As the recent events in Florida demonstrate, a week is still a lifetime in politics.

Coming out of the South Carolina primary, Mitt Romney’s campaign was in significant disarray; Newt Gingrich seemed to have emerged as the long-awaited “conservative alternative to Romney,” with a path to the nomination, a positive and negative message that seemed to be resonating with Tea Party activists, and the Super-PAC money to compete in an expensive state like Florida. “Establishment” Republicans, including some key conservative opinion-leaders, were beginning to panic.

Now, the day after Florida, Romney is back in charge of the race, and while Gingrich, Santorum and Paul are all still campaigning avidly, it’s difficult to see a clear path to victory for any of them.

Romney, who fell immediately and badly behind in Florida polls after the South Carolina results were in, recovered last week and won the state by a 46-32 margin over Gingrich (Santorum, who won 13 percent, and Paul, who took 7 percent, conceded the state and spent little time there).

There were four main factors in the Florida turn-around: money, debates, opinion-leaders, and demographics.

Last Saturday’s South Carolina primary sent the Republican presidential nominating contest into strange and possibly uncharted territory. Front-runner and “Establishment” favorite, Mitt Romney, turned in a dismal performance, while twice-left-for-dead Newt Gingrich not only swept the state but quickly seized the lead in both national GOP polls and in Florida, where voters go to the polls on January 31.

Newt’s Florida “bump” was especially impressive, since the Sunshine State was supposedly Romney’s “firewall” that would maintain his momentum even if disaster struck in South Carolina. Moreover, Gingrich took the lead there even though Romney had enjoyed virtually uncontested control of the airwaves, having spent (via his own campaign and his Super-PAC) over $5 million in ads, mostly attacking the former Speaker on his Freddie Mac “historian” gig. Thanks to another $5 million check from Sheldon Adelson’s family, Newt’s fighting back with his Super-PAC recently buying $6 million in Florida air time.

Gingrich’s ace-in-the-hole throughout the campaign, namely his ability to rally conservatives to his side by attacking the news media, didn’t work as well for him in the first of two pre-primary debates in Tampa on January 23. Instead, Newt was largely on the defensive against attacks from Romney. The debate, however, ended more or less as a draw, with Mitt once again struggling over questions about his tax returns. For this reason, the final debate in Jacksonville tomorrow could prove decisive.

In terms of the second-tier candidates, Ron Paul is not seriously contesting Florida, preferring to focus on upcoming caucus states. But one real imponderable here is the trajectory of the struggling campaign of Rick Santorum; his collapse or withdrawal could give a crucial boost to Gingrich, given the strong evidence that Newt is his supporters’ overwhelming second choice. That being said, it remains unclear how much Gingrich’s South Carolina win was attributable to the late withdrawal of and endorsement from Rick Perry, since the Texan’s support-levels there were low and vanishing. Regardless, there are generally strong signs in national polling that Gingrich has now become the Tea Party’s adopted candidate, with Romney depending to a dangerous degree on self-identified moderates.

With the South Carolina primary on tap this Saturday, Mitt Romney is breathtakingly close to a victory that would likely all but clinch the presidential nomination. He’s been ahead in every public poll taken in South Carolina since his win in New Hampshire. His conservative opposition remains divided. And the one candidate who did drop out after New Hampshire, Jon Huntsman, promptly endorsed Romney after months of badmouthing him.

But a strong debate performance by Newt Gingrich on Monday, and the $3.4 million his Super-PAC invested in attack ads on Romney that have generated a lot of even more powerful “earned media,” have placed the outcome in South Carolina in some doubt. A final debate on Thursday, along with the decision—or indecision—of conservative opinion-leaders to consolidate support behind a single candidate, could make a difference.

Romney and his own Super-PAC have clearly concluded Gingrich is the main, and perhaps the only, real threat, and have resumed the intense fire on the former Speaker (heavily utilizing former House colleagues) that cut him down to size in the run-up to the Iowa Caucuses.

