— This blog is reposted from Saturday night; the usual business-oriented blog on Mondays will be published tomorrow. —

Though it is easy to dismiss that bane of the average American – the so-called “experts” – they do hold vast institutional and collective wisdom – but perhaps it is about the past.  All of them – from the left to the right – have been wrong this year.  And so in this uproarious year, their judgment is now near useless given South Carolina.  None of these experts expected that after three GOP contests three different candidates could call themselves a winner.  One does not have to be an expert in these things to sense something is not plumb with things-as-usual.  I have been around journalistically and politically long enough to be confounded totally by what has happened in South Carolina. For me, it now is not outside the possibility that President Obama could lose this election. For conventional thinkers, this is not the year to be conventional.  My thoughts have been all along that Obama was going to defeat any of the Republican candidates.  As recently as two weeks ago, I blogged as much.  Now I am not so sure.  Will Florida tell the tale on whom Obama will face?  Watching Romney on television is to look at someone who, it turns out, is not as good as he thinks he is.  This business of running for President is not directing a takeover of another company.  Running for President is not insider work.  Romney talks as if he is selling a merger acquisition project to a group of investment bankers instead of himself to the voters.  His canned and repetitive spiel is old and numbing.  Newt Gingrich offers something new: New language, new energy, new anger – the stuff of which most elections are made and won.

My blood runs cold when “experts” on television report that their “expert” friends in the White House and in the Obama Campaign are popping champagne bottles at the prospect of Gingrich being nominated.  I have news for them: Gingrich belongs to the gangster club that Lee Attwater founded two political generations ago and whose current president is Karl Rove.  One took a candidate from 20 points down to win; another took a man who should never have been President and also won.  There is no reassurance in being tied in the national polls with Romney.  This Romney?  Does not make sense.  Something is up: The roar of the crowd is real, and Gingrich knows how to goad it into action.

Usually in the GOP, early primary wins by a candidate generate inevitable momentum but that has changed, it would appear.  How Romney wins long-term becomes more formidable.  As the primaries go, the western states are probably more Gingrich territory now than they were even from four years ago for McCain.  Think Arizona.  Sure, a couple of western states are Mormon-dominated but if the South holds for Gingrich and the rest of the West adds to those wins, it is – amazingly, stupefyingly – possible that he could capture the nomination.

Florida is an opportunity for the mostly Cuban HispanicLatino vote to help stop the hate wing of the Republican Party, and they will do so, but not because they are as simpatico as other HispanicLatinos upset with the rhetoric the GOP has unleashed against their community.  Rather, HispanicLatinos – being the most conventional of all voters – most likely will be in Romney’s corner.  In a year of unconventionality, HispanicLatinos will probably help Romney win but not by much, which is why the fight will continue to other parts of the country where an angry and anxious electorate awaits and is eager to respond to Gingrich’s language of resentment and division.

We have seen Gingrich arise from absolutely nothing – his staff of experts abandoned him months ago and went over to Rick Perry, for goodness’ sake!  If the Obama camp thinks they are going to roar to re-election if Gingrich is its opponent, it is mistaken.

Two additional thoughts: 1) One of the experts said Gingrich in Florida would refrain from invoking Bain against Romney.  In a state of retirees many of whom lost big on Wall Street to Romney-types, that might not be a sure bet.  2) I am not so sure that the instability of the race for the GOP nomination and the thought of a Gingrich in the White House will not add to the uneasiness of the international markets – read that Europe.

Feel free to forward these blogs that deal with business topics on Mondays, politics on Wednesdays and social and personal and professional development on Fridays.  Additional thoughts are published invariably on Tuesdays or Thursdays.