Frailty and timidity are not the qualities that come to mind when one thinks of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Or House Budget Committee Chairman Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wisconsin. Or Mitt Romney. These are tough guys, veterans of the political wars, and more than capable of defending themselves.

Rick Santorum's aides and surrogates hit the news-talk circuit on Wednesday like Rush Limbaugh set loose on a buffet table. They were noisy and everywhere, almost clamoring in unison about the need for Newt Gingrich to get out the contest for the Republican nomination in order to let Santorum have a head-to-head contest with Mitt Romney in upcoming primaries. Conservative flame-keeper Richard Viguerie lent some dignity to the proceedings by weighing in with a calm analysis on his website calling on Gingrich to stand down and let Santorum carry the right's torch into battle with Romney.

It was a daylong exercise in futility of course. Given Gingrich's "gargantuan ego" as former Clintonite Dee Dee Myers put it on MSNBC, he is highly unlikely to end his presidential campaign now. Plus, the former House speaker just clocked a huge victory in Georgia, the most populous Southern state outside of Florida. Even though it was the only state in his win column on Super Tuesday - an achievement further discounted by it being his home state -- a big victory nevertheless hardly puts a candidate in a giving-up sort of mood.

But there's another reason for Gingrich not to hang up his cleats just yet.

The independent-minded Republican voters of Massachusetts stuck by their guy Tuesday. And in the network exit polls, we got a glimpse of the voters who launched Mitt Romney's presidential hopes by electing him their governor.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's decision to endorse Mitt Romney is a certified big deal. The Virginia Republican is no highborn member of the Washington establishment - he's the GOP House leader with the closest ties to the Tea Party movement and the huge group of representatives it elected in 2010.

A new poll in Tennessee underscores the stakes for Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum in tomorrow's Michigan primary.

Like the Quinnipiac University Ohio survey released on Monday, the Vanderbilt Poll showed Santorum marshaling powerful support in Tennessee from the key elements in the GOP's populist wing- particularly tea party supporters and evangelical Christians, while remaining competitive with (or even leading) Romney among more managerial voters. Tennessee, along with Oklahoma and Georgia, loom as, in effect, the top second-tier of contests on March 6, behind Ohio, which is likely to hold center stage on that day. With polls in the GOP race gyrating wildly all year, the results in Michigan are likely to cast a long shadow over those contests.

The Tennessee survey, conducted from February 16 to 22 for Vanderbilt University's Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, showed Santorum leading Romney overall by a resounding 38 percent to 20 percent, with Ron Paul (15 percent) and Newt Gingrich (13 percent) lagging. Santorum's lead is grounded in big advantages among groups at the GOP's ideological vanguard. Three-fourths of Tennessee voters in the survey identified as born-again Christians and they prefer Santorum over Romney by 39 percent to 15 percent. Among the nearly two-thirds of likely primary voters who say they support the tea party's ideas, Santorum led Romney even more decisively-43 percent to 13 percent.

A second poll underscores the opportunity that division on the right is creating for Mitt Romney in Iowa. In the NBC/Marist College Iowa survey released Friday, Romney continues to draw only modest support overall - but remains positioned to capture the state because the groups most skeptical of him are fragmenting.

Overall, the poll showed Romney leading with 23 percent, followed by Ron Paul with 21 percent, and then Rick Santorum (15 percent), Rick Perry (14 percent) and Newt Gingrich (13) all bunched closely together. That largely tracks the findings of the CNN/Time/ORC Iowa survey released earlier this week.

In the NBC/Marist poll, like the CNN/Time survey, Romney continues to draw meager support among the party's most ardent elements. The new survey shows him capture just 13 percent among both evangelical Christians and voters who describe themselves as strong tea party supporters.

The latest CNN/Time/ORC surveys released this afternoon for New Hampshire, and especially Iowa, show that on the eve of the first actual voting, the GOP race is reverting to the pattern that has defined it for most of this year: the party's more pragmatic and secular circles are consolidating around Mitt Romney more than the GOP's more ideological and evangelical wings are consolidating around any single alternative to him.