Meanwhile, the candidate who came out of Iowa with a strong claim to have finally become the “true conservative alternative” to Romney, Rick Santorum, is struggling a bit, though still, along with Ron Paul, showing up in the mid-teens in South Carolina polls. Santorum appeared to have obtained a real breakthrough last Saturday, when a sizable group of conservative religious leaders convened in Texas by Christian Right warhorse Tony Perkins announced it had reached a “consensus” to back the Pennsylvanian. But almost immediately, backers of Newt Gingrich who attended Perkins’ conclave contested this interpretation of events, and suggested the group was evenly divided between Gingrich and Santorum, with the vote to endorse Santorum only occurring after a big percentage of attendees had already left. In Monday’s debate, Santorum didn’t exactly shine, and found himself on the defensive for voting against a national “right-to-work” bill in the Senate (not a popular position among union-hating South Carolina Republicans).

After a campaign often described as “boring,” a New Hampshire Republican electorate showing no great signs of excitement performed its expected duty on January 10, giving Mitt Romney a solid win and making it increasingly difficult to see a path to the nomination for anyone else.

Romney’s 39 percent of the vote in New Hampshire was about what the polls had long predicted, but some last-minute turbulence in surveys and speculation that Paul or even Huntsman could pull an upset reset expectations nicely for Mitt, making his comfortable win look formidable. Paul’s 23 percent of the vote was also pretty predictable, and now that his two best states are behind him, we can expect his campaign to focus on small caucus states where it’s easy to pack rooms. Huntsman, having staked his entire campaign on a New Hampshire breakthrough, campaigning virtually nowhere else, may talk bravely of his third-place (17 percent) finish as giving him a “Ticket to Ride” to later states, but it’s hard to see much of a constituency for his defy-the-Tea-Party campaign in more conservative parts of the country. But like everyone else persisting in this strange nomination contest, Huntsman can help prevent other candidates from consolidating the non-Romney vote, at least until the money runs out.

If there was any surprise in New Hampshire, it’s probably how poorly the “true conservative” candidates performed. Newt Gingrich, who had the coveted endorsement of the New Hampshire Union-Leader, narrowly finished fourth (with 10 percent) ahead of Iowa co-winner Rick Santorum (9 percent), who clearly did not get much of a “bounce.” Rick Perry made no pretense of campaigning in New Hampshire, but still, it’s a bit shocking to see this one-time bully-boy of the field finishing just ahead of Buddy Roemer, with less than one percent of the vote.

Now the campaign will quickly move to its crucial southern phase, with primaries in South Carolina on Saturday, January 21 and in Florida on January 31. Victories by Mitt Romney in both would pretty much wrap up the nomination for him, and the latest polls from South Carolina and Florida have shown him likely to do just that.

So voters finally got into the act in the Republican presidential nominating contest, and the results from Iowa were about what anyone reading the late polls might have expected. With Ron Paul apparently taking a bit of a hit from bad publicity about his extremist past and attacks on his current foreign policy views by other candidates, he fell just short of Romney and Santorum, who almost literally tied. In many respects, the caucuses were a re-run of 2008: turnout was very much the same despite all the talk about a super-psyched GOP base; the composition of caucus-goers was very similar; and Mitt Romney got about the same number of votes. The main difference is that Romney spent much less time in Iowa than in 2008, and more crucially, the non-Romney vote was more divided. It’s also significant as a sign of politics to come that Mitt didn’t have to spend nearly as much of his own money in 2012, because a “Super PAC” supporting him did the dirty work of destroying Newt Gingrich’s credibility with Iowa conservatives (with some help from Ron Paul’s campaign).

The free-falling Gingrich campaign did have enough energy left to beat Rick Perry in Iowa (Newt got 13 percent of the vote, Perry 10 percent), dealing a huge blow to the candidate still generally thought to be the only enduring threat to a Romney nomination (Perry considered dropping out of the race Tuesday night, but reconsidered, probably after taking a good long look at the poor positioning of the rest of the field in South Carolina and Florida). Michele Bachmann, the winner of the Iowa GOP straw poll back in August, which croaked Tim Pawlenty’s candidacy, had the wheels fall off in the final week before the caucuses and finished a poor sixth, subsequently folding what was left of her campaign.

