But in the debate, Newt just may have attained the separation from Santorum that he so desperately needs. He did this not by attacking Romney’s Bain Capital record; loud condemnation from conservative opinion-shapers has caused him to ease up on the subject, and when debate panelists tried to engage him on it Monday night, he claimed only that he’d tried to raise reasonable questions about Romney’s business record and showed no interest in saying more. Instead, Newt struck gold by catering to racial and class resentments — with an assist (presumably unintended) from one of the panelists.

The key exchange took place in the debate’s second segment, when Fox News contributor Juan Williams brought up Gingrich’s statement that “the African-American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps” and his claim that children in poor areas don’t understand the value of work and could learn it by doing the jobs of school janitors.

“Can’t you see,” Williams asked, “that this is viewed at a minimum as insulting to all Americans, but particularly to black Americans?”

In a general election debate, this might have been a challenging question for Gingrich to field. But this was a GOP primary debate in a state where the modern Republican Party was essentially created out of a white backlash against the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights. Some in the live audience in Myrtle Beach hissed at Williams, one of the few Democratic-friendly voices on Fox, and Gingrich milked their outrage for all it was worth.

“No,” he said matter of factly, ” I don’t see that.”

Neither did the crowd, of course, which responded with one of the night’s most thunderous bursts of applause, a scene that was repeated when Gingrich punctuated his explanation to Williams by saying, “Only elites despise earning money.”

This came just moments after Gingrich had brought the house down by claiming that Barack Obama doesn’t believe that work is good and by railing against  “unconditional efforts by the best food stamp president in American history to maximize dependency is terrible for the future of this country.” It was all a reminder of Gingrich’s unparalleled ability to serve up pure red meat to a party base that has spent the past three years being sold a caricature of  Obama as radical redistributionist.

But then Newt really got lucky: Williams decided to ask him a follow-up.

“I’ve got to tell you,” he said, “my email account, my Twitter account has been inundated with people of all races asking if your comments were not intended to belittle the poor and racial minorities. You saw some of this reaction during your visit to a black church in South Carolina …”

Williams was referring to the grilling Gingrich faced from parishoners at the Jones Memorial A.M.E. Zion Church on Sunday, but by this point his words were being drowned out by jeers from the crowd. When they quieted, he finished: “You saw this during your visit to a black church in South Carolina, where a woman asked why you refer to President Obama as ‘the food stamp president.’ It sounds as if you are seeking to belittle people.”

More booing.

“Well,” Gingrich replied, “First of all, Juan …”

There were laughs at this.

“The fact is that more people have been put on food stamps under Barack Obama than any other president in American history.”

Cheers.

“Now, I know among the politically correct you’re not supposed to use facts that are uncomfortable.”

More cheers.

“Second, you’re the one who earlier raised a key point. The area that ought to be on I-73 was called by Barack Obama a corridor of shame because of unemployment. Has it improved in three years?  No. They haven’t built a road. They haven’t helped the people. They haven’t done anything.”

Louder cheers.

“So here’s my point: I believe every American of every background has been endowed by their creator with the right to pursue happiness, and if that makes liberals unhappy I’m going to continue to find ways to help poor people learn how to get a job, learn how to get a better job, and learn someday how to own the job.”

By this point, the audience was practically chanting Gingrich’s name. When it comes to massaging the resentments of the party base, no Republican candidate has had a finer five-minute stretch than this during the entire campaign. It’s the kind of performance that fueled Gingrich’s unlikely polling surge this fall, and it’s very possible that it will do the same now in the South Carolina home stretch.

This is especially when you consider that Santorum pretty much bombed. Why? Because the closest he came to scoring points on Monday was when he picked a fight with Mitt Romney over voting rights for convicted felons. Santorum pointed out that it was Martin Luther King Day and that “this is a huge deal in the African-American community.” Romney responded that, “I don’t think people who commit violent crimes should be allowed to vote again.”

The crowd liked that reply, as you might expect, showing that Romney seemed to understand his audience better than Santorum — but not nearly as well as Gingrich.