That pattern isn't enough to place Romney in a commanding position - but it does offer him the possibility of a plurality advantage in a fragmented field. The surveys provide a snapshot of the nightmare for the conservative activists most resistant to the former Massachusetts governor: it raises the possibility that he could steamroll to the nomination without ever attracting majority support in the party because the ideological voters most resistant to him fail to ever coalesce behind a single alternative.

These dynamics are most apparent in the results of the new survey in Iowa, which polled 452 GOP likely caucus participants from December 21-24 and December 26-27. Overall the survey shows Romney now leading with 25 percent, followed by Ron Paul with 22 percent; Rick Santorum has surged into third place with 16 percent, followed by Newt Gingrich with just 14 percent. In the most recent CNN/Time/ORC poll from early December, Gingrich led with 33 percent, followed by Romney at 20 percent and Paul at 17 percent.

Mitt Romney isn't the only politician making a comeback these days.

A new ABC News-Washington Post poll shows rising numbers for President Obama. The man presiding over a nearly imperceptible recovery from the Great Recession is now at 49 percent job approval.

That's substantially higher than Obama's career low of 42 percent in the same poll in October, and better than George W. Bush's 47 percent three months before he defeated John Kerry in 2004. It's also more than twice as high as the 20 percent approval rating the poll found for Republicans in Congress.

Mitt Romney has pulled into a tie with Newt Gingrich in the latest CNN/ORC national poll on the strength of gains with both wings of the Republican Party. Both men polled at 28 percent support overall in the survey.

When Gingrich rocketed to the top of the GOP primary polls last month, he did so mostly with tea party support but also with a healthy percentage of non-tea party Republicans, who had previously provided Romney's core constituency. In the new poll, Gingrich has slightly passed Romney among Republicans who don't identify with the tea party - 28 percent to 24 percent. Last month's CNN poll had Romney up by two points among non-tea party supporters - but also with only 19 percent of them. As recently as mid-October Romney had attracted 35 percent with that group in CNN polling; he hasn't trailed with that group since late August and early September, when Rick Perry briefly consolidated both wings of the GOP before fading.

Now it is Romney's turn to eat into Gingrich's core supporters: Romney won the support of 28 percent of tea partiers in the new poll, his best showing among the most ideological Republicans in any CNN poll this year. Gingrich still leads among the group, 32 to 28, but that represents a much smaller lead among the tea party than last time around. In November, Gingrich led Romney 31 percent to 19 percent with those voters. Romney's previous high with tea party Republicans in a CNN poll this year was 27 percent in June.

Overall, Gingrich is the first GOP contender since Texas Gov. Rick Perry, in that late summer stretch, to lead among both tea party and non-tea party supporters in a CNN survey. But that could be a lagging indicator: more recent Iowa polls have found Gingrich plummeting under a sustained advertising assault.

The new CNN/Time/ORC polls out today for the first four states on the Republican calendar underscore the breadth of Newt Gingrich's rise - and the extent of the threat confronting the erstwhile front-runner Mitt Romney.

In each of the states except New Hampshire, Gingrich is consolidating the voters that have long been the most skeptical of Romney, while dividing those that had been most open to the former Massachusetts governor. That's a formula for success - if the former speaker can maintain it, admittedly a big question.

(RELATED: Gingrich Leads in Three of Four New Early-State Polls)

Gingrich is now succeeding among both sides of the party - dominating among the vanguard half that identifies with the tea party movement, and holding his own with the less ideological half that does not. What's more, the evidence from these polls suggests that along each track, the voters most skeptical of Romney are moving to unite behind Gingrich, at least for now. In particular, among the groups most dubious of Romney, Gingrich is now attracting much larger shares of the vote than any single candidate did in surveys earlier this fall.

In all four states, Gingrich now leads Romney among GOP primary voters who identify with the tea party movement. Gingrich's share of the vote among tea party supporters has increased as if launched from a rocket: since the last round of CNN/Time/ORC polls in late October he's up from 13 percent with them in Iowa to 40; in New Hampshire he's jumped from 6 to 37; in South Carolina from 11 to 53; and in Florida from 14 all the way to 62.

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What's the scariest news for Mitt Romney in the nearly mirror-image polls out today showing Newt Gingrich rocketing into the lead in Iowa, South Carolina and nationally?

