Newt was on fire for a couple of weeks there, wasn’t he? Alas, the flames seem to be guttering just in time for Iowa. The Republican Establishment Fire Department, worried that the whole gated neighborhood might burn down, has deployed the big hoses. A possibly decisive dousing was administered earlier this week on page one of the Wall Street Journal:

Newt Gingrich voiced enthusiasm for Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts health-care plan as recently as five years ago, the same plan he has been denouncing over the last few months as he campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination. “The health bill that Governor Romney signed into law this month has tremendous potential to effect major changes in the American health system,” said an April 2006 newsletter published by Mr. Gingrich’s former consulting company, the Center for Health Transformation. The two-page “Newt Notes” analysis, found online by The Wall Street Journal even though it no longer appears on the center’s website, continued: “We agree entirely with Governor Romney and Massachusetts legislators that our goal should be 100% insurance coverage for all Americans.”

Quelle horreur.

A month ago, when it suddenly looked like Gingrich might actually have a path to the nomination, his mood grew mellow, his condescension grandly regal. Then came the well-financed tsunami of oppo that is washing him down the same water slide on which Bachmann and Cain went splash before him.

Newt does not respond well to nonrecognition of his world-historical destiny. His exit will not be pretty. He may act out. There is a certain wan dignity, though, in the fact that the “baggage” that is proving to be Newt’s undoing is not so much his rabbity love life or his lucrative, un-historian-like subprime lobbying as it is his past forays into unorthodox decency, such as recognizing that mass roundups and deportations of undocumented immigrants and their children is inhumane as well as impractical, acknowledging that global warming is a reality, not just a secular-socialist hoax designed to crush freedom, and (the latest news from five years ago) suggesting that medical care should be available to everybody—all hundred per cent, which necessarily includes even more of the undeserving, the improvident, and the ungodly than does the ninety-nine per cent.

(Also in the plus column for Newt: he has inspired a Loudon Wainwright ukulele ditty.)

Illustration by Tom Bachtell