“This nation is divided,” Huntsman replied, “because of attitudes like that.”

It was the biggest applause line of the entire Huntsman campaign, one that was aired repeatedly on news broadcasts and talk shows and celebrated by non-conservative pundits. And it figures to be treated as the definitive illustration of why his candidacy was always doomed — proof of the futility of running as a reasonable man in today’s GOP. In reality, though, the debate moment was something different: a perfect microcosm of a campaign that was treated by the media as a courageous, principled stand but that actually represented an ambitious politician making the best with the hand he’d been dealt.

Early on, the media latched on to Huntsman as its favorite candidate — the sane Republican candidate who was trying to sell competence and sobriety to an unhinged party base — and tracked his campaign with ridiculously disproportionate intensity. This reputation stemmed from Huntsman’s tenure as governor of Utah, when he broke somewhat with national conservative orthodoxy by supporting civil unions for same-sex couples, granting driving privileges to undocumented immigrants, and calling for the GOP to take a less strident tone on social issues, and from his willingness to leave that job in 2009 when Obama offered him the ambassadorship.

But let’s not treat Huntsman as some kind of ultra-principled martyr. He’s an ambitious politician whose overall platform was far more conservative and tactically-driven than many realized. His economic program, for instance, was nothing short of radical — massive reductions for the super-wealthy and for corporations — and seemed tailor-made to win approval from the GOP’s supply-side wing. He also provided the most unqualified endorsement of Rep. Paul Ryan’s plan to end Medicare as it now exists, was just as insistent as every other candidate that healthcare reform and the Dodd-Frank bank reform law be repealed, and sang the standard conservative tune on abortion, gay marriage, gun control and most other hot-button issues. Occasionally, he’d throw his media and non-Republican fans a bone, but he could be just as quick to reverse himself when he sensed an opportunity to make inroads with the right.

It wasn’t hard to see the strategy that was at work: Ride the “sane” image to a breakthrough showing in finicky, independent-friendly New Hampshire, then be positioned to win over suddenly curious national conservatives by saying, “Have you actually looked at my platform — I’m not the moderate you’ve heard I am.”

There are a couple of reasons why this strategy didn’t work. One is that the voters Huntsman was depending on in New Hampshire were always very likely to side with Romney, a man they remembered well from his 2008 campaign and his term as Massachusetts governor. So when Romney emerged from Iowa with some real momentum, it became impossible for Huntsman to gain meaningful traction in the Granite State. Another reason was Huntsman himself: As a public speaker, he’s a dud. Debates have played an unusually significant role in shaping public opinion in the GOP campaign, and (his direct hit on Mitt notwithstanding) Huntsman consistently faded into the background in all of them.

But there’s really no avoiding his original sin as a 2012 candidate: saying “yes” to Obama in 2009.

Huntsman, of course, liked to portray his decision as a patriotic act — answering a president’s call to serve and ignoring his party label. But the evidence suggests he simply overreacted to the significance of Obama’s 2008 victory and made a bad political calculation. It’s a distant memory now, but recall that in late 2008 and early 2009, Obama’s popularity was stratospheric and conventional wisdom held that the Republican Party was entering a long, painful sojourn in the political wilderness. When Obama’s team recruited Huntsman in this period, they didn’t exactly hide their eagerness to remove a potential GOP foe from the 2012 mix, so it seems that Huntsman made a calculation that was at least as pragmatic as it was patriotic: The ’12 nomination was going to be worthless, but teaming up with a transformational president would be a nice credential for 2016.

Huntsman probably didn’t see the anti-Obama backlash coming. He was hardly alone in this, even if the GOP’s resurgence wasn’t exactly shocking, but there he was in Beijing watching the same party that had been given up for dead just two years earlier scoring the biggest midterm gains in decades in November 2010. Suddenly, the 2012 nomination seemed very much worth having — and if a Republican could win then, there’d be no ’16 race. So Huntsman handed in his resignation, hit the campaign trail, and came up with the best strategy that his Obama baggage allowed for. And it wasn’t nearly good enough.

