I respectfully dissent from National Review’s Wednesday-evening editorial, which derided Newt Gingrich as not merely flawed but unfit for consideration as the GOP presidential nominee. The Editors further gave the back of the hand to the bids of two other prominent conservatives, Rick Perry and Michele Bachmann — a judgment that is simply inexplicable in light of the frivolousness of its reasoning and of the Editors’ embrace of Jon Huntsman, a moderate former Obama-administration official, as a serious contender.

The editorial surprised me, as it did many readers. I am now advised that the timing was driven by the editorial’s inclusion in the last edition of the magazine to be published this year, which went to press on Wednesday. The Editors believe, unwisely in my view, that before the first caucuses and primaries begin in early January, it is important to make known their insights — not merely views about the relative merits of the candidates but conclusions that some candidates are no longer worthy of having their merits considered. Like many other voters, I haven’t settled on a candidate. What I want at this very early stage is information about the candidates so I can consider them, not a presumptuous and premature pronouncement that good conservatives do not even rate consideration.

Regarding former Speaker Gingrich, I have no objection to the cataloguing of any candidate’s failings, and Newt has certainly made his share of mistakes. But there ought to be balance — balance between a candidate’s failings and his strengths, balance between the treatment of that candidate and of his rivals. The editorial fails on both scores.
Gingrich’s virtues are shortchanged — his great accomplishment in balancing the federal budget is not even mentioned, an odd omission in an election that is primarily about astronomical spending. His downsides are exaggerated in two unbecoming ways.

Let me preface the first by conceding that I am as concerned as anyone by the former Speaker’s walks on the wild side — though I think they are outweighed by his unique gifts. Like other conservatives, I was disappointed this week by his dig at Governor Romney’s success at Bain Capital — we can’t both fight to restore economic liberty and talk like Occupy Wall Street agitators when someone practices it. I accept Gingrich’s explanation that the remarks were a bad attempt at cutting humor — in reaction to withering taunts from the Romney campaign — and are not a reflection of his views. But he has to know that such outbursts exemplify his famed impulsiveness, giving his detractors a chance to say, “I told you so.”

Nevertheless, if the Editors were enterprising enough, they could just as easily write a similar editorial, with the same tone of alarm, about, say, Governor Romney or Governor Huntsman. Their heresies, too, are notorious — and their explanations no more satisfying. I am not suggesting that such editorials be written — particularly with respect to Romney who, like Gingrich, would make a superb president. I am just saying that it could be done. For the Editors to single out Gingrich for this kind of raking — particularly when his accomplishments in government dwarf anything his rivals have managed to achieve — fails the test of judgment conservatives expect from National Review. The transcendent mission of our founder calls for explicating principled conservative arguments about the great issues of the day, not “winnowing” intra-GOP primaries. I appreciate, as Jonah Goldberg recounts, that the magazine has made endorsements in some prominent contests throughout its history. In this instance, however, we are talking about clearing a seven-person field — eliminating strong conservatives, preserving spots for two moderates (and one solid conservative who is a very long long-shot) — before a single vote has been cast.

Romney has managed to weather the debates unscathed. However, the brittleness he showed when confronted with the kind of informed follow-up questions that Bret Baier tossed his way Tuesday on Fox’s “Special Report” — the kind of scrutiny one doesn’t get in multiplayer debates — suggests that Romney may become increasingly vulnerable as the field narrows.

Moreover, Romney has profited from the temporary rise and spontaneous combustion of Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry and Herman Cain. No exertion required on Romney’s part.

Enter Gingrich, the current vessel for anti-Romney forces — and likely the final one. Gingrich’s obvious weakness is a history of flip-flops, zigzags and mind changes even more extensive than Romney’s — on climate change, the health-care mandate, cap-and-trade, Libya, the Ryan Medicare plan, etc.

The list is long. But what distinguishes Gingrich from Romney — and mitigates these heresies in the eyes of conservatives — is that he authored a historic conservative triumph: the 1994 Republican takeover of the House after 40 years of Democratic control.

Which means that Gingrich’s apostasies are seen as deviations from his conservative core — while Romney’s flip-flops are seen as deviations from . . . nothing. Romney has no signature achievement, legislation or manifesto that identifies him as a core conservative.

