point in the year). His first official State of the Union, on Jan. 27, 2010, was seen by 48 million people; his second, on Jan. 25, 2011, drew an audience of 42.79 million, according to Neilsen's ratings.

(Subscribers can check out our full list of SOTU Neilsen data, dating back to 1993, compiled by Hotline TV staff writer Chris Peleo-Lazar, here).

Florida is a must-win state for Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. The race is tied. Debates matter. That makes tonight a must-win debate. 

If you want to know more about the sky-high stakes in the CNN debate at 8 p.m., read on:

Mitt Romney had a Swiss bank account. You're welcome, Democratic National Committee.

The Republican presidential contender, who released his tax forms Tuesday morning under pressure from his fellow candidates and the media, avoided some of the embarrassing pitfalls that can come with opening one's financial portfolio for public inspection. But in doing so, Romney handed Democratic opposition researchers a trove of new data that will surely show up in attack ads this fall, if he's lucky enough to be the GOP nominee.

Romney's tax forms show he made $21.7 million in 2010 and paid $3 million in federal taxes, a rate of just under 14 percent. The majority of Romney's income came from investments -- $12.6 million in capital gains, $3.3 million in interest and $4.9 million in regular dividends. The 2011 estimated forms show Romney made a total of $20.9 million last year, including $4.1 million in taxable interest, $3.1 million in dividends and $10.7 million in capital gains. Romney will pay about $3.4 million in taxes this year.

Like a stand-up comedian whose routine suffers without echoes of laughter egging him on, Newt Gingrich was a candidate without cadence Monday night when he found himself searching hopelessly for the secret weapons that have proven crucial to his season of strong debate performances: moderators to scold and audience members to energize.

In front of a small, sedate crowd comprised primarily of rank-and-file spectators rather than die-hard activists, Gingrich found himself on the defensive from the opening bell against a barrage of blows from Mitt Romney over everything from his work at Freddie Mac to his abrupt departure from Congress.

In past debates, Gingrich has employed humor, hubris and humiliation to deflect incoming criticism and reverse the rhetorical momentum, rallying the crowd to his cause with a sharp remark to a rival or stinging rebuke of the moderator. But there was no such outlet for Gingrich in Tampa: NBC's Brian Williams asked the audience to stay quiet and steered clear of any John King-style confrontation; and most of Gingrich's internecine attacks seemed to land with a rhetorical thud.

After months of campaigning in which they rarely encountered Latinos, the Republican candidates are suddenly hunting for votes in the state with the third highest number of Hispanics. But in the Tampa debate, neither Mitt Romney nor Newt Gingrich backed down from their tough stands about the English language and immigration - even when confronted with what seems to many to be a little hypocrisy in their campaigns. Beth Reinhard of the National Journal noted that both candidates want to make English the official language and outlaw ballots being printed in Spanish. But Gingrich is sending out Florida press releases in Spanish and Romney is running some Spanish language advertising.

Both candidates insisted there is nothing hypocritical about this. "I think campaigning, historically, you've always been willing to go to people on their terms and in their culture, whether it is Greek Independence Day or something you did for the Irish on St. Patrick's Day," said Gingrich. "I'm perfectly happy to have a lot of support in the Latino community." But he said that "it is essential to have a central language" to unify the country. He added, "Look, English is the language of this nation. People need to learn English."

The only dissenting voice was Ron Paul who favors English as the national language but chided his rivals for trying to impose their policy on the states. "Our system really gives us a way to be more generous," he said. "Because if Florida wanted to have some ballots in Spanish, I certainly wouldn't support a federal law that prohibited Florida" from having them. The others, he said, were "dictating one answer for all states."

The imperative of the issue is clear from the numbers. In the three states where the candidates have spent most of their time campaigning, there is a grand total of only 371,000 Latinos - 37,000 in New Hampshire, 130,000 in Iowa and 204,000 in South Carolina, according to the Pew Hispanic Center numbers for 2009. In Florida, there are 3.9 million. Hispanics in the other three states are either three or four percent; in Florida, they are 22 percent of the population.

"Angry Newt" took the night off. In a striking role reversal, Newt Gingrich looked more like a firefly than a firebrand in a high-stakes debate Monday night, while rival Mitt Romney called the surging former House Speaker a disgraced, influence-peddling, Washington insider.

Somebody must have awakened the cool-and-nonchalant Romney out of his debate slumber and told him the GOP nomination was slipping away. Gingrich stunned the political world -- and frightened much of the GOP establishment -- with a landslide victory in South Carolina on Saturday night that erased Romney's lead in national and Florida polls.

Mitt Romney has been making an aggressive play for Cuban voters in a state where they represent a pivotal part of the Florida Republican electorate.  He's won the support of the Diaz-Balart brothers, former Sen. Mel Martinez, and much of the Cuban-American establishment in the state.

But it's Gingrich's hawkish message on Cuba -- saying Fidel Castro will be going to hell, support for an aggressive overthrow of the regime, and call for a Cuban Spring -- that has the potential to win over Cuban-American Republicans.

In 2008, Romney did not do well in Miami-Dade County, with the state's largest concentration of Cuban-Americans. He won just 16 percent of the GOP vote in the county -- well below the 31 percent he carried statewide.  And he's been taking a relatively hard line on illegal immigration, which could be a turn off to the Cuban-American community.

It took less than a minute into the latest Republican presidential debate for longtime front-runner Mitt Romney to show what lesson he took from his surprisingly big defeat in South Carolina: Bare the teeth and go for the jugular of the man who beat him so solidly.

The attacks on former House speaker Newt Gingrich were almost non-stop. Before most viewers had a chance to settle in to watch NBC's broadcast, Romney had lashed Gingrich as a Washington "influence peddler," a disgraced speaker forced out of office, a failed political leader, a lobbyist and a traitor to the conservative cause.

Asked by moderator Brian Williams how he squared those attacks with his lament last week that he wanted to avoid personal criticisms of other Republicans, Romney adopted a tight smile and recalled his Saturday shellacking. "I learned something from that last contest in South Carolina," said Romney. "And that was I had incoming from all directions, was overwhelmed with a lot of the attacks. And I'm not going to sit back and get attacked day in and day out and without returning fire."

Gingrich was not bashful about fighting back, though he refused to get dragged into many of the specifics. He seemed more saddened than angry at the barrage from Romney. "He just went on and on and on," he said of Romney, adding that "he may have been a good financier. He's a terrible historian." Yet Gingrich, who really is a historian, offered up some questionable history himself.

Two fascinating findings from today's Pew Research Center survey on the public's top priorities: Both President Obama and leading Republican presidential candidates are focused on two issues that are rapidly becoming less important to most voters: global warming/environment and illegal immigration.

The survey found that only 39 percent of voters view illegal immigration as a "top priority" for the president and Congress this year, a 16 point dropoff from January 2007.  The number of Republicans considering it a top issue also has plummeted.  In 2007, it was the second-most important issue for Republicans, with 69 percent rating it as a top priority.  Now only 48 percent of Republicans view it the same way.

A similar downward spiral has taken place on the issues of the environment and global warming.  In the mid-1990s, Bill Clinton once used environmental issues as a wedge to win over independents and suburbanites disenchanted with the Republicans' opposition to any type of regulations.  Now Republicans hold the upper hand on the issue: With the economy stagnant, voters appear to favor economic growth and lower regulations over environmental protections.

In January 2007, 57 percent rated the environment as a top issue.  That number has tumbled to 43 percent.  Only one-quarter of voters rate global warming as a top priority, down 13 points from five years ago.