So technically, at least, Rick Santorum, who benefitted mightily from a last-minute consolidation of social conservative support, is the unlikely winner of the conservative-alternative-to-Romney sweepstakes that Iowa hosted for so many months. I qualify his victory because there are many doubts about his post-Iowa viability, and aside from Paul, who will be in the race to the bitter end, there remains a slim possibility that Perry or Gingrich can rise from the dead to attempt one more comeback when the calendar turns to the South after New Hampshire. Indeed, one of the grand ironies of this entire contest is that perceptions of Romney’s weakness have kept candidates in the field who are mainly keeping each other from consolidating non-Romney support.

Santorum has spent little time outside Iowa, and does not have deep pockets. More importantly, he’s a career politician with a domestic policy record that troubles some conservatives (notably pundit Erick Erickson, who has taken to attacking Santorum regularly and savagely). As a conservative Catholic, he has ties to evangelical activists via the anti-abortion movement (in which he is heavily involved, taking positions that won’t wear well with more moderate voters), but does not have the kind of natural connections to southern political culture that 2008 winner Mike Huckabee enjoyed.

Up until now, the right-wing conquest of the Republican Party that reached critical mass immediately after Barack Obama’s election in 2008 has not involved a lot of soul-searching questions about the relative value of ideology and “electability.” Indeed, it’s been an article of faith on the right—for some dating all the way back to Phyllis Schlafly’s 1964 book A Choice Not An Echo—that insufficient ideological rigor was precisely the reason for the GOP’s electoral problems. And nothing much has happened since the beginning of 2009, when the GOP made the unusual decision to move away from the political center after two straight electoral debacles, to disabuse them of the idea that they would be rewarded at the ballot box for fully indulging their ideological appetites and thrilling the conservative activist base.

That may be about to change. The House Republicans’ rejection of a two-month stopgap agreement to preserve a payroll tax cut and extend unemployment benefits has finally earned the Tea Party Movement full blame for gridlock and dysfunction in Congress (an institution whose approval rating dropped to 11 percent last week according to Gallup). Opinion surveys indicate that the deeply satisfying sabotage game (i.e., deliberately screwing up the operations of the federal government and then benefitting from public disgruntlement with the competence of said federal government) conservatives have been playing may be coming to an end as Republicans become more firmly identified with unpopular positions on spending, taxes, and the willingness to cooperate across party lines. Even the president’s approval ratings are looking better by comparison.

In other words, Republicans are at long last having to choose between ideology and popularity—or to put it another way, between the “base” and the general electorate—and the current behavior of House Republicans indicates it’s no real contest: ideology comes first.

Congress is mired this week in a complex struggle over an omnibus appropriations bill (with the total amount dictated by the earlier deficit reduction agreement) linked to a continuation of unemployment benefits and payroll tax relief. It’s almost entirely a matter of partisan Kabuki theater at this point, and neither a collapse of negotiations (followed, presumably, by another short-term continuing resolution on appropriations) nor an agreement (within the current parameters of the fight) would produce a major wingnut meltdown. Republicans generally are trying to secure a measure forcing the administration, among other indignities, to build the controversial Keystone KL pipeline, but again, this is more of a partisan that a purely ideological concern.

But conservative activists are reaching a failsafe point in the presidential nomination contest, with less than three weeks to go (or less in actual campaign time, given the limitations in attention-span and tolerance for “comparative” messages imposed by Christmas) before the Iowa caucuses.

With Herman Cain having finally suspended his campaign, conservatives in Iowa and elsewhere are struggling to decide whether to get behind the current frontrunner, Newt Gingrich, as an alternative to the chronically disfavored Mitt Romney, or to find some way to unite behind other, previously failed candidacies like those of Perry or Bachmann (while very much a viable candidate in Iowa, Ron Paul is generally considered unacceptable as an actual nominee because of his foreign policy views, and Rick Santorum would need an Iowa miracle to become viable). Perry and Paul are spending extensively on campaign ads in Iowa, and Paul, in particular, has been pounding Gingrich for his many flip-flops, his ideological heresies, and his Washington ties. Iowa polls all show Gingrich in the lead at present, though at least one, from PPP, shows Gingrich losing ground with steadily eroding favorable/unfavorable ratios.

