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?

On Friday, Pastor Robert Jeffress of the 10,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas took the podium at the Values Voter Summit to introduce and endorse Rick Perry.

Gov. Perry, said Pastor Jeffress, is a leader with “a strong commitment to biblical values” who defunded Planned Parenthood, that “slaughterhouse for the unborn.” He contrasted Perry with an unnamed rival.

“Do we want a candidate who is a conservative out of convenience or one who is a conservative out of deep conviction? Do we want a candidate who is a good, moral person or one who is a born-again follower of the Lord Jesus Christ?”

Perry thanked Jeffress for this “very powerful introduction” and congratulated him for having “hit it out of the park.”

By then, however, the pastor, having rounded the bases, was expatiating to an attentive press corps.

“Mormonism is not Christianity,” Pastor Jeffress asserted. Rather, Mormonism is a “cult.” The Mormons “embraced another gospel, the Book of Mormon, and that is why they have never been considered by evangelical Christians to be part of the Christian family.” In essence, Romney may be a good man, but he is not a Christian.

Saturday, Bill Bennett appeared. “Do not give voice to bigotry,” said Bennett. “I would say to Pastor Jeffress: You stepped on and obscured the words of Perry. … You did Perry no good.”

Romney took the podium to speak of America’s “heritage of religious faith and tolerance” and denounced those who would inject “poisonous language” into the political debate.

“Speaking of hitting it out of the park,” Romney began, “how about that Bill Bennett?”

The Perry campaign separated itself from the pastor’s comment about a cult. Yet Jeffress had expressed that view four years ago when Romney was running. In August, he partnered with Perry at “The Response.” His introducing of the governor had been cleared by the Perry campaign.

Hence, this episode was no accident.

As Bennett’s blast was being reported, this writer was in a green room with Pastor Jeffress, who was not backing off an inch.

Evangelicals have the same right to support fellow evangelicals as women did to support Hillary Clinton, said Jeffress. And a candidate’s religion is a valid concern, for what a person believes about God and man and morality and immorality will influence not only how he lives his life but the decisions he will make as president.

The view that Mormonism is a “theological cult” is not “bigotry,” said Jeffress, but the official position of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination and, after Catholicism, the largest denomination in the United States.

Why is Mormonism a cult?

Because, Jeffress explained, whereas Christ, God himself, is the founder of Christianity, Joseph Smith, a 19th-century American, was the father of Mormonism. And the Book of Mormon is not biblical revelation.

The political problem arises with the word cult. To most of us, it conjures up the Rev. Jim Jones ordering up the Kool-Aid in his Jonestown encampment or Branch Davidians burning to death in Waco.

Mormonism, however, is America’s fourth-largest religion and among its fastest-growing ones. In the leadership of the nation it is well-represented. If one judges a religious faith by the precept of Christ himself — “By their fruits shall ye know them” — it has produced more than its share of healthy and happy children and families and good and productive citizens.

The Romneys appear to be the very model of an American family.

Nevertheless, politically, this is no minor matter.

Herman Cain, rising star in the GOP firmament, has said Romney cannot be elected, as his Mormonism would kill him in the South. Pressed Sunday on what Pastor Jeffress had said, Cain said, “I am not going to do an analysis of Mormonism versus Christianity.”

“Mormonism versus Christianity”?

Romney’s faith may be the reason — though he is far out in front in New Hampshire — he has been unable to expand his Southern base.

In the candidates poll at the Values Voter Summit, Romney ran sixth with just 4 percent, while Ron Paul got 37 percent, Cain got 23 percent and Perry and Michele Bachmann each got 8 percent.

With the Iowa caucuses three months off and Romney’s being the man to beat, Mitt is likely to replace Perry as the “pinata” in the debates.

Social and moral issues — such as gay rights and abortion, where Romney’s views have evolved since he ran against Teddy Kennedy — seem certain to emerge as surrogates for the religious question.

In 2007, Romney gave an eloquent defense of his faith and the values by which he has lived his life. Today he would prefer to keep focused on his business acumen and how to create jobs in a private sector that employs 85 percent of Americans, where his credentials are matched only by Cain’s.

It is a good bet Mitt’s rivals are not going to accommodate him.

Liberals are trying to twist Ronald Reagan’s words to muster support for raising taxes. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s press office sent a memo on Monday to congressional Republicans claiming they’d found evidence proving that President Reagan was the real inspiration for President Obama’s tax-the-rich “Buffett Rule.” The California Democrat posed the question: “What would Reagan do?”

The correct answer is: He would cut taxes. Mrs. Pelosi’s memo sends people over to the liberal Think Progress website, where a video montage interweaves clips of Mr. Obama and Reagan saying apparently similar things about tax rates. “We’re going to close the unproductive tax loopholes that allow some of the truly wealthy to avoid paying their fair share,” said the Gipper.