So what is he? A center-right, classic Northeastern Republican who, over time, has adopted a specific, quite bold, thoroughly conservative platform. His entitlement reform, for example, is more courageous than that of any candidate, including Barack Obama. Nevertheless, the party base, ostentatiously pursuing serial suitors-of-the-month, considers him ideologically unreliable. Hence the current ardor for Gingrich.

Gingrich has his own vulnerabilities. The first is often overlooked because it is characterological rather than ideological: his own unreliability. Gingrich has a self-regard so immense that it rivals Obama’s — but, unlike Obama’s, is untamed by self-discipline.

Take that ad Gingrich did with Nancy Pelosi on global warming, advocating urgent government action. He laughs it off today with “that is probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done in recent years. It is inexplicable.”

This will not do. He was obviously thinking something. What was it? Thinking of himself as a grand world-historical figure, attuned to the latest intellectual trend (preferably one with a tinge of futurism and science, like global warming), demonstrating his own incomparable depth and farsightedness. Made even more profound and fundamental — his favorite adjectives — if done in collaboration with a Nancy Pelosi, Patrick Kennedy or even Al Sharpton, offering yet more evidence of transcendent, trans-partisan uniqueness.

Two ideologically problematic finalists: One is a man of center-right temperament who has of late adopted a conservative agenda. The other is a man more conservative by nature but possessed of an unbounded need for grand display that has already led him to unconservative places even he is at a loss to explain, and that as president would leave him in constant search of the out-of-box experience — the confoundedly brilliant Nixon-to-China flipperoo regarding his fancy of the day, be it health care, taxes, energy, foreign policy, whatever.

The second, more obvious, Gingrich vulnerability is electability. Given his considerable service to the movement, many conservatives seem quite prepared to overlook his baggage, ideological and otherwise. This is understandable. But the independents and disaffected Democrats upon whom the general election will hinge will not be so forgiving.

They will find it harder to overlook the fact that the man who denounces Freddie Mac to the point of suggesting that those in Congress who aided and abetted it be imprisoned, took $30,000 a month from that very same parasitic federal creation. Nor will independents be so willing to believe that more than $1.5 million was paid for Gingrich’s advice as “a historian” rather than for services as an influence peddler.

Obama’s approval rating among independents is a catastrophically low 30 percent. This is a constituency disappointed in Obama but also deeply offended by the corrupt culture of the Washington insider — a distaste in no way attenuated by fond memories of the 1994 Contract with America

My own view is that Republicans would have been better served by the candidacies of Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan or Chris Christie. Unfortunately, none is running. You play the hand you’re dealt. This is a weak Republican field with two significantly flawed front-runners contesting an immensely important election. If Obama wins, he will take the country to a place from which it will not be able to return (which is precisely his own objective for a second term).

Every conservative has thus to ask himself two questions: Who is more likely to prevent that second term? And who, if elected, is less likely to unpleasantly surprise?

Rick Perry stumbled through much of the last GOP debate, but not when speaking about immigration. He issued a clarion condemnation of critics of his state’s policy of giving the children of illegal immigrants in-state tuition to college. Such naysayers, Perry declared, lack “a heart.”

The Texas governor prides himself on his distinctness from George W. Bush, yet on this issue he sounds just like him: scolding his party for its lack of compassion for immigrants coming here to make a go of it. If Perry had wanted to avoid raising the hackles of Republicans with the imputation of heartlessness, he could have borrowed the staple Bush line: “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande.”

Neither, more relevantly, does the desire to find a job. What Perry portrays as the great US job machine in his state has mostly benefited people who aren’t Americans, according to a new study by the Center for Immigration Studies. This significant caveat to the Texas Miracle raises the larger question of why the country has continued to welcome millions of new immigrants during the last few years while shedding millions of jobs.

In Texas, the study finds, 81 percent of the jobs created since 2007 have gone to immigrants who arrived here since 2007. Ninety-three percent of these immigrants aren’t citizens. An estimated 50 percent are illegal immigrants. All of this may be further testament to the status of Texas as a jobs magnet, but Perry won’t be bragging about this indication of its drawing power.

In this same period, the native-born accounted for almost 70 percent of the population growth in Texas. They didn’t experience the same gains in employment, though. “The share of working-age natives holding a job in Texas declined significantly,” the study finds, “from 71 percent in 2007 to 67 percent in 2011.” In the second quarter of this year, the unemployment rate for natives in Texas, 8.1 percent, ranked 22nd in the country, and the share of natives holding a job, 66.6 percent, ranked 29th.