The short answer: the breadth of Gingrich's support. In all three surveys, Gingrich is not only lapping Romney among the ideologically conservative and religiously devout voters who have resisted the former Massachusetts governor throughout the race; Gingrich is also running step for step (or ahead) with Romney among the less ideological, more secular, voters who have been Romney's base.

All of this is a big and ominous change for Romney. Earlier he had the luxury of watching the rivals to his right divide conservative voters while he made steady progress at consolidating the party's more managerial, less ideological wing. For a brief period in late summer, Texas Gov. Rick Perry threatened to reach across the divide - but his poor debate performances quickly deflated his standing with both groups. Now Gingrich, a much steadier (if still volatile) contender than Perry, is not only consolidating conservatives, but loosening Romney's hold on the more pragmatic and managerial components of the GOP coalition.

It might be a blip, but the latest CNN/ORC national poll out this afternoon shows a new reason for more of Mitt Romney's hair to turn gray.

Overall, the survey showed Newt Gingrich edging past Romney to lead the field overall, with 24 percent compared to 20 percent for the former Massachusetts governor. That makes Gingrich the sixth GOP contender to lead a CNN/ORC poll this year - a level of volatility unmatched in any Republican presidential race since 1964.

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Gingrich actually didn't move much in the new poll, compared to the previous survey last week when he surged into a near-tie with Romney. Gingrich's support among the roughly half of the GOP that identifies with the tea party edged up only from 29 percent to 31 percent, a change within the poll's 6.5 percent margin of error among that subgroup. Among the half that doesn't identify with the tea party, Gingrich also remained virtually unchanged at 17 percent, compared to 16 percent last week.

The USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll of California Republicans released yesterday shows that the basic divide in the GOP presidential race extends even to states not yet in the center of the action.

The survey, conducted from October 30 to November 9, found the race closely bunched among Republicans who identify with the tea party movement while Mitt Romney held a big lead among Republicans who do not. That follows the pattern evident in most national surveys about the race, as well as the recent CNN/Time Magazine/ORC polls in the big four contests that will kick off the competition next January: Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida. California isn't scheduled to vote until June 5 of next year.

Thank goodness the name of Oscar Ramiro Ortega-Hernandez is not going to go down in American history alongside Lee Harvey Oswald and John Wilkes Booth.

If anything, he seems a little more like the shoe bomber having tried to harm the president by firing at the White House while the president was 3000 miles away. Still, a bullet was stopped only by protective glass and that's frightening.

It's always crazy to extrapolate from the actions of the deranged. Less than a year ago, Gabby Giffords would-be assassin offered certain proof, to some, that the tea party was upending our country which was unfair in the extreme. American assassins may have some political leanings but they tend to be dabblers. Their real cause is in their head. The progression of young, unmoored men from Oswald to John Hinckley seems more proof that paranoia is a curse of youth than evidence that ideology is to blame.

In 2008, the not so quiet fear about the historic Obama candidacy in '08 was that some lunatic white supremacist would take it upon himself to make sure there was no first African-American president. Thank God that didn't happen. Who would have guessed that the first person charged with trying to kill the president would turn out, at first glance anyway, to be the typical American political assassin wannabe whose aim was a continent off?

Republican frontrunner Mitt Romney remains at the top of the polls in Iowa and many of his more tea-party friendly rivals are struggling to overcome major campaign gaffes. Eventually, those tea party activists will come around to Romney in their zeal to defeat President Obama, right?

"Ahhh no,'' said one influential tea party leader in that state, Ryan Rhodes.  "I'd think they'd take a candidate with problems over Mitt Romney. The only difference between Romney and Barack Obama is that he's run things before. I don't think he would accomplish any of our goals. He's essentially a Massachusetts liberal.''

Rhodes pointed to a new Bloomberg news poll that shows 58 percent of Iowa caucusgoers  would reject a candidate who favored an individual mandate to buy insurance, as Romney did when he was governor of Massachusetts.

"You can't lobby against crony capitalism if you've done that. You can't lobby against the individual mandate if you founded that,'' said Rhodes, who backed Michele Bachmann in the state Republican party's straw poll in August. "This election is about repudiating the health care system that's being forced on individuals.''

