The New York Times map shows Romney carrying the Columbia area and the southern coast with Gingrich winning in the other parts of the state. I’d be interested in knowing the percentages in the urbanized parts of the upcountry.

Gingrich makes me very nervous; he has good ideas, and is articulate, but everything I’ve read about him suggests he’s a loose cannon.  When everyone in DC who has worked with him, even his allies, suggest that he is undisciplined and untrustworthy, I don’t know that I can support him.  It’s the “Phone call at 3AM” issue.  He just doesn’t strike me as reliable.

#2—Even scarier is you can replace “Obama” with “Gingrich” in your post and it would still be true.

Well, yes, #2 and #3.  We’ve already got a guy in the White House with a very strong ideological bent, an inability to work well with Congress, and an unrealistically inflated view of his own importance.  We don’t need his mirror image, either.

My suggestion to #s 2,3,and 4 is that you read the article about former speaker Gingrich at Wikipedia, which is a disinterested source. He is opinionated, to be sure, and IMHO suffers a bit from “I’m smarter/better educated than you” (which is true, comparing him to most people), but I think “loose cannon” comes from the drumbeat of the liberal press, which is merely afraid that he will fire on them.

Whatever your final opinion, IMHO he - or Romney- are better than Obama, and I would prefer either of them to be my President on January 22, 2013, than the latter. Politics in the USA usually requires one to take the best of less than perfect choices. Because Jesus is not running for President, less than perfect is all we have.

sophy0075, Wikipedia may or may not be a disinterested source.  Because it can be edited by large numbers of people, it is not unusual to see a point of view reflected there.  It’s not the Britannica.  Be careful about it, and not only in this instance.  I am old enough to remember Gingrich’s speakership and some of his “loose cannon” moments first-hand.  Some of them were in the past year or two.

However, I agree that Obama must be replaced and I will vote for whomever the Republicans nominate.

Krauthammer said that Gingrich never had an unspoken thought. He is still less dangerous than Obama in a second term.

I have the same feelings about Gingrich that I had about McCain.  I thought McCain was the worst candidate the Republicans could have picked out of the whole field.  They’re on their way to doing it again, thereby losing an election they should easily win.  The Democrats will destroy Gingrich.  His qualities of hubris, lack of judgment, and a lifetime record of unethical and immoral behavior are a combination the Democrats will make seem worse than the incompetence.

The Republicans are not going to nominate Gingrich.  They do occasionally shoot themselves in the foot (though not as often as the Democrats who almost never aim anywhere else) but I don’t belive they’re going to do it this time.

I felt that way about McCain, that there was no way he could be nominated, especially since before he had performed so poorly running against Bush (himself a weak candidate) in the prior primary cycle, but McCain had the nomination wrapped up before anyone could do anything about it.  And thereafter he basically ran no campaign and let Obama win.  (I still don’t know whether that was intentional or not.)

It’s also true that an idiot tends to surround himself with idiots, and idiots don’t make very good staffers or advisors.

Jim the Puritan, it appears that Big Labor agrees with you that Gringrich would be our weakest candidate in the general election.  The report is that the AFSCME is going to spend $800,000 running anti-Romeny ads in the Florida primary along the same lines as Gingrich’s own inexcusable anti-capitalism rants.  How people can seriously consider Gingrich as a viable conservative candidate after he has attacked what has made our country wealthier and healthier than previous ages could imagine is beyond me.

The problem for some of us is I refuse to vote for a two-time adulterer, and so will my wife.  Gingrich can say all day long that he’s become a new man (I guess for the second or third time?), and that supposedly we don’t have the right to judge him and must “forgive him,” but Scripture says we are to be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves, which means to me we don’t leave our powers of judgment and discernment at the door.  I can forgive someone for stealing from me, but that doesn’t mean I keep on letting him watch my bank accounts.  Similarly, I don’t want someone in office who has repeatedly shown that his words and actions cannot be trusted, especially in something as basic as being faithful to his wife.

For me, personal character is the number one requirement in a leader, especially a president, and sadly, that is something that is totally missing in many of our candidates these days, in both parties.

I think this is the real reason that McCain picked Sarah Palin, an “in your face” evangelical, as his VP.  His polling had to show him that many Christians were going to stay home and not vote for him because of his own personal past, including similarly cheating on and abandoning his first wife because of her health problems.  So he had to bring in Palin to allow folks like me to rationalize that even though we may dislike McCain’s low personal integrity and morals. we could still vote for Palin.

In the end, however, that whole strategy was a disaster.  It didn’t make McCain any better, and just gave the Left the opportunity to demonize “wacky” Christians.  (Something that has continued to go on throughout the whole Obama administration.)

And now, we’re being painted as total hypocrites, for saying we stand for family values while supporting someone who is a serial adulterer.  And I agree with them.

#12 Katherine:  Here’s another Gallup poll that concludes Gingrich is by far the worst possible candidate:

http://www.christianpost.com/news/poll-suggests-romney-best-gingrich-worst-to-beat-obama-67845/