These findings raise questions about both President Obama and Mitt Romney's tactics on each of these issues.  Obama has put the environmental issues at the top of his priority list, most recently canceling the Keystone XL pipeline out of concerns for environmental protection - and perhaps more important, because of loud howls from the liberal base. 

But there's no indication that it's a winning political issue for him.  Most Americans consider the economy and jobs far more important than the environment theses days.  This already has become a potent issue for Republicans to attack the administration on.  And in the 2010 midterms, Democratic support for a cap-and-trade system played a pivotal role in many House Democratic defeats - particularly those from the electorally-important Rust Belt.

Meanwhile, illegal immigration, fast becoming a litmus test issue for Republicans, has dropped far down on the list of priorities, even among GOP voters.  It's striking that Romney has positioned himself to the right of Gingrich on the issue, even though it could cost him support from Hispanic voters in a general election.  (It's also an issue where Romney's border security hawkishness doesn't come across as particularly authentic.)

Former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum's campaign moved quickly Saturday night to squash any speculation that his campaign is over. But there's a reason to speculate: Santorum's disappointing finish shows he has all but lost the race to become the anti-Mitt Romney alternative to Newt Gingrich.

Exit polls indicate that Santorum will finish a distant third in tonight's South Carolina primary, well behind Gingrich and Romney and only marginally ahead of Rep. Ron Paul. Santorum's campaign announced a 2:00 p.m. rally in Coral Springs, Florida, tomorrow, sending the signal that they're not finished yet. But tonight's results show Santorum's days are pretty well numbered.

That's despite Santorum's surprisingly good fortunes over the last month. He spent the vast majority of his campaign mired in the low single digits, then surged at exactly the right time to take advantage of a weak Republican field to win the Iowa caucuses -- though he only got to claim credit for that win late this week, after ballot snafus marred the caucuses. Santorum even got to claim support from major figures in the evangelical movement after they gathered to endorse his candidacy in Texas last weekend.

But luck shines on more than one person, and it's illuminating Gingrich tonight. Not only did Gingrich benefit from strong debate performances and from a timely endorsement by Texas Gov. Rick Perry, he also got a little help from his friends in the media.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich finished an astonishing comeback Saturday night to defeat front-runner Mitt Romney in South Carolina, plunging the Republican Party into a wrenching and potentially lengthy period of soul-searching: Can either of these jokers beat President Obama?

By prolonging the GOP primary season with a strong come-from-behind win in South Carolina -- one that exposed new and serious doubts about Mitt Romney -- Newt Gingrich has almost certainly increased the general-election chances of the man he calls "the most dangerous president of our lifetime," Barack Obama.  

That's because, as my colleague Reid Wilson has argued, Romney must still be considered the "overwhelming front-runner" for the Republican nomination. But the former governor is fumbling badly in the race. Now, to counter Gingrich's surge and frontal assault against him as a  "Massachusetts moderate," Romney has no choice but to lurch even further rightward (something he'll need to do also to sell his record at Bain Capital more effectively).

Taken together with a new set of GOP primary rules that allocate delegates proportionally rather than in a winner-takes-all distribution until April -- except for Florida -- this means Romney will need to stake out positions that are far more Gingrich-like and thus less appealing to centrists and independents in the general election.

And Romney is already pushing the envelope on that trend, sowing doubt among those in the center who were considering him as an alternative to Obama.

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. - Two prominent Republican governors stood on stage and praised Mitt Romney effusively this afternoon - but only one of them said they weren't interested in being considered to be Romney's running mate.

South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, one of Romney's most effective surrogates on the campaign trail in her home state, told National Journal that she had no interest in becoming Romney's number-two, if he emerges as the Republican nominee.  But Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, who just endorsed Romney this morning, made no such declaration, sidestepping the question.

Haley's response: "I'm doing this for my country, but mainly for South Carolina... I don't want a Cabinet position, I don't want to be vice president, I just want to see Obama out of the Oval Office."

McDonnell: "That's completely up to Mitt Romney or whoever becomes the nominee. I'm not worried about it. I think anyone would be honored to help the ticket and help the country if they could.  I have my hands full in Virginia, and trying to win governors' races next year."

Hours after South Carolina Republicans reported receiving a fake breaking news alert spreading rumors about former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the same rumors are showing up as an email from what appears to be Gingrich's campaign. But like the earlier fake news alerts, the statements themselves are false.

The earlier fake CNN email contained allegations that Gingrich had pressured his ex-wife into having an abortion. The fake statement admits to that, something for which the candidate has "had to apologize to God and to seek reconciliation."

Several Republicans in Washington, all of whom are on Gingrich's regular email list, forwarded the email to National Journal. The email comes from campaign@newt20l2.org -- an address that replaces the "1" in with a lower-case "L" to appear similar to the campaign's actual web address. A physical address enclosed within the email also doesn't match earlier addresses Gingrich's campaign has used.

The email is datelined Orangeburg, South Carolina, a city southeast of Columbia where Gingrich was scheduled to deliver a closing argument-style speech to supporters. More than 400 showed up at the event, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said.

If you're like us, you'll spend Saturday evening clicking refresh to get the latest results out of South Carolina. Here are the key areas to watch as the numbers roll in:

-- The Upstate: The northwest corner of the state, sandwiched between Georgia and North Carolina, is the buckle of the Bible Belt, the center of the state's socially conservative, evangelical Christian electorate. Mike Huckabee won most Upstate counties in 2008, but not by huge margins. Together, Greenville and Spartanburg Counties will contribute more than 20 percent of the primary vote. Huckabee beat John McCain by about 3 percent in Greenville County, 29 percent to 26 percent, while Fred Thompson took another 21 percent. Huckabee took 34 percent in Spartanburg County to McCain's 27 percent and Thompson's 20 percent.

Look for both Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum to play well in the Upstate. The question is, how evenly do they split those votes? If they split more evenly than Huckabee and Thompson did in 2008, that only helps Mitt Romney, whose coalition more closely resembles McCain's. Anderson County and York County will contribute about 20,000 votes each to the statewide total; Huckabee and Thompson combined took 54 percent and 59 percent in those two counties four years ago.

OK, let's stipulate the obvious: Newt is everything he said he was. He's a superb debater. He really could take on Barack Obama in a "Lincoln-Douglas debate," and he might even win. Gingrich's preemptive assault tonight on John King, CNN and the media in general over his ex-wife Marianne's salacious allegations  was nothing short of brilliant. It was a classic Gingrichian descent into rhetorical overreach -- King's decision to raise the subject as the first question in the 17th GOP debate was "as close to despicable as anything I can imagine," Newt declared (Anything? Really, Newt?) -- but, man, was it effective.

Do you remember when the issue of health care reform -- specifically, how Mitt Romney's program in Massachusetts provided the blueprint for President Obama's federal law -- was supposed to define the Republican primary contest?

Rick Santorum does.

The former Pennsylvania senator, who has spent recent debates attacking multiple rivals on a variety of subjects, finally got back to basics during Thursday's GOP debate in South Carolina. Amid a discussion on how to repeal and replace Obama's federal health care program, Santorum attempted to nail Romney on the issue once predicted to be his Achilles heal in the Republican nominating race: "Romneycare."

Rep. Ron Paul almost always can be counted on for statements few other politicians would dare to offer. But even for Paul, his answer one hour into Thursday night's South Carolina debate was one for the books. While his rival candidates barely can restrain themselves from attacking China and lamenting the outsourcing of American jobs to China, the Texas congressman basically told everybody to just relax and stop worrying about those jobs.