If it's possible to encapsulate the volatility and uncertainty of the 2012 Republican presidential race in a single chart, the one below might fit the bill.

It tracks the results of the 13 national CNN/ORC polls this year measuring the preferences of Republican primary voters. It also separates the results into three categories: the overall leader, the leader among the roughly half of the party that identifies with the tea party, and the leader among the roughly other half that does not.

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The chart points to several large conclusions. First is how fluid and unsettled the race has been. Five different candidates (including three that did not run, Mike Huckabee, Rudolph Giuliani, and Donald Trump) have held the overall lead in the survey; not since 1964 have so many different candidates led in a GOP presidential race in the year before the voting.

Within the two evenly balanced wings of the party, there's even more fluctuation. In the 13 polls, six different candidates have led among tea party supporters: Huckabee, Giuliani, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and most recently Newt Gingrich. Among those who don't identify with the tea party, a similar group of six candidates have held the top spot: Sarah Palin, Gingrich, Trump, Romney, Giuliani, and Perry.

The latest CNN/ORC national survey showing Newt Gingrich surging to a statistical tie with Mitt Romney captures not only the continuing volatility of the GOP's most conservative wing, but cracks in Romney's standing among the party's more managerial and moderate voters.

Most directly, the CNN/ORC poll underscored the persistent inability of the GOP's conservative vanguard to settle on an alternative to Romney. In the poll, Gingrich now leads among Republican voters who identify with the tea party movement, drawing 29 percent. That's an 18 percentage point increase over the 11 percent Gingrich attracted among those voters in CNN's mid-October poll. Gingrich's gain among the tea party contingent is matched almost exactly vote for vote by Herman Cain's loss: he plummeted from 39 percent among them in October to just 22 percent now. Cain's ascent with the tea party came after Texas Gov. Rick Perry suffered a similar collapse with those voters from September through October.

It's about time to start planning for the post-Herman Cain world, and there are gathering signs that Newt Gingrich could be the next anyone-but-Romney contestant in the GOP primary race.

 If the Cain campaign implodes as it seems determined to do, the question would be who replaces him as the alternative to front-runner Mitt Romney - and if there has been anything consistent about the GOP contest, it's been the need among likely GOP voters for an anti-Romney. Could the baton go to the blunt-spoken former speaker of the House?

After struggling to put a couple pennies together, Gingrich announced in New Hampshire on Tuesday that his campaign had raised over $800,000 in the month of October, more  than in the entire third quarter of the year. Gingrich's poll numbers have also been quietly creeping up lately, from the low single digits to 10 percent in the most recent CBS/New York Times survey. The results put him in third place, after Cain, at 25 percent, and Romney, with 21 percent. The man who led Republicans to congressional victories in the mid-1990s is also now enjoying double-digit support among voters who identify with the tea party in the key primary states of Iowa, South Carolina and Florida, according to a CNN/Time poll earlier this week.

Meet the new bosses. Same as the old bosses.

That's the message from a special analysis Gallup conducted for National Journal that offers a unique peek at the likely composition of the primary electorate that will decide the 2012 Republican presidential nomination. To preview the potential 2012 GOP electorate, Gallup analyzed for National Journal the characteristics of adults who identified as Republicans (or leaned Republican) in tens of thousands of nightly tracking interviews conducted this summer-and then compared the results to similar interviews conducted during the primary fight in 2008. Because the sample involves tens of thousands of interviews, it allows for unusually detailed analysis with very small margins of sampling error.

One reason the Republican presidential contest has been so unusually volatile is that it's become two races running along parallel but very distinct tracks. One of those races seems to be settling down, steadily if slowly. The other still appears perched on an earthquake fault. If that dynamic persists,  former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney will remain the favorite for the nomination- even though a significant proportion of the party remains resistant to choosing him.

The evolution of the GOP contest into two distinct races becomes apparent when looking at the long trend in public opinion polling. In the twelve national CNN/ORC surveys about the race conducted since January four different candidates have held or shared the national lead: ex-Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and businessman Donald Trump (neither of whom actually entered the race), Romney and Texas Gov. Rick Perry. Other national polls this year have recorded leads for former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and more recently businessman Herman Cain.