The end of the calendar year always means an assortment of “temporary” policies are approaching expiration, including some (e.g., upward revision of reimbursement rates for Medicare providers, and a “patch” to avoid imposition of the Alternative Minimum Tax on new classes of taxpayers) that happen every year. And then there are other expiring provisions central to the Obama administration’s efforts to deal with the recession, most notably unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed, and last year’s major “stimulus” measure, a temporary Social Security payroll tax cut.

With the collapse of the deficit reduction supercommittee and an uncertain future ahead for the “automatic sequestrations” of spending that are supposed to subsequently occur, leaders in both parties are especially sensitive at the moment about taking steps on either the spending or revenue side of the budget ledger that add to deficits. But some of the “fixes” mentioned above are political musts, while others are highly popular or scratch particular ideological itches. It will be interesting to see whether conservative activists wind up taking a hard line against deficit increasing measures, and indeed, against any cooperation with Democrats so long as their own demands for “entitlement reform” and high-end tax cuts are ignored.

The payroll tax cut is an especially difficult subject for conservatives. While it will be easy for them to reject Senate Democratic proposals to pay for an extension of the cut with a surtax on millionaires, it is certainly possible, as Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell has acknowledged, to “pay for” this tax cut with spending cuts, perhaps even some that Democrats would consider supporting.

Some conservatives, however, view any deal with Democrats on this and any other fiscal issues as a deal with the devil. One of McConnell’s deputies, Sen. John Kyl, has argued that the payroll tax cut hasn’t boosted the economy (i.e., it is not targeted to “job creators,” the wealthy) and should be subordinated to tax cut ideas that supposedly do. In an argument that is getting echoed across Wingnut World, RedState regular Daniel Horowitz suggests that GOPers make any payroll tax cut extension conditional on a major restructuring of Social Security, which of course ain’t happening.

The official failure of the congressional “supercommittee” came and went without much hand-wringing in Wingnut World; indeed, the prevailing sentiment was quiet satisfaction that Republicans had not “caved” by accepting tax increases as part of any deficit reduction package. It was all a reminder that most conservative activists are not, as advertised, obsessed with reducing deficits or debts, but only with deficits and debts as a lever to obtain a vast reduction in the size and scope of the federal government, and the elimination of progressive taxation. For the most part, the very same people wearing tricorner hats and wailing about the terrible burden we are placing on our grandchildren were just a few years ago agreeing with Dick Cheney’s casual assertion that deficits did not actually matter at all.

It is interesting that throughout the Kabuki Theater of the supercommittee’s “negotiations,” the GOP’s congressional leadership came to largely accept the Tea Party fundamental rejection of any compromise between the two parties’ very different concepts of the deficit problem. From the get-go, Democrats were offering both non-defense-discretionary and entitlement cuts in exchange for restoring tax rates for the very wealthy to levels a bit closer to (though still lower than) their historic position. The maximum Republican offer was to engage in some small-change loophole closing accompanied by an actual lowering of the top rates in incomes, plus extension of the Bush tax cuts to infinity. Conservatives are perfectly happy to let an on-paper “sequestration” of spending take place, with the expectation that a Republican victory in 2012 will put them in a position to brush aside the defense cuts so authorized and then go after their federal spending targets with a real vengeance.

It was a relatively quiet week in Wingnut World, with the loudest mouths probably conserving energy for cries of “betrayal” in the unlikely case that the congressional “super-committee” actually reaches a deficit reduction agreement in time to meet its November 23 deadline.

Believe it or not, there have already been “sellout” charges aimed at super-committee conservatives based on their dubious offer to accept $300 billion in loophole-closing revenue enhancements in exchange for reductions in the top marginal income tax rate and permanent extension of the Bush tax cuts (an offer Democrats summarily rejected as “unserious”). But beyond rejecting anything that remotely looks like a tax increase, conservative activists do not seem to have a very clear party line about what their congressional allies ought to do, with some welcoming a “sequestration” of domestic and defense funds as harmless, others demanding a “back-to-the-drawing-board” cold war against domestic appropriations (with specific venom being spewed at a pending appropriations bill boosting FHA funding), and still others following Newt Gingrich’s lead in treating the entire exercise as meaningless since any defense spending “sequestrations” could be quickly reversed after a presumed GOP landslide next November. Indeed, Gingrich favors dropping the sequestration trigger altogether.

