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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The ads will apparently portray Romney as a job-destroying corporate raider and feature interviews with people who lost their jobs when Romney’s venture capital firm took over their companies. This poses two threats to Romney, an immediate one in the GOP primaries and potentially a longer-term one, with Democrats itching to caricature him the exact same way in a fall campaign.

At the moment, Romney has maneuvered his way into an enviable position in the GOP race. His razor-thin Iowa victory last week has elevated his national poll numbers to levels he failed to attain for all of 2011 and helped push him to a commanding lead in South Carolina, a state where he finished a distant fourth in 2008 and where his moderate past, Northeast roots and Mormon faith are all seen as particularly problematic. He’s also poised to score a comfortable victory in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, and despite (or maybe because of) Rick Santorum’s surprising Iowa showing, the conservative base is no closer now to uniting behind a consensus Romney alternative than it has been all campaign. If Romney can roll a lopsided New Hampshire victory into a South Carolina triumph, it’s hard to see how anyone will touch him on his way to the nomination.

But the pro-Gingrich PAC’s move is a serious curveball. A similar blitz aimed at Gingrich by a pro-Romney PAC helped cripple the former House speaker in Iowa, knocking him from the front-runner’s spot in early December to a distant fourth place finish with just 13 percent of the vote. The most recent poll has Romney posting his best-ever South Carolina numbers, with 37 percent. Rick Santorum was in second place in that survey with 19 percent, followed by Gingrich at 18, underscoring how Romney is benefiting from the split conservative base.

One question is how severely the anti-Romney ads will hurt him in the Palmetto State — enough to make the race close again? Or to cost him a first place finish? Or to push him lower than second place? It’s worth remembering that the anti-Gingrich spots in Iowa were amplified by an informal campaign by key Republican opinion-shapers to undermine the former speaker, so it’s unclear what was more devastating — the actual ads or all of the anti-Newt voices that suddenly filled the free media. It’s possible that those same opinion-shapers, or others like them, will rush to Romney’s defense in South Carolina and minimize the ads’ impact. Or maybe they’ll join the pile-on.

The other question is whether Gingrich will be the clear beneficiary of any Romney fall in South Carolina, or if Santorum (and maybe even Rick Perry, who is still running) will split the spoils with him. Santorum, after all, received almost twice as many votes as Gingrich in Iowa and may end up finishing ahead of him in New Hampshire. Gingrich says his goal is to slow the Romney train, telling the Christian Broadcasting Network that “the longer this goes on, the more clear it is how un-conservative his record is, the more difficult it will be for Romney to survive in this race.” On CBS Monday morning, he said it will be clear to Republicans in South Carolina that the race is a two-way contest between him and Romney.

Even if Romney survives, the ads could provide a nice fall blueprint for Democrats, who are already starting to draw attention to the unflattering aspects of Romney’s business background. In a way, then, the pro-Gingrich PAC’s move calls to mind an attack on the Massachusetts prison furlough program that a desperate Al Gore launched against Michael Dukakis in the final days of his 1988 campaign for the Democratic nomination — which was how Republican researchers ultimately found out about Willie Horton.

That possibility seemed to reach new heights in the home stretch of the Iowa campaign, when influential conservative voices — not to mention most of his fellow candidates — responded to the possibility of a Paul victory by essentially declaring him excommunicated from the Republican Party. It was easier than ever to imagine Paul, who has already announced he’ll retire from the House this year, deciding the process was rigged against him and using the Libertarian nomination as the ultimate revenge vehicle.

But the past week has offered something of a reality check. While the attacks haven’t stopped, GOP elites have dialed back their anti-Paul hysteria, partly because they are now more confident that his power within the party is contained (he didn’t score the breakthrough Iowa victory they feared) and partly because they are more mindful of the third party possibility. At the same time, Paul himself showcased the most compelling argument against waging a kamikaze mission this fall when he brought out his son to campaign for him.

47-year-old Rand Paul didn’t enter politics until 2010, but he’s already made national inroads that have eluded his father for his entire career. When Rand Paul ran for the Senate in Kentucky in 2010, he did so against the state’s GOP establishment but with crucial assistance from some powerful movement conservatives — most notably Jim DeMint, the South Carolina senator and Tea Party godfather. In posting a landslide victory in the GOP primary and winning solidly in the fall, Paul showed political savvy not normally associated with his family name, modulating his foreign policy pronouncements to ease the fears of GOP hawks and learning to market himself to a broader electorate that doesn’t share his ideological fervor.

By contrast, when Ron Paul ventured out of his House district to wage a statewide campaign in Texas, he lost by 57 points to Phil Gramm in a 1984 Republican Senate primary. With his quirky libertarian bent, Paul was a lonely man in that race, and the isolation he experienced helped push him toward taking the ’88 Libertarian nomination.

Ideological differences between father and son are virtually nonexistent, but Rand Paul may not face the same hard ceiling within the Republican Party that his father does. Nor is Rand burdened by the extremist paper trail that will dog his father for as long as he remains on the public stage. This offers Ron Paul a different, more meaningful way of enjoying the last laugh in his war with the party establishment: Stepping aside gracefully at the end of the GOP primary campaign and handing off the family political franchise to his son.

