Let’s consider two scenarios:
#1. Mitt Romney is the 2012 GOP nominee
#2. Someone else is the 2012 GOP nominee
Now let’s see how each situation would play out.
#1 If Mittens wins the nomination, he will head a surly, unhappy party. After the bruising, nasty fight we have seen in every primary since Iowa, Mitt Romney comes across principally as a mealy-mouthed weasel who has no qualms about savaging his opponents with the worst negative advertising since Willie Horton. My guess is that Newt Gingrich would refuse to support a Romney nomination, or support it so tepidly that it comes off as a diss. He’s that pissed, even though it is only poetic (if not cosmic) justice that he has been mauled and left for dead by the very style of gutter politics he himself used to win the House for the GOP in 1994. I also doubt that Rick Santorum would be very enthusiastic about either joining the Mittens mule-team or even voicing strong support for him. Too much blood has been left in the snow, drawn by Romney’s Super Pacs. And Romney can deny personal involvement all he wants—in every case the trail of red leads right back to him. But even if the GOP were to reunite in harmony and bliss around a Romney candidacy, he has no hope of winning the election. Too many of the electorate have been shivved by the GOP during the primaries—women, working taxpayers, the middle class, even people who use contraceptives. The result will be an historic stomping, and if Romney stinks bad enough by election day, the GOP might even lose the House again. This will set up the Armageddon Scenario, where the batshit crazy elements of the GOP argue that they lost the election because Romney wasn’t conservative enough, and will force the party to lurch even further to the right, and further away from what the average American believes in, further away from common sense, further away from the planet.
#2 If someone else wins the nomination, there will be a very, very sore place in the party around the Mittens camp, like a rotten spot in an apple. There is no way he would get behind any other nominee; even if he voiced support he doesn’t have enough gravitas (he couldn’t even win the nomination with every advantage stacked high in his favor) for anything he said to make any difference. If the nominee isn’t Mittens it would be Santorum, and what a gift that would be for the Democrats. Santorum would be given an unprecedented pounding in November, and there would be no hope for the GOP to hang onto the House. But the biggest result of the disaster would be the internal destruction of the Republican Party, starting with an infection spreading from the Romney rotten-spot. Cliques would began openly battling each other—it would be like Beirut in the 1980s—and the skilled GOP political manipulators would come down equally on each side; the Nazi Tea-baggers against the billionaire/business bloc, insuring that the only direction the party could go is further downward into oblivion.