No, not an answer about how to create jobs. Republican front-runner Mitt Romney needs to settle on a single number to pull out when he's describing his tenure at Bain Capital. Just like his stumbles over whether he'll release his tax returns in a timely fashion, Romney struggles to a surprising degree when it comes to quantifying a key part of the biography he wants voters to buy.

Tonight, Romney sounded like he was claiming credit for creating 110,000 jobs during his time at Bain.

A stunning opening to the debate as John King goes there, all the way.

Newt went with full attack, as I said he must have wanted to do. He questioned ABC's legitimacy, denied the veracity of his ex-wife's claim that he wanted an open marriage, claimed that ABC wouldn't interview persons with a conflicting account. He went as far as to say that the media was working for Barack Obama. The "destructive, vicious, negative nature of the media," he said.

 If the former speaker's outburst wasn't surprising, the unwillingness of any of his opponents to jump in was less obvious. Ron Paul dissed the media but slyly noted his marriage of 54 years. Santorum said he was glad God believed in forgiveness.

Gingrich's remarks played well in the hall. Will they with GOP voters in South Carolina? It's hard to know. And it depends what else his second wife might or might not say in the coming days. But one voice that won't be heard is Callista. The other woman can't be a character witness.

Mitt Romney employed some of the toughest rhetoric of his campaign in Thursday's South Carolina debate, ripping into President Obama as a job-destroying disaster who practices "crony capitalism," listens to labor "stooges," and so misunderstands capitalism that Romney will have to "stuff it down his throat" in the fall campaign.

And that was just in Romney's first response in a debate he clearly wanted to serve as a preview for how he'd go after Obama.

The GOP front-runner was also the first in the debate to attack the president for his decision this week to kill the Keystone pipeline. "Because he has to bow to the most extreme members of the environmental movement, he turned down the Keystone pipeline, which would bring energy and jobs to America," said Romney. "This president is the biggest impediment to job growth in this country. And we have to replace Barack Obama to get America working again."

Romney also raised the Obama administration's $535 million loan to Solyndra, the California solar company that went bankrupt last year, accusing the president of "practicing crony capitalism." He added, "He stacks the labor stooges on the NRB so they can say no to Boeing and take care of their friends in the labor movement."

Romney also turned an attack on his work for Bain Capital into another attack on Obama. "There's nothing wrong with profit," he said, adding that much of Bain's profits went to pension funds and charities and hired more people. "I'm going to stand and defend capitalists across this country. I know we're going to get it hard from President Obama. But we'll stuff it down his throat."

Since the beginning of this presidential cycle, Iowa, the state with a seemingly unshakeable inferiority complex, has feared its relevance in the presidential nominating process could be compromised if any number of events happened to transpire:

-- If Iowa was leap-frogged on the primary calendar, it could lose its relevance as the nation's first nominating contest.

-- If Iowa crowned a candidate who spent too little time campaigning in the state, it could lose its relevance in the eyes of the media, which pumps money (and energy) into the state by pushing the narrative that Iowans favor candidates who invest time in the state.

-- If Iowa crowned a candidate who's too conservative, it could lose its relevance in the eyes of the eyes of the Republican establishment, which favors electability over ideology and has long been wary of the Hawkeye State's homogeneous, evangelical electorate.

-- If Iowa crowned a candidate who's too moderate, it could lose its relevance in the eyes of Iowans themselves, who take pride in coalescing around the candidacy of a conservative standard-bearer capable of challenging the establishment favorite.

-- If Iowa crowned a candidate who stood no shot of winning the White House, it would lose its relevance as a state that's, well, relevant.

As Rick Perry ignominiously departs the presidential race and sheepishly returns to Texas, his oh-so-short campaign should serve as a humbling reminder to those who prognosticate about politics. For when Perry burst on the scene with an Aug. 13^th announcement in South Carolina that overshadowed the Iowa Straw Poll, no one foresaw that he would crash and burn only 159 days later, not even making it to the South Carolina primary.

The experts inside the Republican Party, political analysts and journalists were aware of potential pitfalls for Perry when he announced. But they were all more impressed by his executive experience in Austin, his ability to raise money, his influential backers and a jobs record he could highlight in an election that all expected would be dominated by the economy. Fueled by the high expectations and advance reviews, everything seemed to be falling into place. Only ten days after his announcement, Gallup reported "Perry Zooms to the Front of the Pack for 2012 GOP Nomination." He was beating second-place Mitt Romney by 12 points, 29 to 17 percent.

But the collapse was almost as quick and agonizingly inexorable. Accusing the head of the Federal Reserve of treason; calling Social Security "a Ponzi scheme"; aligning himself with the already-discredited birthers. And all that long before that "oops" moment or any of his other missteps in the many debates.

Forget about potentially losing the evangelical vote in South Carolina. Marianne Gingrich's interview on ABC News tonight puts her ex-husband's presidential campaign in jeopardy with a much bigger segment of the electorate in South Carolina -- women. Be they evangelical, Catholic or agnostic, women are going to see in Marianne Gingrich a highly sympathetic version of that American classic -- the middle-aged woman abandoned by her ambition-addled husband for a younger version of herself. The fact that he heaped insult onto injury by asking her for an open marriage, so that he could keep both his marriage and his young mistress, makes it highly unlikely that women will be willing to overlook Newt Gingrich's character and vote for him on the economy.

Although most of what Marianne Gingrich has to say about her ex was reported in 2010 in a long interview with Esquire, her decision to say it on television, just two days before the South Carolina primary, is potential dynamite. One has to wonder whether she waited for precisely this moment to drop the bomb, when in all probability she had multiple interview requests over the several months that Gingrich has been in the race for the Republican nomination for president. If revenge is a dish best served cold, she made sure she reached into the fridge at just the right moment.

Her claim that Gingrich requested an open marriage is believable, given the candidate's reputation for grandiosity and for, well, his ability to dream up novel approaches to problems. When Gingrich admitted his six-year affair with Callista, while he was the House speaker and she was a congressional aide, Marianne Gingrich said she pleaded with her husband that they had been married for 18 years.

There is a sympathetic case to be made for Rick Perry's spectacular flameout along the lines once suggested by my colleague Ron Brownstein: Perry simply never had a chance to learn and grow as a presidential candidate. In the old days, before the internet and social media and 24-hour cable, would-be presidential contenders could make their rookie errors in relative anonymity in town halls in Iowa or New Hampshire, away from the blaze of the national media. Even Mitt Romney had four years to get it right after his error-strewn bid in 2008 (and he's still not quite there yet).

Perry, by contrast, was thrust immediately onto the national stage in the first GOP debate, as the first Great Red Hope alternative to Romney. And not surprisingly, he began failing immediately.

But the larger problem was that Perry never did grow into the role, 16 debates and two primary states later. And as much as GOP voters still hunger for a Not-Mitt-Who's-Not-Newt, even they quickly realized that Perry just wasn't presidential timber. He simply could not recover. Perry's "oops" moment in November--his brain freeze when he tried to remember which federal agencies he planned to cut--will go down with Dan Quayle's misspelling of "potato" as one of the most disastrous disqualifying episodes in modern presidential history.