The logic is compelling. The Paul libertarian economic message is becoming increasingly mainstream in the Republican Party, as the growth in Ron Paul’s support between 2008 and 2012 attests, and long-term trends suggest the GOP will only move further to the right in the years ahead. In other words, if there’s an open presidential nomination in 2016, Rand Paul could be a major factor — starting with the base that his father now enjoys and expanding it in ways he never could. Or maybe he’d have to wait until 2020. Either way, though, it’s not inconceivable that Rand Paul could ultimately mount a successful campaign for the Republican nod.

But if the Paul name were to turn into the Republican equivalent of Nader, the fallout could threaten the inroads that Rand has made and his otherwise bright future in the party. Against this backdrop, Ron Paul’s third party dilemma doesn’t seem like one at all. He could run this fall, garner a lot of press attention, win five to ten percent of the vote and maybe keep Mitt Romney (or whomever) out of the White House. Or he could resist the urge and then watch with pride a few years from now when his son plays the presidential game for real.

Now Santorum had a chance to claim the role all for himself going forward, and he seemed to take a big step toward doing it when Rick Perry used his concession speech to all but drop out of the race, declaring that he would return to Texas to reassess his candidacy. By late morning, Michele Bachmann added her name to the casualty list, ending her candidacy at a Des Moines news conference. Between the two of them, Bachmann and Perry gobbled up 20 percent of the evangelical vote in Iowa, a constituency that looms just as large (60 percent of the entire GOP primary electorate) in South Carolina as it did in the Hawkeye State — and one that is key to Santorum’s chances of derailing Romney.

And as this was happening, money was pouring into Santorum’s treasury like never before. By the end of the day, according to the candidate, he’d taken in $1 million in new contributions — the same amount he’d raised for the entire campaign before today.

But somewhere around noon, the headaches began.

The first and biggest was the sudden, inexplicable decision by Perry (announced via Twitter that his own spokesman didn’t know about) to stay in the race. The Texas governor’s move came as a surprise even to his own campaign team and represents a clear and direct threat to Santorum’s effort to unite the right. Given his dreadful performance as a candidate and his awful showing in Iowa (ten percent of the vote and fifth place, despite millions in expenditures), there’s no reason to believe that Perry will come close to winning South Carolina, let alone the nomination. But if he used his remaining treasury to saturate the airwaves and replicates his Iowa finish, it will effectively deny Santorum badly needed conservative votes — and offer Romney a chance to prevail.

The early afternoon hours brought further disappointment for Santorum when Rush Limbaugh’s radio show went on the air. Limbaugh remains one of the most influential opinion-shapers on the right, the rare voice that the GOP’s Tea Party base seems willing to listen to. Limbaugh has been rough on Romney for most of the campaign, telling listeners that Romney “is not a conservative” and urging them to consider other candidates.

The resistance of Limbaugh’s audience is a big reason why Romney has been unable to crack the 25 percent mark outside of New Hampshire, and there’s little that Santorum would benefit more from now than a clear signal from the host that it’s time for conservatives to rally around him as their last best hope. But even though the clock is ticking and Iowa established Santorum as the most viable non-Romney option left, Limbaugh was in no mood to play along on Wednesday.

Instead, he praised Perry for staying in the race, talked up Gingrich’s potential to damage Romney in the coming debates, insisted that it’s still early in the process, and even mentioned in passing the idea of Sarah Palin jumping into the race. He had some nice words for Santorum too, but on the whole Limbaugh’s post-Iowa show didn’t offer the Pennsylvanian the kind of boost he’s looking for — and needs.

There’s also the Gingrich factor. The former House speaker is essentially embarking on a one-man payback mission, vowing to confront Romney forcefully on the campaign trail and in debates in the weeks ahead. Gingrich is motivated by his own Iowa demise, which was keyed by a barrage of attacks ads launched by a pro-Romney Super PAC.

In theory, Gingrich’s push could help Santorum by softening up Romney. But remember: Strong debate performances are what lifted Gingrich’s poll numbers in the first place. So if he steals the show with his Romney attacks in the upcoming debates, why should we assume that Santorum will be the beneficiary — and that Gingrich’s own numbers won’t instead rise? And the more that Gingrich and Santorum seem like equally viable options to conservatives in South Carolina, the better Romney’s chances will be. And if Romney can pull off a South Carolina win — even if it’s with an unimpressive plurality — the endorsement floodgates should open, just as they did for John McCain when he won the state by three points in 2008.

There was news Wednesday morning that a group of conservative leaders was looking to clear the field of non-Romney candidates and unite around a consensus choice. Given his Iowa success, Santorum would be the natural choice for this role. But the mood hardly seems unanimous on the right. Instead, some conservative opinion-leaders are already attacking Santorum as an apostate, and Limbaugh is even talking up how fun it will be to watch Gingrich do battle with Romney.

All told, Wednesday was not an encouraging start to the post-Iowa phase of Santorum’s campaign. He needs his conservative rivals and the right’s biggest leaders to rally around him in a hurry, but there’s no sign yet that they feel much urgency.