If providing ready employment opportunities for non-Americans seems awfully cosmopolitan for the man who is supposed to be a famous rube from Paint Creek, it’s the Texas way. The Lone Star State has always had a close relationship with its neighbor to the south. A wide-open attitude is good politics. In welcoming all comers, Perry can do the bidding of a business community that wants the immigrant labor and simultaneously appeal to the Hispanic vote. If anyone should think to complain that he’s soft on illegal immigration, well, that’s why God created the pointless gesture, isn’t it?

Perry can ostentatiously send Texas Rangers to the border and lambaste the federal government’s failures, but none of it matters if it’s relatively easy for illegals to find a job. Another border state, Arizona, implemented an e-verify system requiring employers to check the immigration status of prospective employees. It led to a dramatic reduction in the population of illegals, many of whom have, no doubt, decamped to Texas. So long as he doesn’t implement e-verify, Perry is shooting holes in the bottom of USS Enforcement and demanding that the feds bail faster.

It would be much too simplistic to say that every new immigrant employed in Texas took his job from a native. On the other hand, it would be much too Pollyannish to deny that there must be crowding out, especially of natives who don’t have college degrees. At least Texas has been creating jobs. The country has lost about 7 million jobs since the onset of the recession in 2007 and continued to import another 1 million immigrant workers a year, and 200,000-300,000 illegals on top of them. In August, monthly job growth ground to a halt, yet we’re welcoming some 100,000 immigrants a month.

Is it heartless to wonder why this makes any sense?

They did this to oppose Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s efforts to require public employees to increase contributions to their retirement and health-insurance plans, and to rein in their collective-bargaining power to negotiate for higher benefits.

President Barack Obama has joined labor’s attacks, criticizing Mr. Walker’s proposals as “an assault on unions.” According to news reports, Mr. Obama’s personal political machine, Organizing for America, was thrust into the battle, providing buses to transport striking government workers to the protests, mobilizing phone banks, and rallying protesters from nearby states.

Why is the president trying to bully the Wisconsin governor? After all, Arizona, Utah, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and West Virginia are among the states to explicitly prohibit collective bargaining for public employees, which is far beyond what Mr. Walker is seeking. The answer is found in four digits: 2012.

Unlike those states, Wisconsin is a 2012 battleground. Gerald McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, told a reporter from this newspaper last week that a union defeat in Wisconsin “can put [Mr. Obama] in some danger” of losing the next election. Labor spent $400 million to elect Mr. Obama in 2008: Mr. McEntee was sending a not-so-subtle message that unions would be unable to spend so generously on his behalf in 2012 if they continue hemorrhaging members and dues money.

And hemorrhage they have. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), last year alone 612,000 U.S. workers dropped their union memberships, each representing as much as $500 in lost dues. While labor is still powerful, its decline has been precipitous among private- sector workers. According to the BLS, just 6.9% of private-sector workers (7.1 million) are unionized, while 36.2% of public- sector workers (7.6 million) are. And the number of public-sector union members is rising.

The growth of public- employee unions has paid off handsomely for some. The BLS reports the average annual wage for a state-government employee is now $48,742, but $45,155 for a worker in the private sector. What’s more, the Bureau says the cost of benefits for state and local government workers has risen 50% more than those for private-sector employees since 2001.

This matters to taxpayers. Public-employee unions push to increase their numbers and get more benefits by expanding government’s cost and size. This often puts them at odds with the citizens who pay the bills.

Union demands have helped produce an estimated $3.5 trillion in unfunded liabilities for state and local government pension and health-care plans. They’ve also led to personnel practices that tie the hands of local elected officials, often resulting in perverse outcomes. For example, union insistence on “Last In, First Out” often means the best and brightest teachers are let go when districts downsize or schools close.

Wisconsin’s governor knows this firsthand. In 2003, during his first term as Milwaukee county executive, Mr. Walker faced a huge budget deficit. He could have either raised already astronomical property taxes or found savings in personnel costs, the biggest part of his budget. Collective bargaining tied his hands, and once unions refused concessions his only option was to fire people. He reduced the county government’s work force by 20%.

