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"  There&amp;#039;s one thing that you always have to remember about Willard Romney. His jaw is made of glass. It always has been. When he ran for Edward Kennedy&amp;#039;s Senate seat, and the Kennedys started running at him like Kennedys run at everyone, he folded like a cheap lawn chair. He ruthlessly pushed out an incumbent Republican governor named Jane Swift, whom everybody in Massachusetts already had figured for a dolt, in order to run against Shannon O&amp;#039;Brien, who never was confused with Margaret Thatcher. Once elected governor, Willard made a lot of noise about setting up a statewide organization to elect more Republicans to the state legislature. A subsequent election showed this effort to be utterly futile, which is about when Willard gave up on really being governor and started running for president, which happens to be why we here in the Commonwealth (God save it!) have him to thank for inventing Obamacare. Thanks, Willard! Then, in 2008, he had everything going for him until every single other Republican in the field began to make it known that they&amp;#039;d rather scoop out their own eyeballs with a salad fork than spend five minutes in a room with Willard Romney. The going got tough and Mitt got out, and started planning for 2012, when Republican people might have forgotten how much they truly loathed him. The point is that Mitt is what the old fight managers used to call a &amp;quot;mutt.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s great in the early rounds but, hit him once, and he&amp;#039;s looking for a place to fall. Which is what&amp;#039;s going to make the next few months very, very interesting. He&amp;#039;s still the odds-on favorite, given the passel of goobers he&amp;#039;s running against. (La Bachmann was lately heard explaining about how intellectually impeccable her campaign has been. Michele, ma belle, your entire political career has been a gaffe. Ask around.) But he can&amp;#039;t seem to make up his mind about what he&amp;#039;s doing in Iowa, and now it appears that Newt Gingrich may be running him a race in New Hampshire. (The upswing in Newt&amp;#039;s likability numbers in that poll gives me pause. It&amp;#039;s not as though the guy&amp;#039;s become more likable over the past few months.) The dithering in Iowa is the key to understanding Willard&amp;#039;s campaign and whatever vestigial soul he has as a politician. There is the fighting-the-last-war timidity. (Romney plunged heavily in the 2008 Iowa caucuses and, largely because the Iowa caucusgoers got a really good look at him, he pretty much bombed, losing to Mike Huckabee. So he wasn&amp;#039;t going to make the same mistake twice, dammit.) This made a little bit of sense if a) Mitt was going to run as the electable moderate he ran as in Massachusetts, and b) if his firewall in New Hampshire was in the satchel. The problem is that Mitt is (once again) kowtowing to the kind of lunatic conservatism that runs riot in the Iowa GOP caucus base, which has undermined the whole rationale for avoiding Iowa in the first place, turning the campaign again into his desperate attempt to prove his wingut bona fides. So he&amp;#039;s been to Iowa probably more than he&amp;#039;s planned to be, all the while trying to convince himself and the rest of us that a loss there won&amp;#039;t really mean that much. Now, though, if New Hampshire&amp;#039;s really in play, and I&amp;#039;m not really sure that it is, Willard would have himself a real problem. He&amp;#039;s pretty much got to win there by a touchdown-and-a-half for it to mean anything nationally. If he tanks in Iowa, and if Newt Gingrich stays within a field goal in New Hampshire, and then the campaign moves south, that would set up the perfect moment for the glass in Willard&amp;#039;s jaw to crack. Gingrich isn&amp;#039;t going to stay in butter-wouldn&amp;#039;t-melt-in-his-jowls Party Statesman mode for much longer. He&amp;#039;ll get the bends. And Rick Perry still has millions to blow on attack ads. If the campaign evolves to the point where Willard is both perceived to be vulnerable and is everybody&amp;#039;s target, you will see the pettiness, the whining, and the perpetual sneer at the lower orders that are all such fundamental parts of Willard&amp;#039;s personality, and that have endeared him so to the people in his own party. It is possible, after all, to lose simply because you&amp;#039;re afraid you might. CLICK HERE FOR MORE OF CHARLES P. PIERCE&amp;#039;S LONG READS &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Politics Blog on RSS and on the Twitter &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a11712/mitt-romney-iowa-strategy-6590142/>