Yesterday was Election Day in scattered parts of the country, and it was not a terribly successful election night in Wingnut World. Two ballot initiatives of special importance to hard-core conservative activists—Ohio’s Issue 2, an effort to overturn the state’s anti-public-union legislation, and Mississippi’s ballot item #26, an initiative to define legally protected human “personhood” as arising at the moment of conception—both went pretty solidly the wrong way from their perspective. Another less-visible initiative, in Maine, aimed at restoring same-day voter registration, which conservatives invariably oppose, passed easily, though Mississippi voters did approve a new voter ID law.

Statewide elections went as expected. Democratic KY Governor Steve Beshear was comfortably re-elected despite last minute charges by his Republican opponent that his presence at a Hindu ceremony connected to an Indian company plant opening indicated he didn’t love Jesus. In Mississippi, Republican Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant, a strong supporter of the Personhood initiative and a wingnut in good standing, nonetheless easily won the governorship over Hattiesburg mayor Johnny DuPree, the state’s first African-American gubernatorial nominee.

As the November 23 deadline for congressional action on a “supercommittee” package to reduce budget deficits by $1.2 trillion and avoid automatic domestic and defense cuts approaches, conservative activists have been steadily ramping up the pressure on supercommittee Republicans to hold a hard line against any tax increases. This missive from Heritage Action for America is pretty representative of the drumbeat:

Unfortunately, the “super committee” is veering off course and the odds are growing that massive tax hikes will be part of a final deal. Even worse, not all Republicans are willing to take massive tax hikes off the table. According to news reports, more than 100 House members–Republicans and Democrats alike–sent a letter to the “super committee” urging a “big, grand bargain–taking nothing off the table.” In Washington, that is code for a tax increase.

A few anti-supercommittee conservatives are willing to come right out and say that allowing across-the-board defense cuts to be enacted is an acceptable price to pay for avoiding tax increases. The most common rationalization is that these “sequesters” would not take effect until 2013, and a newly triumphant Republican president and Congress could fix the problem after the 2012 elections. Using the same kind of arguments, many activists have long claimed that a “grand bargain” that included major changes in federal retirement programs in exchange for tax increases would be unacceptable on grounds that Democrats would never keep their promises on spending in the future.

At an earlier point in the process, it appeared conservatives might allow some “wiggle room” for the supercommittee on taxes by considering the idea of a package that includes base-broadening “tax reforms” without raising actual rates on the wealthy or any major category of corporations. But the renewed popularity of sweeping, radical tax system overhauls, as reflected in the adoption of variations on the regressive “flat tax” idea by presidential candidates Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry, has undermined what little support existed on the Right for revenue-raising elimination of “loopholes” under the general framework of the current tax code.

Plans to reduce the taxes of wealthy “job creators” remained on the minds of conservatives this last week, with Rick Perry harnessing the reboot of his floundering presidential campaign to a “flat tax” proposal that’s really an alternative maximum tax for people currently in the higher brackets. In an effort to get conservative voters to think about everything and anything other than immigration policy in considering him, Perry nestled his tax plan in a larger package that includes total suspension of federal regulations for a period of time, uninhibited exploitation of fossil fuel resources, and a balanced budget constitutional amendment that includes a permanent limitation on spending as a percentage of GDP (this last item is an item beloved of SC Sen.–and Wingnut Generalissimo–Jim DeMint, whose endorsement Perry would surely love to secure prior to next January’s Palmetto State primary).

Perry’s tax plan and the optional nature of its rates raise a lot of questions, but its shape-shifting features are politically convenient, particularly as compared to Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 proposal, with its unambiguously regressive thrust and its reliance on an unpopular national sales tax. With Newt Gingrich also hawking a flat tax scheme, the conquest of the Republican Party by cranky tax schemers is now very far advanced.