Seared by this episode, Mr. Walker now wants statewide local governments and school districts to have the management tools to avoid layoffs. Hence his proposals to limit collective-bargaining rights for benefits and to require public approval of pay raises greater than inflation.

Fortunately for Mr. Walker and others contemplating his course, there’s a lesson in the experience of Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels. Upon entering office in 2005, Mr. Daniels signed an executive order ending collective bargaining for state workers. This and other controversial actions caused his approval ratings to fall into the 30% range.

But by re-election time, Mr. Daniels’s decisions had paid off. The state’s finances were in good shape and Indiana’s economy was doing better than its neighbors’. While Mr. Obama was carrying the state in 2008, Mr. Daniels won a second term with 58%, proving that the right policies are often the right politics.

Events in Wisconsin have offered a vivid contrast between two chief executives. One (Mr. Walker) is taking meaningful steps to achieve fiscal balance. The other (Mr. Obama) is encouraging public employees to violate their contracts while his policies cause record deficits and reckless spending.

Let’s hope the differences between the two won’t be lost on Badger State residents or the rest of America.

Liberalism’s decline might appear, at first glance, to have begun with the 1961 inauguration of President John F. Kennedy—when historians noted the first glimmerings of what was to become liberalism’s distinctive trait, overreach. Kennedy’s soaring oratory was infectious and admirable and even impressed a later generation of conservatives. But it was a bit dishonest. There never was a missile gap with the Soviet Union, as he claimed, or any other cause for histrionics. On the domestic side, the oratory set in motion President Lyndon Johnson’s catastrophic War on Poverty.

JFK’s stirring language represented a break with the Burkean understanding of President Dwight Eisenhower. Ike, whether he articulated it or not, wanted to put the Great Depression and the dangerous confrontations of the early Cold War period behind us. He wanted to return to normalcy. Yet Kennedy’s inaugural put America on a different path, one that led to the Cuban missile crisis and ultimately to Vietnam. It fixed America’s stance in the world, and with that stance we were on the road to Iraq and Afghanistan. Domestically it set us on the path to a behemoth big government.

Still, in tracing liberalism’s decline, one cannot ignore an earlier event: the civil war that broke out in the aftermath of World War II. The conflict pitted what we might call the radicals led by Henry Wallace against the advocates of what Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. would call in his book, “The Vital Center,” more practical liberals like Hubert Humphrey, Joseph L. Rauh and Walter Reuther. They were hard-headed and patriotic, and their desiderata were reasonable by comparison with the radicals’ utopian ideas about the Soviet Union.

The practical liberals won in the late 1940s, but in 1972 civil war broke out anew. This time the radicals won. In the meantime, LBJ’s Great Society caused even some liberals to warn against the “unintended consequences” of government programs. These were to be the first new recruits to modern conservatism. Jeane Kirkpatrick, Irving Kristol and, for a time, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, were in Kristol’s words liberals “who were mugged by reality.” The radicals were seeking refuge from reality in a self-regarding fantasy. Only a crisis in the leadership of President Richard Nixon, Watergate, allowed them to hide from the American electorate their fantastic delusions.

Conservatives have had Edmund Burke and the Founding Fathers as their cynosures. Sometimes they have provided discipline; sometimes conservatives have followed their own star. The problem for liberals is they have been denied a cynosure. Some had looked to the British Fabian Socialists and some to Karl Marx, but since the late 1940s liberals became coy about their intellectual mentors.

From the Nixon administration on, the numbers have not been good for liberals. In 1972 only one state went for presidential candidate George McGovern, who even lost the youth vote. In 1976 liberalism did better, but Jimmy Carter ran as a moderate.

Then came 1980. Ronald Reagan benefitted from the ongoing electoral accretions that modern conservatism has attracted: the neocons, the evangelicals (aka the Christian Right), the Reagan Democrats. Liberals could claim nothing new.

During his eight years in office, Reagan changed the political center for years to come. As the Old Cowboy headed back to California, the political center was center-right: vigilance about big government, balanced budgets, low taxes and peace through strength.

In 1992, after 12 years of conservatives in the White House, Bill Clinton beat George Herbert Walker Bush. Yet he too ran as a moderate. Once in office he tried to push a big government agenda and was trounced in the midterm election.