And he continued to have "oops" moments, each a more embarrassing revelation of his ignorance than the last. At Monday night's debate in South Carolina, Perry declared that Turkey, one of America's most important allies (and a country that will be even more crucial to U.S. national interests in the future; read Zbigniew Brzezinski's forthcoming book, "Strategic Vision," for the reasons why), was governed by "Islamic terrorists." He blundered jingoistically in defending the Marines who had urinated on Taliban bodies, offending even the military. He asserted that the government must get out of the housing market and "free up Wall Street," even as mortgages remain underwater to a record degree, and even as he lambasted Romney for being a "vulture" capitalist.

Nothing seemed to add up, because it was clear that Perry himself wasn't connecting enough dots in his own head to add up to anything like a vision of how the country, or the economy, or the world, works. And let's face it: Perry had a larger burden of proof, considering that he was another Texas governor who was following in the footsteps of one of the most disastrously unready presidents in American history. 

A Perry aide, speaking to my colleague Alex Roarty today, basically conceded that Perry was simply not prepared for the rigors of the campaign trail. "You can run Texas all you want; it doesn't help you prepare to answer questions about Turkish terrorists," he said.

All of which points up, yet again, the central problem facing the Republican Party today: it doesn't much like Romney--and perhaps likes him even less now considering what he didn't pay in taxes--but can't seem to find an alternative who's qualified to be president.

The question now, with Rick Santorum seeming to fade, is whether GOP voters will decide the same thing about Newt Gingrich. You're on, Marianne. 

GREENVILLE, S.C. -- Here in South Carolina, all the attention is on the looming primary and on Romney's tax returns.  But the most revelatory development over the last 24 hours is that President Obama's re-election campaign is up with its first ad, which strikes a surprisingly defensive tone - especially for a sitting president.  The Obama team apparently thought Obama could be vulnerable on ethics - perceived as a relative strong suit - and is defending his record on that front.

Two thoughts:

1. It shows that Obama is highly vulnerable on Solyndra, an example of government overreach that jibes ideally with Romney's general election narrative.  It mutes attacks on Romney over his own record at Bain, since Obama spent taxpayer money at a failing company - even when there were clear signs the company's business model was suspect.  And it accentuates one of his greatest weaknesses - that he favors a greater governmental role in the economy, which has been stagnant during his presidency. Romney, at least, can point out that many of the investments he made at Bain went to growing companies.

2. Has there ever been a presidential campaign that's started out on the defensive with its first ad?  I can't think of one.  It comes as a new CBS/NYT poll shows the president with a dismal 31 percent favorability rating among independents (38 percent overall) - fairly consistent with other national polling lately.

Updated with an Obama advisor's insights

Nearly two years to the day after the Supreme Court allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts on political advertisements, President Obama's re-election campaign is using its first foray into paid media to lay a foundation against the outside groups that benefit from the Citizens United v. FEC ruling.

One might not have guessed that the candidate of hope and change would launch his re-election bid by inoculating himself against "secretive oil billionaires."

But that's the new political reality Team Obama faces: In the post-Citizens United world, presidential campaigns must pay as much attention to outside groups that attack their records as seriously as they do attacks from their rivals. Just ask Newt Gingrich, whose campaign suffered when it failed to respond to millions of dollars in attack ads from a pro-Mitt Romney super PAC in Iowa.

The Obama ad comes a day after Americans for Prosperity -- a conservative group largely funded by the Koch brothers -- said it would spend $6 million in ads criticizing the Obama administration over Solyndra, the solar panel company that went bankrupt after receiving billions in loans from the Energy Department.

The 30-second ad will run in Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin, according to Obama's campaign -- the same six states where AFP is running their ads (The ads hadn't actually been purchased by close of business, according to a Republican source who watches political ad markets). And the script is a direct response to the AFP ad, touting job growth in the energy sector.

Check out both ads and more after the jump.

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Mitt Romney is still waiting for his victory lap. Three different national surveys released Wednesday showed his overall support among Republicans at 33 percent or less -- hardly a stirring number after his feat of becoming the first Republican other than a sitting president to win both Iowa (at least until final results are announced Thursday) and New Hampshire under the modern primary calendar.

Jay Carney could be excused for his incredulity at Wednesday's White House briefing. To his surprise, he found himself on the defensive amid suggestions that somehow President Obama should not be traveling to Florida on Thursday. The criticism is that because Republicans are about to descend on the state prior to the Jan. 31 primary, the Democratic president should somehow leave them free to attack him uncontested.

This morning's front-page headline in the State, one of South Carolina's leading papers, offers the bookend to National Journal's report on the movement toward Mitt Romney among business-oriented managerial Republicans. The headline reads: "S.C. Evangelicals Split, Frustrated."

Though evangelical Christians constituted a solid 60 percent majority of GOP primary voters in 2008, they "are divided among the faith-and-values trinity of the 2012 S.C. GOP primary, supporting Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry or Rick Santorum," writes reporter Adam Beam. Beam quotes Oran Smith, the executive director of the Palmetto Family Council, a leading local social conservative group: "I do sense frustration that there is not a single candidate that is being put up against Romney."

The Monmouth University survey released Tuesday - which showed Romney holding a double-digit advantage overall in South Carolina - quantifies the reason for Smith's frustration. It showed Romney attracting 29 percent among self-identified evangelicals - much better than his 11 percent with them in 2008, but not much more than the 27 percent John McCain won among them that year while amassing a narrow plurality win in the state. 

AIKEN, S.C. -- Listening to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich give his stump speech Tuesday night at a conservative confab, I was struck by how different his speech sounded from his memorable lines at the debates.  This was Gingrich at his wonky best, discussing health care reforms that he pioneered at the Center for Health Transformation.  He discussed the benefits of preventative medicine, throwing out ideas for offering poor Americans incentives for staying healthy as a way to lower spiraling medical costs.  It was so in the policy weeds that Rick Perry's son Griff, in attendance, tweeted: "I haven't been this bored since Microeconomic Theory 231."

His most effective line was when he said that President Obama wants to cut costs to the health care system, which would worsen the service, while he would offer visionary reforms to improve care.  Gingrich didn't sound at all like a small-government conservative, but a reform-oriented Republican, trying to come up with ideas to streamline government.  (Very Clinton-esque.)  His mostly-humorous idea to crack down on illegal immigration: Outsource the responsibilities of the federal government to FedEx, and have them send packages to all illegal immigrants with tracking devices.

Gingrich's panoply of ideas won over Anne Fulcher, who worked in the health care sector for over 30 years until she was laid off when the surgeon she worked for got sick. She is currently unemployed and doesn't have health insurance to pay her own health care costs.  Looking for work, she's now going back to college to get a degree in communications - and wants to become a health care lobbyist to "fix the system."

"I've been on the inside.  I'm one of the people who fell through the cracks," Fulcher said. "His speech made a big impact. The system is broken, and Gingrich offered ideas for reform."  She said she was probably voting for Gingrich, after hearing his detail-packed speech.

But at the debates, viewers haven't been seeing as much of these reformist ideas from Gingrich, or from any of the other Republican presidential candidates, when they're on center stage.  Instead, the message coming from all the presidential candidates has been centered on cutting spending and the role of the federal government at all costs.

There may not be much suspense when Democrats gather this summer in Charlotte to renominate Barack Obama and Joe Biden as their nominees. But the organizers of the event are determined to re-invent the modern political convention, shortening it and moving key moments outdoors. Just as he accepted his nomination in 2008 in a football stadium, the president's acceptance address this time will be in the 74,000-seat Bank of America Stadium, home of the NFL's Carolina Panthers.

Those plans were announced Tuesday by Steve Kerrigan, CEO of the Democratic convention, who left no doubt that Democrats would love to recapture the magic of 2008 when Obama was nominated in Denver. That was before the economy became his responsibility, before the health care vote, before the "shellacking" of 2010.