One of the more exotic policy tendencies of Wingnut World is a history of strong and pervasive support for replacing income taxes with higher consumption taxes. Many conservatives support this step on grounds that it will promote savings and investment, which is another way of saying that they believe capital should not be taxed at all. Others like the idea of getting rid of the compliance costs and “bureaucracy” associated with income taxes, and still others are attracted to the “flat” nature of consumption taxes, which do not vary based on the taxpayer’s personal circumstances (whether it’s income, or the various characteristics that earn deductions and credits against income tax liability).

The so-called “Fair Tax”—the general term used for any number of schemes for shifting from federal income to consumption taxes—has been a hardy perennial for years among conservative activists and talk show hosts. Among the latter was Herman Cain, whose so-called 9-9-9 (replacing current federal income, capital gains and estate taxes with a 9 percent national sales tax, a 9 percent VAT on corporations, and a 9 percent income tax with no deductions or credits) plan is explicitly advertised as an intermediate step towards a “Fair Tax.” Like the “Fair Tax,” Cain’s plan seems to have great curb appeal for rank-and-file conservatives, but less so for opinion-leaders.

At a time when we are constantly being told that no one in America cares about anything other than the economy, one of Wingnut World’s most durable forums for people who intensely care about cultural issues was held this last weekend. The Value Voters Summit, sponsored by the Family Research Council, attracted every significant GOP presidential candidate other than Jon Hunstman. But as has often been the case, the controversial nature of the event’s sponsors and speakers overshadowed anything the candidates had to say.

Most notably, Robert Jeffress, a Southern Baptist minister from Dallas who was asked by conference sponsors to introduce Rick Perry (he’s a long-standing supporter of his governor and one was one of the pillars of Perry’s big prayer event back in August), made big waves by going out of his way to tell reports he regarded Mitt Romney’s LDS church as a “cult.” This is an old refrain for Jeffress, but casting the Republican presidential nominating contest as a war of religious identity in which Christians should follow Perry was sure to grab headlines. Moreover, one of the main speakers at the event was Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association (a major Value Voters Summit co-sponsor), who lived down to his reputation as a purveyor of all sorts of bigotry, mainly aimed at gays, Muslims and Mormons. Romney, who preceded Fischer at the podium, was driven to an indirect swipe at him for “crossing a line,” which of course just gave Fischer a new excuse to whine about being persecuted.

The whole series of events led some commentators to wonder if a sustained attack on Romney’s religion, with or without the complicity of Rick Perry, had been launched to stiffen resistance to the 2012 front-runner among white conservative evangelicals.

The presidential candidate who was most successful in cutting through all the distractions at the Value Voters Summit was Herman Cain, whose stock speech is still blowing the doors off in conservative gatherings. He got a lot of standing ovations, but perhaps the biggest greeted his assurance that he and other African-Americans had nothing to be angry about thanks to the opportunities they’d received as Americans.

A lot happened in the presidential campaign sector of Wingnut World this last week. The GOP field for 2012 probably became fixed. The calendar for the nominating process shifted and jelled. Rick Perry’s dive in the polls, and Herman Cain’s rise, accelerated, even as the Texan’s status as co-front-runner with Mitt Romney remained central to the conventional wisdom.

It’s not clear how many sincere wingnuts were part of the noisy posse that tried, unsuccessfully, to drag Chris Christie into the presidential race (a lot of the Draft Christie momentum came from northeastern donors associated during the last cycle with Rudy Giuliani). His ferocious YouTube videos and confrontational attitudes towards public sector unions were very popular in Tea Party circles. But his positions and record on immigration, guns, global climate change, and same-sex civil unions were sure to get him into serious trouble with ideological conservatives had he actually pulled the trigger.

With Christie definitively out, the only major pol who hasn’t fished or cut bait is Sarah Palin, who continues to insist she hasn’t made up her mind about whether or not to run in 2012. But recent polls show two-thirds to three-fourths of Republicans—including many who profess admiration for her—saying she should not run. So that development is unlikely, unless Palin simply decides it’s the best way to recapture the public attention she seems to have gradually lost.

It’s been a fairly introspective week in Wingnut World. Remarkably little right-wing blood was spilled over the continuing appropriations resolution fight and denouement; no thundering emanated from talk radio or the blogs about the necessity of fighting to the last ditch and shutting down government.

