Dispatch from Florida

Orlando, Florida, Gingrich 2012 Campaign HQ

The mood in the Gingrich campaign isn’t as upbeat as it was immediately after the South Carolina primary. Mitt Romney regained his footing after the last debate and once again looks like the presumptive GOP nominee.

Despite being despised and mistrusted by many members of his own party, Romney has opened a double digit lead over Gingrich in Florida.

Helping Romney’s cause is the fact that the GOP establishment -- or what remains of it, anyway -- hates Newt Gingrich with passion and prejudice. Bob Dole, a relic of the Establishment, always believed that Gingrich was a crackpot and a megalomaniac -- and now he’s not afraid to say so publicly. “Oh sure,” Dole said the other day, “Gingrich had a lot of ideas when he served in Congress -- and every one was nutty. He was never as smart as he thought he was, and all his grandstanding and grandiosity pissed off a lot of people. If he’s the nominee, the GOP is dead meat come November.”

Gingrich’s campaign staff play it close to the vest most of the time, but late at night, after a couple of rounds of drinks, when only the most intrepid reporters are still around, they let down their guard. While there are a few true believers in the group, most of the staff thinks Gingrich is full of shit, arrogant, and living in his own fantasy world where people like him get elected president.

“He’s serious about colonizing the moon,” one staffer said in the bar of the Sheraton. It was past 1:00 a.m. and the guy looked fried, like he’d been mainlining Red Bull for days. “Newt’s plan is to colonize and then send our illegal aliens and undesirables up there, in the same way Britain once sent convicts to Australia. Newt’s nuts, man.”

“The other day,” another chimed in, “Newt walked in and stood in the middle of the office and apropos of nothing announced, and I quote: ‘I am the smartest man in America and one of the great minds in the history of the world. I consider myself the equal of Aristotle and Plato and far superior to Socrates, and it’s a surprise to me -- truly a surprise -- that no sculptor has come forward to render my likeness in marble or granite. That will change when I’m elected president. The White House grounds will be peppered with statues of me.’ And then he turned around and left. How fucking bizarre is that?”

Nobody is willing to talk in detail, on or off the record, about Newt’s wife, Calista, though rumor has it that by comparison Calista makes Hillary Clinton look friendly and warm.

A female staffer looked up from her iPad and said, “The word is that Newt likes his sex kinky. He dresses like Julius Caesar and Calista like a slave girl, and they play out scenes involving leather restraints and oversized dildos. There’s videotape, apparently.”

It’s a weird vibe for sure, and South Carolina feels like a long time ago. National political campaigns are always strange, part circus, part revival meeting, part freak show. The candidate is “on” twenty-four hours a day, the pace is exhausting, and the news cycle short and unforgiving. A candidate as voluble as Gingrich is always one slip of the tongue away from disaster.