The rest of Clinton’s presidency was defined by his pronouncement that “The era of big government is over.” The Reagan revolution was secured. In 2000, Clinton’s vice president lost to the governor of Texas despite prosperity and peace. George W. Bush won the midterms in 2002. Then came the Republicans’ wilderness years in 2006 and 2008—but not conservatism’s. Conservatives remained more popular than liberals by about a 2-1 margin.

Conservatism has steadily spread through the country since its larval days in the 1950s, and the reason is that the vast majority of Americans favor free enterprise and personal liberty. Note the tea party movement. The Republicans just took the House of Representatives by over 60 seats and gained six seats in the Senate. The social democrat in the White House has been routed.

Over the past two years the Democrats showed their true colors. Faced with an entitlement crisis, they rang up trillion dollar deficits. We now face an entitlement crisis and a budget crisis—and liberals have no answer for it beyond tax and spend. They still have support in the media, but even here they are faced with opposition from Fox News, talk radio and the Internet.

As a political movement liberalism is dead. They do not have the numbers. They do not have the policies. They have 23 seats in the Senate to defend in 2012 (against the Republicans’ 10) and Republican control of state houses and legislatures will give them even more seats in the future. Liberalism R.I.P.

People who remember the old comic strip “Peanuts” will recall an often repeated situation where Lucy offers to hold a football for Charlie Brown to kick. Then, as Charlie comes running up to kick it, Lucy snatches away the ball and Charlie Brown loses his balance and goes crashing on his backside.

The reason this same scene remained funny, despite how often it was repeated, is that in the later repetitions Charlie Brown would express suspicion at Lucy, recalling how she had tricked him before. She would then come up with some claim that she wasn’t going to do that any more— and of course she did.

There is a similar routine that has been repeated many times in Washington, over the years, with the Democrats playing Lucy and Republicans playing Charlie Brown.

It goes like this: Democrats start spending money wildly, handing out goodies to a wide range of people who they want to vote for them, while Republicans complain about deficits and the national debt. Then, when the public becomes alarmed about the debts that are piling up, the Democrats get the Republicans to vote for higher taxes to deal with the debt crisis, in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”

Sometimes the deal is sweetened by the Democrats promising to make spending cuts if the Republicans vote for higher taxes, so that there can be one of those “bipartisan” solutions so beloved by the media. But, after the Republicans vote for the tax increases, and come running up to find the spending cuts, the Democrats snatch away the spending cuts and the Republicans fall right on their backsides, just like Charlie Brown.

This old trick is now being unveiled by the Obama administration, like so many other old political tricks used in this “change” administration.

In one of President Obama’s many prissy little sermonettes, complete with finger wagging, he has declared: “Next year when I start presenting some very difficult choices to the country, I hope some of these folks who are hollering about deficits step up. Because I’m calling their bluff.”

There is already a bipartisan commission set to provide political cover for the Democrats’ wild spending that has increased the national debt from 63 percent of the country’s Gross Domestic Product in 2004 to 83 percent in 2009— and official estimates of more than 90 percent this year, with more increases in sight.

Why Republicans join such transparent attempts to rescue the Democrats from the political consequences of their own actions is one of the many unsolved mysteries of human nature in general and the Republican Party in particular.

What this political game boils down to is that Democrats get all the political benefits of playing Santa Claus to all sorts of groups and special interests, while Republicans who vote to raise taxes to pay for all this are cast in the role of Frank Nitti, the enforcer for the mob.

Many elections have confirmed that Santa Claus is more popular than Frank Nitti, surprising as that may be to some people.

Republicans are not the only suckers in this game.

The voting public’s willingness to believe fancy rhetoric and ignore hard facts is a crucial part of this scam.

When the Obama administration said that it could provide health insurance to millions of additional people without increasing the national debt, shouldn’t common sense have told you that somebody was just insulting your intelligence?

When the two thousand page bill was rushed through Congress too fast for anybody to read it, shouldn’t that have made you realize that you were being played for a sucker?

When this bill that was passed with lightning speed was scheduled to take effect only after the 2012 election, didn’t that suggest that they didn’t want you to find out how it works in practice in time to turn against Obama when he is up for reelection?

Recent polls show that a lot of people are against ObamaCare. But there are still a lot of other people, though not as many, who are for it.

Even more amazingly, there are still Republicans lured by the siren song of “bipartisanship” and apparently unaware of the difference in popularity between Santa Claus and Frank Nitti.