Still, his nomination could be problematic for the GOP for a very unique reason that is now coming into focus: He exudes top 1 percent-ness.

That Romney’s career in venture capital could cause general election headaches was established long before this campaign. It’s one of the major reasons his first campaign for office, a 1994 bid for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, crumbled apart. But his private equity past is a particularly sensitive subject in post-meltdown/OWS America, where decades of rising income inequality are suddenly a big part of the national conversation, with even working-class Republicans concluding that Wall Street and big corporations have gotten rich on their backs.

What’s worse for Romney, as Joan Walsh pointed out yesterday, is that he seems incapable of talking about these issues without drawing attention to his own privileged life. And the more closely he’s identified with the top 1 percent in the public’s mind, the greater the risk there is for Romney of playing to type in unintentionally damning ways. Would a photograph like this — which is actually a TSA security screening but looks like a shoeshine at first glance — be troublesome for a candidate without Romney’s money and business background?

With Romney’s candidacy, there is an odd paradox at work. In terms of the political issues that deal with income inequality, he’s really no different than any other candidate the GOP might conceivably nominate, favoring economic policies that offer tangible benefits mainly to the wealthy. And actually, his program is marginally less hostile to the middle class than those of his rivals. Recall, for instance, that Newt Gingrich – who is now slamming Romney as a symbol of irresponsible corporate behavior – actually criticized him in a December debate for not supporting the elimination of the capital gains tax.

But unlike Gingrich and the rest of the GOP field, Romney embodies the super-wealthy/corporate-type that Democrats like to accuse Republicans of coddling – making it much harder for him to credibly reject the charge. A Republican nominee running on the same platform but lacking Romney’s aristocratic bearing could more credibly reassure voters that he’s not doing the bidding of plutocrats.

A prime example of this kind of Republican can be found in Romney’s top surrogate, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Just like Romney and every other major Republican, Christie has lashed out at Obama’s “class warfare” and argued for policies that benefit the rich. One of his first acts as governor was the killing of the state’s millionaires’ tax. But he embodies the image of the blunt, take-no-crap Jersey working stiff – not the sort of person you’d expect to kowtow before the moneyed elite.

This may explain why some of the most insistent calls for Christie to enter the presidential race back in the fall came from the who’s who of super-elite GOP donors. As the New York Times reported at the time:

They are rich. They are unattached. They are looking for a little excitement.

Meet the Draft Christie committee, a small but influential group of Republican-leaning donors and activists, many based in New York, united by a shared desire to see Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey run for president.

There is Kenneth G. Langone, the billionaire Home Depot founder who is perhaps Mr. Christie’s most fervent booster; Paul E. Singer, the publicity-shy hedge fund magnate and Republican activist who is among the most-sought-after Republican donors in the country; and David H. Koch, the industrialist, Tea Party benefactor and, according to Forbes, the richest man in New York.

Charles R. Schwab, the personal investment guru, is also among those who have shown interest in seeing a Christie presidential bid, according to published reports and people familiar with the discussions, as is the financier Stanley F. Druckenmiller. So are the hedge fund managers David Tepper and Daniel S. Loeb, a onetime supporter of President Obama.

In theory, these men should have been happy to sign on with Romney, a man who comes from their world, shares their basic outlook and values, and was within striking distance of the Republican nomination. Could it be that they understood how politically toxic Wall Street had become and feared that Romney might be just a little too much like them to win a general election?

Christie, obviously, decided against running. But the promise his candidacy held for Republicans – working-class cover for a top 1 percent agenda – underscores the reality of Romney’s candidacy: At this point, he gives the GOP its best chance of winning – but they could have done better.

* * *

I was on “The Rachel Maddow Show” last night and discussed Romney’s top 1 percent problem. The full segment is below. Note: During the segment, I mentioned a photo that’s been making the rounds that seems to show Romney receiving a shoeshine on an airport tarmac. It turns out he was actually going through a TSA security screening, although in a way this reinforces the point: Because of Romney’s background and style, even actions can serve as a reminder of his privileged status.