You’re supposed to think that’s just what Mr. Obama is doing, but the liberals edited out the context of the 40th president’s remarks. In a June 1985 speech at an Atlanta high school, he called for a total overhaul of the tax system. He wanted loopholes closed to lower the tax rates for everyone, for a net reduction in the tax burden. Congressional Republicans point out that’s precisely the opposite of what the Democrats are now trying to do.

“One of the problems we have in the United States of America is what I call ‘revisionist history’ and obviously that’s something that Nancy Pelosi has taken a page from,” Florida Rep. Allen West told The Washington Times. “Ronald Reagan set the conditions with the right type of regulatory policies and tax policies that enabled this country to grow. And that’s what we have to do.”

Mr. West called the current president’s American Jobs Act, a “mini-me stimulus, and that’s the last thing we need.”

Fellow freshman Rep. Jeff Landry echoed the sentiment. “I’ve never known Ronald Reagan to employ class warfare,” the Louisiana Republican told The Washington Times. “I’ve always known him to be one that pulled America together.”

The Pelosi memo is chock-full of cherry-picked “facts” about millionaires designed to support their Keynesian economic fantasies. Americans for Tax Reform’s Ryan Ellis explained recently that many millionaires have income from investments that fluctuate with the economy. “During bad years, the very wealthy pay less because everything is tanking,” he told us.

Mr. Ellis pointed out that the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers saw their tax rates go down from 28.2 to 22.7 percent from 2000 to 2009 but their contribution has gone up from 16 to 18 percent of all income taxes paid in that same period.

It’s simply not true that the uber-rich are paying lower tax rates than many in the middle class. In fact, a typical middle-class family of four has a median income of $75,000 and shells out about 12.5 percent to the IRS – that’s 10 percent less than the rich guy.

You know liberals are desperate when they start quoting Ronald Reagan. As Reagan told the gathered students 26 years ago, his guiding philosophy was “freedom, freedom and more freedom.” That’s not the principle behind anything Barack Obama is doing.

Dan Rather opened a CBS Evening News broadcast in 1991 by declaring, “One in eight American children is going hungry tonight.” Newsweek, the Associated Press, and the Boston Globe repeated this statistic, and many others joined the media chorus, with or without that unsubstantiated statistic.

When the Centers for Disease Control and the Department of Agriculture examined people from a variety of income levels, however, they found no evidence of malnutrition among those in the lowest income brackets. Nor was there any significant difference in the intake of vitamins, minerals, and other nutrients from one income level to another.

That should have been the end of that hysteria. But the same “hunger in America” theme reappeared years later, when Sen. John Edwards was running for vice president. And others have resurrected that same claim, right up to the present day.

Ironically, the one demonstrable nutritional difference between the poor and others is that low-income women tend to be overweight more often than others. That may not seem like much to make a political issue from, but politicians and the media have created hysteria over less.

The political Left has turned obesity among low-income individuals into an argument that low-income people cannot afford nutritious food, and so have to resort to burgers and fries, pizzas and the like, which are more fattening and less healthful. But this attempt to salvage something from the “hunger in America” hoax collapses like a house of cards when you stop and think about it.

Burgers, pizzas, and the like cost more than food that you can buy at a store and cook yourself. If you can afford junk food, you can certainly afford healthier food. An article in the New York Times of September 25 by Mark Bittman showed that you can cook a meal for four at half the cost of a meal from a burger restaurant. So far, so good. But then Mr. Bittman says that the problem is “to get people to see cooking as a joy.” For this, he says, “we need action both cultural and political.” In other words, the nanny state to the rescue!

Since when are adult human beings supposed to do only those things that are a joy? I don’t find any particular joy in putting on my shoes. But I do it rather than go barefoot. I don’t always find it a joy to drive a car, especially in bad weather, but I have to get from here to there.

An arrogant elite’s condescension toward the people — treating them as children who have to be jollied along — is one of the poisonous problems of our time. It is at the heart of the nanny state and the promotion of a debilitating dependency that wins votes for politicians while weakening society.

Those who see social problems as requiring high-minded people like themselves to come down from their Olympian heights to impose their superior wisdom on the rest of us, down in the valley, are behind such things as the hunger hoax, which is part of the larger poverty hoax.

We have now reached the point where the great majority of the people living below the official poverty level have such things as air conditioning, microwave ovens, either videocassette recorders or DVD players, and either cars or trucks.

Why are such people called “poor”? Because they meet the arbitrary criteria established by Washington bureaucrats. Depending on what criteria are used, you can have as much official poverty as you want, regardless of whether it bears any relationship to reality.

Those who believe in an expansive, nanny-state government need a large number of people in “poverty” to justify their programs. They also need a large number of people dependent on government to provide the votes needed to keep the big nanny state going.

Politicians, welfare-state bureaucrats, and others have incentives to create or perpetuate hoaxes, whether about poverty in general or hunger in particular. The high cost to taxpayers is exceeded by the even higher cost of lost opportunities for fulfillment by those who succumb to the lure of a stagnant life of dependency.

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?