In his pursuit of a presidential nomination that a majority of his party’s voters clearly do not want to give him, Mitt Romney has been extraordinarily lucky. Aside from the sheer number of potentially formidable opponents who chose to forgo a run in 2012, the rivals he has actually faced each seem to possess qualities that cast Romney’s own shortcomings in a more favorable light. His authenticity issues, for instance, paled in comparison to those of Tim Pawlenty, who spent most of his brief campaign trying unsuccessfully to convince Tea Partiers that he looked good bellowing anti-government slogans in a tricorner hat. His ideological heresies, meanwhile, might be extensive, but unlike Rick Perry he has never told his conservative tormenters they didn’t have a heart because they disagreed with him. And while Mitt’s buttoned-up, Mormon persona is a bit boring and wonky, Herman Cain has done more than enough to demonstrate the downside of an exciting and unpredictable personality.

None of Romney’s opponents, however, have greater potential to make him shine in comparison than Newt Gingrich. That’s because Gingrich, the latest candidate to surge in the polls on a wave of anybody-but-Mitt sentiment, is the only candidate with a longer and more contradictory track record than Romney, effectively nullifying the most grievous charge levied against the former Massachusetts governor. Indeed, if Gingrich has a divinely appointed role to play in the ongoing GOP nomination drama, one might argue it’s to make Romney look like a piker when it comes to the art of flip-flopping.

Consistency is always going to be a problem for a pol of Gingrich’s rare vintage, who made his first congressional bid in 1974 when Mitt Romney was still at Harvard Business School. Indeed, Gingrich anticipated Romney’s moderate-Republican incarnation of the 1990s by more than two decades, serving as Nelson Rockefeller’s southern regional campaign coordinator in 1968 and then running distinctly to the left of his Democratic opponent in his first two congressional races.

But Gingrich’s most notable flip-flops have been far more recent and abrupt. Both before and during the United States’ intervention in Libya earlier this year, Gingrich seemed to shift positions constantly. And his double back-flip on Paul Ryan’s budget proposal—he was for it, then dismissed it as “right-wing social engineering,” and then endorsed it all over again, all within a couple weeks—nearly destroyed his 2012 campaign before it got off the ground.

The Gingrich flip-flop that plays most directly into Romney’s hand, however, concerns the former Speaker’s shifting positions on heath care reform. Gingrich’s early and strong support for the idea of an individual mandate (particularly as encompassed in a Heritage Foundation proposal for universal health coverage during the 1990s, but reiterated as recently as 2008) will be hard to ignore once attention is drawn to it. To the extent that it closely mirrors Romney’s own image problems over having enacted an individual health care mandate in Massachusetts, it reinforces the perception that this is a heresy conservatives can be forgiven for having once endorsed.