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This happened when he was confronted by a voter who asked him to “lay off the corporatist versus the free market” rhetoric that he’s been aiming at Mitt Romney, and Gingrich replied that “I agree with you.”

“It’s an impossible theme to talk about with Obama in the background,” he explained. “Obama just makes it impossible to talk rationally in that area because he is so deeply into class warfare that automatically you get an echo effect which, as a Reagan Republican it frankly never occurred to me until it happened. So I agree with you entirely.”

Not surprisingly, this was promptly reported as an admission by the GOP candidate that he’d erred in painting Romney as a corporate villain and that he was ready to back off his attacks on his opponent’s venture capital past. That Gingrich might feel this way was certainly understandable; so far, his Romney assault has mainly enraged conservative opinion-leaders, who have used their platforms to brand the former House speaker an unprincipled opportunist and to accuse him of aiding Barack Obama and the Occupy Wall Street movement. But shortly thereafter, his campaign put out a statement insisting there’d been no backtracking whatsoever:

This issue at hand is neither about Bain Capital, private equity firms, nor about capitalism.  It is about Mitt Romney’s judgment and character.  It was Governor Romney’s decision to base his candidacy, in large part, on his background as a portfolio manager.  Thus, it is entirely legitimate to ask questions about whether he is accurately presenting how he conducted himself during that career.

So it looks like Gingrich — and, perhaps more important, the well-endowed Super PAC that’s aligned with him — will not be letting up on Romney’s Bain Capital years after all. But that doesn’t necessarily mean this was all simple misunderstanding, because it’s actually the second time Gingrich has publicly waffled on the wisdom of his Romney attacks.

The first instance came in mid-December, when Gingrich expressed regret to Sean Hannity over his claim that Romney had made his money by “bankrupting companies and laying off employees” and vowed to run a “relentlessly positive” campaign from that point forward. Weeks later, though, after his poll numbers had crashed and Romney had reasserted himself as the GOP favorite, Gingrich went back on this pledge and again made Bain an issue.

This is why it was so easy to believe that he was changing course yet again when he opened his mouth on Wednesday. This campaign, and his entire political career for that matter, is filled with exhibitions of Gingrich’s comical knack for switching back and forth between sweeping, absolute claims and commitments while expressing contempt for anyone who suggests he’s being inconsistent.

The classic example involves the multiple highly specific and confident positions he took on Libya — demanding , for instance, that President Obama establish a no-fly zone, then calling intervention a mistake when one actually was set up. There was also his journey from calling Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan a bad idea and “right-wing social engineering” to claiming that anyone who quoted him saying so was guilty of lying. It’s the story of his career: At the height of the 1998 midterm campaign, he railed against the media for focusing obsessively on the Monica Lewinsky scandal — this after he’d dramatically vowed earlier in the year to raise the subject himself whenever he got the chance.

Gingrich’s last-ditch effort in South Carolina depends on exploiting two of Romney’s chief intraparty vulnerabilities: his penchant for opportunistic flip-flops and his history of ideological apostasies. In Gingrich’s telling, he’s a “Reagan conservative” who represents the party base’s last chance to avoid nominating a “timid Massachusetts moderate.” But he can’t seem to keep himself from engaging in over-the-top flip-floppery of his own, a reality that his Wednesday comments are a reminder of. And the subject he’s vacillating on — whether to attack Romney over Bain — actually gives Romney an opportunity to position himself to Gingrich’s right.

In other words, Gingrich is now running in South Carolina as pretty much the exact candidate he came to the state to beat.

Evidence abounds of New Hampshire’s diminished importance this cycle. Candidates have spent less time here than in past campaigns, events this week aren’t as crowded as usual, and journalists are skipping town early. There just isn’t much buzz this time around.

Romney’s virtual favorite son status – he owns a home on Lake Winnipesaukee, campaigned in the state four years ago, and governed neighboring Massachusetts for four years – is a big reason for this, of course. So is the underwhelming GOP field. Many of the party’s best prospects chose to sit out the race, while every non-Romney candidate who is running has proven incapable of building and sustaining broad support within the party, creating an almost meaningless struggle here between Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum or Jon Huntsman for third place.

