It was a chilly winter for Barack Obama, politically speaking. For six months, he and his party shivered under the avalanche that had buried them in November’s midterm election while Republicans disported themselves on the partisan ski slopes, pausing only to throw snowballs, some of them dirty, and warm themselves with nice hot cups of tea. Lately, though, there’s been a change in the weather.

Illustration by TOM BACHTELL

The barometer began to rise on Wednesday, April 27th, when the Hawaii state health department agreed, per the President’s request, to bend its rules and release his so-called “long form” birth certificate. “We’re not going to be able to solve our problems if we get distracted by sideshows and carnival barkers,” Obama said. “We’ve got better stuff to do. I’ve got better stuff to do.” What stuff? Well, by that Sunday, Osama bin Laden had been killed, in Abbottabad, Pakistan. By last week, Obama’s public-approval rating had reached sixty per cent, the highest since his sixth month in office.

But there’s an election next year, and the show must go on. Also last week, another barker elbowed his way into what used to be called, back when the Republican Party was still an ideological three-ring circus, the big tent. It’s hard to say in which category Newt Gingrich, who on Wednesday formally announced his willingness to be President, belongs as one of the fifteen (by our count) declared, undeclared, and mulling-it-over candidates on the list of G.O.P. hopefuls. Is he one of the Respectables, to be classed with the group of gubernatorial grownups that consists of Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, and Jon Huntsman? Or is he among the Eccentrics, who, though more or less presentable, are a bit too passionately intense about some ism, as in the cases of Mike Huckabee (too much Christianism), Rick Santorum (ditto), Gary Johnson (too much libertarian maximalism), and Ron Paul (ditto, way too much)? Or should we place him among the Implausibles? This category, the largest, most entertaining, and most alarming, takes in Donald Trump, the reality-TV star and man-about-town; John Bolton, the mustachioed warmonger; Charles Elson Roemer III, who once lost an election to David Duke, the Klansman; Herman Cain (no relation to Herman Kahn, John McCain, or Abel), the pizza Godfather, whose poll numbers are sufficiently high that, unlike “Buddy” Roemer, he was allowed into the first-of-the-season televised “debate” on Fox News; Sarah Palin, from Alaska; and Palin’s stunt double, Representative Michele Bachmann, she of the glassy stare, fixed smile, and curiously even intonation. But where to place Newt?

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As a former Speaker of the House, Gingrich has an ex-officio claim to Respectability, though the claim would be more solid if he brought better manners to the table. He has, or used to have, some charming Eccentricities (e.g., a boyish obsession with dinosaurs); the only ism that truly engages him, however, is Gingrichism, which doesn’t count. But what finally places him among the Implausibles—puts him in a class by himself, really—is the violence of his political language. Twenty years ago, he was urging Republicans to describe Democrats as sick, pathetic traitors. More recently, he has accused the Democratic Party of “behaving exactly in the spirit of the Soviet tyranny,” of being responsible for “the greatest political corruption ever seen in modern America,” and of advocating “euthanasia.” Obama is “the most radical president in American history.” His foreign policy is rooted in “Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior.” His Administration “represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did” and aims, oxymoronically, to turn the United States into “a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists.”

Then there’s the matter of “personal baggage,” which in Gingrich’s case is a steamer trunk of Titanic proportions. Republicans are strong believers in man-on-woman marriage, so it makes sense that three of their most prominent Presidential possibilities—Daniels, Trump, and Gingrich—have married eight times. (Only seven wives, though: Daniels married the same woman twice, with a Grover Cleveland-like four-year interval during which she left him to marry someone else.) Gingrich stands out, for hypocrisy (daily demanding Clinton’s impeachment while carrying on his own extramarital affair with a subordinate), brutality (dumping his first wife while she was in treatment for cancer), and chutzpah (attributing his adulteries to “how passionately I felt about this country”).

It seems likely that the eventual nominee will be one of the four Respectables, but none of them can get there without overcoming some departure from current conservative orthodoxy. Pawlenty once favored cap-and-trade; Daniels admits that taxes, or at least tax revenues, might someday have to be raised; Huntsman took a job, Ambassador to China, with the Obama Administration. Romney, still the oddsmakers’ favorite, faces the highest obstacle: his success, as governor of Massachusetts, in enacting health-care reform that has extended health-insurance coverage to ninety-eight per cent of his state’s people, including virtually all its children. According to a Blue Cross Blue Shield survey, “Romneycare” has the approval of two-thirds of the commonwealth’s population and is viewed by eighty-five per cent of its doctors as either improving the quality of care or having no effect on it. The difficulty is that it bears a striking resemblance to “Obamacare,” including a provision mandating that individuals get coverage. Last Thursday, Romney repaired to a college lecture hall in Michigan to explain himself. That morning’s Wall Street Journal had set the stage with a savage editorial headlined “OBAMA’S RUNNING MATE.” Unlike Pawlenty, who has repeatedly flailed himself for once having taken global warming seriously, Romney, who titled his recent campaign autobiography “No Apology,” did not apologize. He defended what he did for Massachusetts far more convincingly than he attacked what Obama has done for the nation. Since the two approaches are so similar, he necessarily had to put himself in the ridiculous position of pretending that a policy which in one state is a triumph for decency and “personal responsibility” becomes a monstrous collectivist tyranny as soon as you bump it up to all fifty. For Romney, inconstancy has been as big a problem as apostasy. His attempt in Michigan to solve both problems at once was the rhetorical equivalent of Steve Martin’s performance in “The Man with Two Brains.” * Maybe he’s betting that two are better than none.

The Abbottabad raid has, for the moment and perhaps for good, subdued any exploitable doubts about Obama’s fitness to be Commander-in-Chief. But eighteen months down the road the “bounce” he has got from it will be as dead as bin Laden. Barring some unexpected foreign or terrorist enormity, the election will turn on domestic issues. The Republicans have done the Democrats a favor by proposing to phase out Medicare and Medicaid as we know them while demanding further tax cuts for the wealthy. But much depends on the economic weather. If the snow is any deeper than it is now, the President is going to need an awfully big shovel.

*Correction, May 16, 2011: The movie that should have been referred to is “All of Me.”