Let me make it clear:
I'm not supporting Mitt Romney for President
I'm supporting Romney for the Republican nomination
I'm supporting Romney because Newt Gingrich, to use highly technical terminology, is hide-under-the-bed, wrap-your-head-in-tinfoil crazy.
If there's a 33% chance that Romney could beat Obama and only a 5% chance that Gingrich could (I'm making those numbers up, apologies to Nate Silver and all my statistics professors), I choose Romney as the nominee, because even a 5% chance of a President Gingrich is terrifying.
I came to the decision to support Romney because of this quote:
Well, I think that we have to really, from my perspective you don’t have an issue of religious tolerance you have an elite which favors radical Islam over Christianity and Judaism. You have constant pressure by secular judges and by religious bigots to drive Christianity out of public life and to establish a secular state except when it comes to radical Islam, where all of the sudden they start making excuses for Sharia, they start making excuses that we really shouldn’t use certain language. Remember, the Organization of Islamic Countries is dedicated to preventing anyone, anywhere in the world from commenting negatively about Islam, so they would literally eliminate our free speech and there were clearly conversations held that implied that the US Justice Department would begin to enforce censorship against American citizens to protect radical Islam, I think that’s just an amazing concept frankly.
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/...
To better understand the Gingrich mind, I decided to go to the experts. My husband. A (locally) renowned psychiatrist.
"Don't you think there's something wrong with Gingrich?" I asked. He muttered something about "narcissistic personality disorder" and zoomed out the door because he hates the idea of diagnosing someone from that person's public utterances.
But earlier he pointed out that the last sentence in the above quote is the telling one -- the "amazing concept" statement Gingrich made shows, according to my husband, some inner acknowledgement that he made it all up.
Way back before the primaries, I was convinced that Gingrich was in the race to up his income by upping his visibility and that he had no real interest in actually getting the nomination. Maybe that was true then, but the little whiff of success he got in Iowa (right before the primary) was like a hallucinogenic drug creating the irresistible image of a towering, adored, mass-leading, endlessly talking and infinitely worshiped President Gingrich (oh god, I'm sick...). I see that self-image in his eyes every time he opens his mouth on television.
I'm supporting Romney because I was an adult when the Democrats crowed at Reagan's nomination -- we just knew we could beat that crazy mother.
Maybe Barney Frank (one of my heroes) is sanguine about the election and therefore is enjoying the prospect of Gingrich as the nominee, but I don't feel that confidence.
I'm supporting Romney because despicable as he is, he's not totally nuts.
I'm supporting Romney because he has such a great habit of saying the wrong thing at exactly the right time, because he's tone deaf, because he has no idea of what the daily lives of most people are like, because he loved his dog and therefore put him up on the roof his car and took off down the highway thinking he was doing the dog a favor (!), and no matter what the polls show about him being closer to beating Obama, I think the more people hear from him, the less likely they are to vote for him.
In sum, I'm supporting Romney for the Republican nomination because he's not crazy, he's inept, he's clueless, and he's not Newt Gingrich.