Kerrigan also announced that the Democrats will try something this year that has long been recommended since the role of conventions changed from the old one of picking a nominee in a process that often required multiple ballots and loud floor fights. With the proliferation of primaries, those days are gone. But as much as the business of conventions now requires fewer days, neither party was willing to drop the fourth day, in large part because no host city was willing to go to all the trouble and expense without guaranteeing the delegates and media would be there long enough to spend their money locally.

But the Democrats have solved that by making the official convention only three days long, but planning a fourth day of activities outside the convention hall. Kerrigan said the schedule was changed "to make room for a day to organize and celebrate the Carolinas, Virginia and the South and kick off the convention at Charlotte Motor Speedway on Labor Day."

Events at the speedway are designed to "show the world what we can do when we out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world and build an economy that creates opportunity for all," he said in his announcement. The whole point of the different schedule, said Kerrigan, is to demonstrate "that this convention is about more than political rituals and confetti falling from the rafters."

Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman was the answer to a call for moderation and pragmatism that no one in the Republican Party ever made.

Huntsman will end his presidential bid on Monday, two senior campaign officials confirmed to National Journal, bringing to a close his quixotic crusade to nudge the Republican Party away from its own right flank.

Huntsman's decision comes after he finished a disappointing third in last week's New Hampshire primary. Two campaign officials confirmed that he will end his campaign and endorse former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who won the New Hampshire contest.

That endorsement will help Romney coalesce the more socially moderate fiscal conservatives who make up about half of the South Carolina Republican electorate. With three other candidates -- Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum -- vying to win over a majority of social conservatives and Rep. Ron Paul largely earning support from independents and libertarians, Romney now stands alone as the candidate who best appeals to that more centrist slice of his party.

Huntsman's shortcomings are proof that his Republican Party is confident in its place on the national political spectrum. While Huntsman represented a turn to the middle and a broader appeal to independent voters and conservative Democrats, the rest of the field -- including Romney -- have spent their campaigns drawing sharp contrasts with the other side.

There are eight days left before South Carolina voters head to the polls, and Republican presidential candidates are racing across the state to reach as many voters as they can. But are they spending their time efficiently?

Talk to any old hand in the Palmetto State and you'll find some gripe about a presidential campaign's schedule.

The goal, in most strategists' minds, is to make media impressions in each of the state's three key regions -- the Upstate, dominated by the Greenville/Spartanburg media market; the Midlands, where most voters watch Columbia television stations; and the Low Country, stretching along the coast from Myrtle Beach to Charleston. Hit all three of those in a day, and you've reached the majority of the Republican voters in the state.

Four years after it was trendy in Democratic circles to liken Barack Obama to Franklin D. Roosevelt, it is safe to conclude that no one in the Obama re-election campaign will be borrowing FDR's "Happy Days are Here Again" as the theme song for 2012. Judging by recent speeches by the president and the first lady, a much likelier choice is the 2009 tune by He is We, "A Mess it Grows." Or maybe Avril Lavigne's "I'm With You," with its line, "'Cause nothing's going right. And everything's a mess."

Both Obamas left little doubt this week that things are still a mess even after three years of Obama rule. In a speech in Richmond, the first lady talked about "this mess." But she struck the right campaign theme, adding ,"Fortunately, over the past three years, we've worked very hard to dig ourselves out of this mess. Your president has worked very hard. And there's been a lot of wonderful progress made."

Then on Friday, the president pitched his government reorganization plan, even making rare use of a colorful chart. "I don't usually use props in my speeches," he acknowledged to laughter. But he wanted to show how complicated the current government makes things. "This is the system that small business owners face.  This is what they have to deal with if they want even the most basic answers to the most basic questions like how to export to a new country or whether they qualify for a loan."  Reflecting on the way, government treats businesses, he concluded, "It's a mess."

Whatever the real reason for the timing, it's interesting that President Obama decided that this week was the moment--when consensus is gelling that Mitt Romney is the all-but-inevitable GOP nominee--to announce a very Romney-esque cost-cutting plan.

At a White House event complete with business CEOs as props and a slide presentation (the kind Bain Capital once perfected), the president urged Congress to give him the power to merge a plethora of trade and commerce functions that are now dispersed among the Commerce Department, the Small Business Administration, the U.S. Trade Representative, the Export-Import Bank; the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and the Trade and Development Agency. The consolidation would save some $3 billion and 1,000 to 2,000 jobs over ten years, the White House said.

It was, in other words, precisely the kind of government-slashing exercise that Romney, the numbers-whiz-consultant-turned-governor-turned-candidate, has been promising we'll get from him as president. To be fair, Obama had promised such a move in his last State of the Union address, and the next SOTU is fast approaching. But one wonders whether this will be the first in a series of moves intended to convey to voters: you don't need Mitt Romney. You've already got me.

Somewhere, Lee Atwater is looking down on his home state in disbelief. This can't be what the father of the modern political attack had in mind: a Republican using the modern version of his diabolical invention against another Republican in South Carolina.

King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town, the newly-released destroy-the-front-runner vehicle from the super PAC run by rival Newt Gingrich's political operatives, blames Mitt Romney for everything from endlessly high unemployment, to the demise of American manufacturing to the destruction of the modern marriage. Visually, it's a montage of smoke-filled rooms, suitcases filled with cash and glinting corporate headquarters juxtaposed with images of cracked sidewalks in broken small towns and the haggard faces of former factory workers.

Over the top? Sure. A gross violation of Ronald Reagan's 11th commandment to Republicans to speak no ill of fellow Republicans? Hands down it is. Romney spokeswoman Andrea Saul condemned the film as full of "blatant falsehoods and fabrications."

But the most important point about Gingrich's movie is that it works. And if it is unleashed full force on South Carolina voters as promised, it has the potential to do serious damage to Romney's lead in the state's Jan. 21 primary. That's how powerful it is.

South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint swears neutrality in the Republican presidential primary, but anyone attempting to connect the DeMint dots this week would be excused for thinking he's effectively a silent surrogate for Mitt Romney.

That DeMint sounds like a Romney supporter isn't surprising: The conservative kingmaker and tea party icon endorsed Romney's maiden White House bid in 2008, and has consistently spoken positively about the former Massachusetts governor despite declining to endorse him again.

But a series of comments made by DeMint this week -- and actions taken by some of his closest confidants -- suggests he's unofficially advocating for Romney, if not outright supporting him.

Ever since April, people have been speculating that President Obama's campaign may shatter all fund-raising records and may even become the first-ever billion-dollar campaign.. But in the last month, campaign officials have struggled to knock down that notion -- sometimes very colorfully -- because they realize that the perception the president's campaign coffers are overflowing actually hurts fund-raising.

Campaign manager Jim Messina on Thursday tried again to rebut the billion-dollar notion, at least his third such attempt in the last month. This time, it was a video sent to supporters. After boasting of "a pretty good quarter" in which the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee raised $68 million, Messina praised the enthusiasm of the president's supporters, calling it "in stark contrast to what we've seen on the other side."

But, somewhat ominously, he complained of "a challenge that keeps coming up -- too many Obama supporters think we don't need their money. Or they don't need to give now."  He spoke of recent emails that said the campaign is going to raise $1 billion, so more contributions aren't needed. "Look," responded an exasperated Messina, "I totally get why people would think that. But they are completely wrong." He said the $1 billion speculation "is completely untrue."