Instead, most of the gabbing has been over the demolition derby of “P5,” last week’s series of presidential candidate events in Orlando, Florida. As I predicted might happen in the last WW, Rick Perry had a terrible 48 hours (actually, a few less than that, since he abruptly left Orlando for Michigan on Saturday morning, letting a surrogate give his speech prior to the state party’s straw poll) in the Sunshine State. By all accounts, he performed poorly in the September 22 Fox/Google candidates’ debate, failing to add much to prior weak defenses of his positions on Social Security and immigration, and stumbling and mumbling his way through a botched attack on Mitt Romney’s record of flip-flops. He didn’t make much of a mark in the September 23 CPAC event, but more importantly, he got trounced in the September 24 straw poll after his campaign made a big deal out of its significance and apparently spent some serious money working the delegates before they assembled.

Since Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann conspicuously gave the straw poll a pass well in advance, and it wasn’t the kind of open event Ron Paul could pack with his supporters, Perry was expected to romp. But instead, the big winner was Herman Cain, who made a favorable impression with a smooth and upbeat performance in the candidate debate, and fiery versions of his well-worn stock speech both at CPAC and just prior to the straw poll.

In February, the “invisible primary” for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination was kicked off in Washington by the American Conservative Union’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference. On Friday, a second CPAC event will be held in Orlando in deliberate proximity to tomorrow’s Fox/Google candidates’ debate and Saturday’s Florida GOP presidential straw poll (CPAC will not feature its own straw poll). As in Washington in February, the event will revolve around a cattle call of speeches by presidential candidates and conservative celebrities. The smell of red meat will hang heavy in the air, and speakers can and will be expected to foreswear all ideological heresy and smite both Democrat Socialists and RINOs.

There are still some observers in Washington who believe congressional Republicans will be forced by President Obama’s jobs speech and proposal to cooperate with Democrats on some sort of emergency economic legislation. But that’s not the perception, and certainly is not the inclination, of the citizens of Wingnut World, who greeted the president’s speech with a combo platter of ideological hostility and mocking indifference.

Almost universally, conservative opinion-leaders insist on calling the proposal a “stimulus” rather than a “jobs” bill. Given their equally universal claim that the 2009 economic stimulus legislation did not create any real jobs (viz. Rick Perry’s claim during the Florida candidates’ debate), this indicates its dead-on-arrival nature among conservative leaders and probably the House. Once the White House made it clear it proposed to “pay” for the jobs proposal with measures that include a limitation on itemized tax deductions by high earners, conservative condemnation solidified even more.

The bigger picture, of course, is that conservatives have long settled on a message and policy agenda that insists nothing other than business tax cuts, federal spending cuts, and aggressive deregulation can possibly be considered as helpful to the current and future U.S. economy. Public investments? That’s just a code word for more spending or worse yet, pork. Temporary relief for the unemployed or the under-employed? That’s just more stimulus, reflecting the failed ideas of John Maynard Keynes. During the long GOP presidential debate on September 12, no concept beyond disabling government was mentioned by any of the candidates with respect to reviving the economy.

If you really want to understand the psychology and the power of Wingnut World, the Palmetto Freedom Forum event in South Carolina on Labor Day was a real eye-opener.

Set up by South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint, Iowa Rep. Steve King, and social ultraconservative Robert George of Princeton University, the event was designed to remove the “soundbite” and horse-race mentality of conventional candidate debates, and present 2012 GOP presidentials with the opportunity and the challenge of making major statements of “first principles” before a murder board of ideological inquisitors.

The event was spoiled a bit by Rick Perry’s last-minute cancellation to go home to look over the shoulders of professional emergency managers and first responders dealing with the recent rash of Texas wildfires. Even if you give Perry full credit for doing the right thing, it’s clear he benefitted by avoiding a probable grilling from inquisitor Steve King over immigration policy (King asked other candidates not only about illegal immigration but about appropriate levels of legal immigration). And actually, it’s doubtful Perry would have done that well under questioning from Robert George about the constitutional issues involved in abortion policy, since the Texan has flip-flopped on the subject quite recently.