But it also may be that New Hampshire Republicans have a problem that’s much bigger than one candidate and one election cycle – that this campaign is a mere preview of their decreasing relevance in future GOP nominating contests. As Jonathan Bernstein wrote on Monday:

If Mitt Romney, Jon Huntsman, and Ron Paul combine to take 80% or more of the vote, will conservatives seek to reform the nominating process by attempting to punish that state? The biggest complaint about Iowa and New Hampshire as the kick-off states in recent cycles has come from Democrats who object to the lack of ethnic diversity in those states, but a far greater problem could be that on the GOP side, moderates are overrepresented.

In fact, the Romney/Paul/Huntsman trifecta may not even need to do that well for conservatives to press this concern. The evolution of the national Republican Party has moved it further and further away from the brand of Republicanism that tends to do best in New Hampshire, and the trend isn’t likely to reverse itself any time soon.

Today’s national GOP is defined by a fusion of Southern-flavored Christian conservatism and Tea Party economic absolutism, with a hawkish streak on Middle East issues, particularly those that relate to Israel. In the 2008 primary and caucus season, 44 percent of GOP ballots were cast by people identifying themselves as evangelical Christians, a number that figures to grow in the years ahead. In the lead-off Iowa caucuses, evangelicals made up 60 percent of the electorate, just as they did in the South Carolina primary.

New Hampshire Republican politics, by contrast, are far more secular in nature. There are actual, bona fide moderates in the party here, and even conservatives tend to focus on economic issues and shy away from the culture warrior politics that play so well elsewhere. Plus, the state’s open primaries give wide influence to independents, whose influence can pull the party further toward the center. There’s also an unusually prominent paleoconservative strain in the Granite State GOP, one that rejects the “clash of civilizations” hawkishness that unites evangelicals and neoconservatives. In ’08, evangelicals made up less than a quarter of the state’s GOP primary electorate.

A generation ago, when the national GOP was more diverse and less aligned with Christian conservatism, this wasn’t a problem. In 1988, for instance, Granite State Republicans ignored televangelist Pat Robertson, who finished in last place here with single-digit support after nabbing 25 percent in Iowa. Back then, Iowa was considered the outlier, a place where the Christian right could leverage the activist-oriented caucus system to exert disproportionate sway.

But in the years since then, the national Republican Party has come to look more and more like the Iowa caucus electorate, and less and less like New Hampshire’s primary electorate. Which means that New Hampshire tends to use its outsize influence on the presidential nominating process to boost candidates who are out of favor with the party’s base while hurting those who aren’t.

This can have real consequences. John McCain, who remains loathed by many national conservatives, did not have to win the GOP nomination in 2008 – and probably wouldn’t have if any state besides New Hampshire occupied the post-Iowa slot. Conversely, Mike Huckabee might have had a better chance of parlaying his Iowa triumph into the nomination if evangelical-allergic New Hampshire hadn’t slowed him down five days later. And let’s not forget the highlight of Pat Buchanan’s political career: his victory in the 1996 primary, the only Republican primary he managed to win in two national campaigns.

This history is another reason why the stakes are so low this year. If Romney posts the comfortable victory that’s expected, it won’t hurt his campaign and will probably add to his national momentum a bit. But even though he’ll be the first non-incumbent Republican ever to win both Iowa and New Hampshire, don’t expect a rush by the party’s elite to crown him – at least not until a state that’s more representative of the national GOP base affirms him. And if, say, Huntsman ends up posting a surprise showing, it’s just as likely to prompt Republicans in South Carolina and other future contests to give him a second look as it is to convince them once and for all that New Hampshire’s verdict can’t be trusted.

This year’s results may or may not hasten it, but the desires of national Republicans make a confrontation with their New Hampshire counterparts over the primary season pecking order all but inevitable in the years ahead.

* * *

I was on “The Last Word With Lawrence O’Donnell” on Monday night and talked about New Hampshire’s increasing isolation from the national Republican Party and what it means for Tuesday’s primary:

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