Messina made the same point in an end-of-the-year email in which he wrote that such speculation "turns people off from politics." He added, "We do not and will not have a billion-dollar war chest." The campaign manager was even more colorful in a December video to supporters. "People have speculated this is a billion dollar campaign," he said. "That's bullshit."

ROCK HILL, SC -- South Carolina is known for dirty tricks, underhanded tactics, and basically anything and everything that people hate about politics (Our pal Peter Hamby at CNN has a great take today on how South Carolina's reputation for skulduggery is vastly overstated).

But in the midst of the negative ads that will characterize the primary over the next nine days, one candidate has a secret plan to stand out: Rick Perry is going to stay positive.

Perry's campaign launched a new 60-second ad on Wednesday featuring several veterans speaking up on Perry's behalf. Perry has purchased more than $341,000 in television air time this week, money that will be spent entirely on positive spots, senior Perry advisor Katon Dawson said.

From National Journal:

CAMPAIGN 2012
Scenes from South Carolina

CAMPAIGN 2012Romney's Disappointing Week, Sandwiched Between Victories

There's nothing particularly new about Quinnipiac's new Florida numbers showing President Obama struggling, but they do underscore how badly the president has slipped - both with white voters and Hispanic voters in the demographically-diverse Sunshine State.

The poll shows Obama's job approval rating among white voters at just 33 percent, and his approval with Hispanic voters at 46 percent.  Obama trails Romney by 21 points among white voters, 55 percent to 34 percent, and only holds a one-point lead among Hispanics, 46 to 45 percent.

Back in 2008, Obama won 42 percent of the white vote against John McCain in Florida; his level of support has dropped eight points since then.  Even more stark is the president's 11-point slippage with Hispanics (he won 57 percent of the state's Latino vote against John McCain).

Obama's carefully-tailored message focused on fighting for the working class seems to have fallen on deaf ears in the Sunshine State, at least so far.  Florida has been particularly hard-hit by the recession, with the state's unemployment rate and foreclosure rate ranking as one of the highest in the country.

Among all voters without a college degree, Obama trails Romney by four points, 47 to 43 percent. Among whites without a college degree, he trails Romney by a whopping 25-point margin, 56 to 31 percent. 

This post has been updated to clarify which PACs have purchased air time in South Carolina.

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- After decades at the head of the primary calendar, South Carolina voters won't be surprised when they turn on their televisions this morning and see wall-to-wall campaign advertisements. And while a super PAC backing Newt Gingrich has said it will spend $3.4 million on negative ads blasting front-runner Mitt Romney, it's actually Romney and his allies who are spending the most on television time this week and next.

Restore Our Future, a super PAC backing Romney's campaign, has purchased more television advertisements than every other entity playing on South Carolina television, our sources in the ad buying community tell us. Restore Our Future has purchased more than $1.7 million in advertising over the next 10 days in South Carolina alone.

The pro-Romney group is spending nearly twice what any other candidate or PAC has purchased in the Greenville/Spartanburg, Columbia, Charleston and Myrtle Beach/Florence markets. And Restore Our Future is going head-to-head with the Gingrich-friendly super PAC, Winning Our Future, in the Charlotte, Augusta and Savannah markets, too.

My colleagues Josh Kraushaar and Alex Roarty have taken note of ex-Sen. Rick Santorum's big-time loss in his 2006 bid for re-election -- and rightly so, given just how badly Sen. Bob Casey beat Santorum across virtually all demographic groups and geographic areas.

But Mitt Romney's re-election bid -- or lack thereof -- deserves its own scrutiny. Romney said Sunday morning he didn't seek another term as governor of Massachusetts in 2006 because it wouldn't have been consistent with the reason he ran in the first place.

"I went to Massachusetts to make it different. I didn't go there to begin a political career, running time and time again. I made a difference. I put in place the things I wanted to do. I listed out the accomplishments we wanted to pursue in our administration. There were 100 things we wanted to do. Those things I pursued aggressively. Some we won. Some we didn't," Romney said. "Run again? That would be about me. I was trying to help get the state in best shape as I possibly could. Left the world of politics, went back into business."

But there are plenty of signs Romney was contemplating another term before he announced he'd skip the race in December 2005.

An underdog presidential contender fails to qualify for the primary ballot in a large, early-voting primary state, prompting questions about the candidate's organizational prowess and ability to run a competitive campaign past January's early nominating contests. Sound familiar?

No, it's not Newt Gingrich in Virginia. It's Jon Huntsman in Arizona.

Huntsman failed to qualify for Arizona's February 28 presidential preference election after his filing paperwork -- which was turned in only two hours before Monday's 5 p.m. deadline -- was rejected due to a "notary issue," according to Secretary of State spokesman Matt Roberts. The Arizona Secretary of State's office sent a letter to Huntsman's campaign shortly thereafter informing them that they are "unable to certify" Huntsman as a candidate.

Huntsman's nomination forms were ruled "incomplete" because they were "missing the candidate's original notarized signature," Roberts said. "We are unable to certify him because of that."

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- The only five men standing between Mitt Romney and the Republican presidential nomination took a walk Saturday night -- attacking each other and the media as the former Massachusetts governor coasted toward the brass ring.

Ron Paul told all Republican voters and the nation why he won't rule out a third-party run if he doesn't win the GOP presidential nomination.

"I want to put as much pressure on them as I can," Paul said at the ABC/Yahoo! News/WMUR debate at Saint Anselm College. "I'd like to see some changes."

That, succinctly, is the clearest, truest and most politically volatile answer Paul has given to the third-party run question. The issue weighs heavily in the GOP general election strategy as Paul could pull 5 percent to 6 percent or more in many swing states - possibly under-cutting GOP efforts to defeat President Obama.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is definitely an outsider now. He is on the flank of the debate platform, the last candidate called on and a fringe participant in the 14th GOP candidate debate. In fact, 45 minutes into the debate Perry had been called on precisely two times.

That Perry has fallen to a level of also-ran status pains his friends and makes a mockery of his troubled attempts to remain a credible presidential candidacy. Panelists leading the ABC News/Yahoo! News/WMUR debate didn't call on Perry until the 18th minute of the two-hour debate at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, N.H.

When Perry was riding high in the polls, he received questions early in debates and stood near the center of the stage, even with eight candidates on the stage. Now, with just six in the field, Perry was placed on the far right edge of the stage.

Perry's first engagement in the debate was on the question of former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum's spending votes and his ties to D.C. lobbying shops.

Perry said the nation needs an authentic "outsider" with no ties to spending earmarks in Washington, which both Santorum and Rep. Ron Paul of Texas support. Perry criticized Paul for seeking earmarks - specified spending projects written by Congress - and then later voting against the full spending bill. "In Texas, we call that hypocrisy," he said.

Mitt Romney may have pulled off the zinger of the night Saturday when, in answer to aggressive questioning by George Stephanopoulos about whether he would support a state ban on the sale of contraceptive drugs and devices, Romney insisted it was a non-issue and a "silly" one besides.

"States don't want to ban contraception," the former Massachusetts governor scolded, so why, he seemed to suggest, was Stephanopoulos wasting precious time at the Republican candidate debate in New Hampshire asking whether a state ban would be proper or not? And then this: "Contraception, it's working just fine. Just leave it alone," Romney zinged.

(VIDEO: See Romney's Zinger)

The audience whooped, and Stephanopoulos pursed his lips.

But more important for Romney than getting off a memorable line was his success landing a punch in the face of the liberal elite media, which Stephanopoulos -- the chiseled, articulate former top aide to President Bill Clinton -- embodied for the Republican audience at the 14th debate of the GOP primary contest.

Sure, House Speaker Newt Gingrich gets the credit for coming up with the bash-the-liberal-media strategy at several earlier debates, but Romney gets high marks for perfecting it.

MANCHESTER -- Before tonight's debate, expectations were running high for a giant pile-on, with frontrunner Mitt Romney at the bottom of the pile. Yet about a half hour into the debate, most of the backbiting has occurred over Romney's untouched head.

The St. Anselm debate got a little nasty and awfully personal when Rep. Ron Paul stuck by his accusation earlier this week that former Speaker Newt Gingrich is a "chicken hawk" because he accepted deferments that kept him out of military service during the Vietnam War. "At least I went when I was called up," said the 76-year-old Paul who was a flight surgeon in the Air Force in the early '60s.

Paul made the charge on Wednesday when he first talked about Gingrich's reaction when he was eligible for the draft. "Guess what he thought about danger? He chickened out on that and got deferments and didn't even go."

Asked by ABC's George Stephanopoulos if he would again call Gingrich a chicken hawk, Paul responded, "Yeah, I think people who don't serve when they could and they get three or four or even five deferments... they have no right to send our kids off to war."

If Mitt Romney's campaign ever feels challenged among key segments of the Republican electorate, he's got a well-worn page in his playbook to turn to: The endorsement rollout. And Romney's team has handled those roll-outs with expert precision.

Any time the media has become obsessed with the prospects of yet another potential challenger, Romney, the clear Republican front-runner, has used big-name endorsements to remind everyone just who's in the driver's seat.

Consider late September, the moment in the race at which Romney was the most vulnerable. Texas Gov. Rick Perry was challenging Romney for the lead in national polls, but perhaps more worrisome, the buzz around New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was loud, and getting louder. Christie, it turned out, was actually considering making a late entrance into the race, setting up the possibility Romney would have to compete with a rising rock star within his own party, one who appealed to many of the same constituencies Romney did.

So Romney's campaign made clear that there wasn't room in the race for two Northeastern Republicans. On September 29, Romney announced support from 53 prominent Connecticut Republicans and from 61 Vermont Republicans. Christie said he wouldn't run the following week, on October 4 (Politico's Jonathan Martin made the connection between the endorsements and the clear message to Christie's team at the time).

Mitt Romney's strong showing in Friday's CNN/Time/ORC South Carolina poll shows how narrow a window his opponents may have to derail him.

The poll offers a powerful reminder of how much each caucus and primary resets the dynamic in the states that follow -- the same way each shot in billiards reshapes the table. Compared to the most recent CNN/Time South Carolina survey in December, Romney posted gains across the board. Most important, the new poll shows him significantly advancing among the overlapping circles of evangelical Christians and tea party supporters who have resisted him in surveys all year -- and who reaffirmed that resistance in the Iowa caucuses, according to entrance polls.

Still am.

Link to today's spot story with Naureen Khan is here.

If you're wondering what Mitt Romney's campaign strategy will be in South Carolina -- the state that has picked every Republican presidential nominee since 1980 -- look no further than the new TV ad he released in the Palmetto State today.

The 30-second spot features footage of Romney addressing the issue of right-to-work during a September visit to Boeing Co.'s factory in North Charleston. Until a recent settlement, the plant had been imperiled by legal action from the National Labor Relations Board, which alleged that Boeing built the plant in South Carolina -- a right-to-work state -- in response to ongoing internal labor disputes elsewhere.

Not coincidentally, Romney launched the labor-themed ad one day after President Obama announced three recess appointments to National Labor Relations Board -- a move that Romney described as "doling out favors to his big labor political allies and giving them a dangerous level of power over businesses and workers."

President Obama's strategists have been portraying Romney's 25 percent first-place showing in Tuesday's Iowa caucuses as a sign of significant weakness - an example of how unenthused Republicans are about his candidacy. But in reality, Romney's Iowa showing is pretty normal for eventual Republican presidential nominees, squarely in the middle-of-the pack.

Romney's 24.6 percent ranks ahead of George H.W. Bush's Iowa vote in 1988, when he finished third with 19 percent - and later won the presidency, comfortably.  It comes close to matching Bob Dole's 26 percent showing in 1996, which at the time was the low-water mark for caucus victors.  And it surpasses John McCain's 13 percent from 2008, when he bypassed the Iowa caucuses to focus on New Hampshire.

But it fell well short of George W. Bush's 41 percent showing in 2000, and a little short of Ronald Reagan's 30 percent tally in 1980.  And in 1976, then-President Gerald Ford tallied 45 percent of the vote in Iowa.

If the conservative movement's anti-Mitt Romney forces want to knock the front-runner off his seemingly inevitable path toward the nomination, they're running out of time. And, if the fallout from Romney's victory in Iowa is any indication, they know it, too. 

Politico reported Wednesday that a group of conservative leaders -- including James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Don Wildmon, an ex-chairman of the American Family Association -- are meeting in Texas this weekend to find a presidential candidate they can unite behind. Thus far, the movement has been incapable of anointing a leader any for more than a few weeks, intermittently rallying behind contenders like Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich only to look elsewhere weeks later. 

You can bet the last people Mitt Romney's campaign wants setting expectations for them are their buddies over at Obama for America headquarters in Chicago. But in a call with reporters this afternoon, that's just what campaign manager Jim Messina and top strategist David Axelrod tried to do.

Romney "has been leading these polls in New Hampshire by 30-some points. "He needs to hold that," Messina said, when asked what Romney needs to shoot for in next Tuesday's primary. "He's got to win by 30 points or so here to continue this momentum."

"...for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap" -- Galatians 6:7.

It's an adage older than our time, one that elucidates Rick Santorum's remarkable showing in Iowa: You reap what you sow.

Granted, it seems unlikely that Santorum, a deeply religious man, would base his campaign strategy on a centuries-old piece of Scripture. But as the returns rolled in Tuesday night, one couldn't help but think that the Biblical proverb -- both as a farming metaphor in a state dependent on agriculture, and as divine instruction in a contest dominated by evangelical Christians -- went straight to the heart of Santorum's success.

Simply put, Santorum would never have reaped the incredible results of the 2012 Iowa caucuses without long ago planting the perfect seed.

It came in the fall of 2010, when Santorum traveled to Des Moines on a chilly October morning and climbed aboard a black and purple bus parked outside the state capitol. While other potential White House contenders were quietly and carefully mapping out the preliminary stages of their would-be campaigns, Santorum set off across Iowa on the "Judge Bus Tour" -- a conservative crusade to rid the Iowa Supreme Court of three justices who had voted in favor of legalizing gay marriage in the Hawkeye State.

There must be something in the Iowa air that impels politicians to give off-key speeches after the votes have been cast in the caucuses. Eight years after Howard Dean committed political suicide by screaming out the names of states and four years after Hillary Clinton put so many oldsters on stage that she looked like she was taping an AARP commercial, the Republican candidates Tuesday night gave us so many fresh memories to cherish.

There was Ron Paul declaring, "I'm waiting for the day when we can say we're all Austrians now." The Texas congressman was referring to the Austrian school of economics and his favorite economist, Freidrich von Hayek. But television viewers could be excused if they wondered whether the rally would break into a rousing singing of "Edelweiss." And Paul wasn't finished with the strangeness. In a first in modern American politics, he welcomed to the stage an active-duty soldier wearing his camouflage uniform and critical of American foreign policy.

Corporal Jesse Thorsen, of West Des Moines, is only 28 years old so perhaps he could be excused for forgetting the Defense Department regulation hammered into all members of the Armed Forces that they may not "participate in partisan political... rallies" and "cannot appear at any kind of political forum in uniform." But Paul, himself a veteran, should have known better than to put Thorsen in a position where he could be disciplined by the Army.

A lighter - but also odd - touch was in Rep. Michele Bachmann's valedictory after her sixth place finish. She praised her husband, Marcus, but drew a wince from him when she disclosed that on the day before the caucuses "he was out buying doggie sunglasses for our dog Boomer."

BEDFORD, N.H. - Bill Cahill says he has visual proof that Rick Santorum's campaign has built an organization outside of Iowa capable of carrying on the momentum he gained after Iowa.

"It's here, the schedule is here," Cahill said Tuesday, holding up a thick stack of papers. Behind a cover page labeled "confidential," it contains a detailed itinerary of the former Pennsylvania senator's schedule for the next six days in the Granite State, Cahill said, evidence he'll be able to hit the ground running when he arrives for this first post-Iowa event Wednesday night.

After his 8-vote loss to Mitt Romney in Iowa on Tuesday, Santorum will have to prove whether he can succeed in states even without an aggressive retail-politicking effort. His near victory in Iowa was attributable largely to campaigning in the state longer and harder than anyone else in the field, a luxury he won't have now that the primaries take place one week after another.

Mitt Romney is running a charmed campaign.

He wins the Iowa caucuses by a mere eight (!) votes, muting the comeback storyline from Rick Santorum.  And now Texas Gov. Rick Perry is sticking around to compete in South Carolina, which makes it all the more difficult for Santorum to emerge as the anti-Romney candidate in the wake of his impressive Iowa performance.

Without Perry in the race, Santorum had a credible shot at winning over the state's significant number of evangelicals and social conservatives, as he did in Iowa.  Just look at the alternatives: Romney, a fading Gingrich, Paul and Huntsman.  For the most conservative voters, Santorum looked like a compelling choice.

But now that Perry is hanging around, he's positioned to perform quite well in the South Carolina primary- or at least well enough to deprive Santorum of victory.  Perry was the biggest thorn in Santorum's side in the Iowa campaign's final days, and he'll be fighting with him for many of the same voters in South Carolina, too.

If Rick Santorum does well tonight--and all indications are that he will--it's worth remembering that it wouldn't have been possible without good relations between evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics. It's now considered a non-event that the two groups get along and are willing to vote for candidates of the other faith. But, of course, it wasn't always so. You can go back to the tensions between Catholic immigrants and native Protestants, the temperance movement which divided Catholic wets from native drys. The tensions did not end with the election of John F. Kennedy who famously told a Baptist clergy in the South that he would not let religion play a role in his public life. Santorum is, of course, devoutly religious and makes no apologies for letting his faith guide his public life. The same is true for Newt Gingrich, a recent convert to Catholicism.

In some ways the tensions between the groups are there over issues like proselytizing--the Third World has become something of a battleground for hearts and minds between Catholics and Protestants who have made deep inroads in Latin America. But there has also been a conscious effort on the party of conservatives to put aside their differences. Pope Benedict the XVI has continued the same outreach to evangelicals the John Paul II did.

In 1994, American Catholic and Evangelical leaders came together to sign a statement: Evangelicals & Catholics Together: The Christian Mission in the Third Millennium. Its signatories included Chuck Colson, the prominent evangelist and Watergate figure and Pat Robertson, the Christian Broadcast Network found as well as Catholics like the lake Father Richard John Neuhaus and Cardinal John O'Connor. The document pledged the groups to work together in common cause on issues like abortion and to not let doctrinal differences or conflicts over recruitment "give comfort to the enemies of Christ."

In the 18 years since, ties between conservative Catholics and fundamentalist evangelicals have only go stronger. Whether those ties will be enough to propel Santorum or another religiously oriented candidate forward remains to be seen but the alliance is remarkable enough.

Iowa voters logging onto the Des Moines Register website this morning were confronted with a headline that seemed improbable mere months ago: "Mitt Romney: 'We're going to win this thing'"

It's quite the ironic twist of fate that a candidate whose campaign worked obsessively in recent months to lower expectations in Iowa -- and succeeded in doing so -- would awake on caucus day to a Joe Namath-esque prediction in the state's largest newspaper.

Romney's approach to Iowa this cycle has, in many ways, redefined the political art of "expectation setting." After investing unrivaled time and resources into winning Iowa in 2008 -- only to suffer a crippling loss to Mike Huckabee -- the Romney campaign was determined to proceed with caution the second time around. From the outset, they worked feverishly to reduce Romney's footprint in Iowa, knowing another loss there could hurt Romney only if it appeared he truly was invested in winning the state.

The Obama re-election campaign is marking Iowa caucus day by releasing a video of candidate Obama on caucus night four years ago, when he pulled off his upset victory over Hillary Clinton. With the spotlight at its brightest, all eyes and TV cameras upon him, a very young-looking Barack Obama gave a substantive victory speech outlining what he wanted to do as president.

The 2-minute video, called "2008 Iowa Caucus Victory Speech: Promises Kept," consists of speech excerpts and captions explaining what Obama has accomplished in each area. Leaving aside for a moment the question of how this will play with a depressed nation, it's hard to argue with most of the specifics. Obama promised to end the Iraq war and he did; he promised to cut middle-class taxes and he did; he promised to reform the health care system and he did.

Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated where Joseph Smith was killed. He died in Carthage, Ill.

If there's one subterranean factor that has prevented Mitt Romney from excelling in Iowa, it is evangelical Christians' discomfort with his Mormon religion. It's a part of Romney's life he deals with carefully, playing up his faith's demonstration of his values while discussing it only as necessary.

But Iowa once played a pivotal role in the Mormon Church's history. Council Bluffs served not only as a key waystation in the Mormon migration westward, to Salt Lake City -- a point the Washington Post's Jason Horowitz hints at today, in a story datelined from the banks of the Missouri River -- it was also the location at which the foundation of the Church's governing hierarchy was established.

Rep. Steve King, the conservative who represents a little under a quarter of all active Republican voters in Iowa, won't endorse a candidate in this year's first-in-the-nation caucuses.

Finally, the answer to the question no Iowa voter actually asked.

NEWTON, Iowa -- In a dramatic moment on Monday, Rick Santorum fought back tears and his wife Karen grew misty-eyed when a voter asked them about criticism of their 1996 decision to bring home a newborn who died soon after childbirth.

Santorum choked up as he described the family's decision to bring home their child Gabriel after the newborn died in the hospital. Noting that his wife worked as a neo-natal nurse, Santorum said: "It was so important ... for the family to recognize the life of that child and for the children to know they had a brother."

(RELATED: Gingrich: Romney's a Liar)

The exchange was prompted by a voter who said she had heard liberal Fox News commentator Alan Colmes criticize the decision to bring home the child. "To some who don't recognize the dignity of all human life, who see it as a blob of tissue ... this is somehow weird, recognizing the humanity of your son. Somehow weird, somehow odd and should be subject to ridicule."

Earlier, as Santorum spoke, his wife Karen was heard to say: "It's so inappropriate."

(RELATED: Forget Winning Iowa: It's Better to 'Exceed Expectations')

Santorum concluded his response by restating his commitment to pursue an anti-abortion agenda. "I will stand and fight," he said. "I will hope to be able to look into the eyes of the American public and say 'Be more welcoming, open up your heart to love more, to love all life."