Mitt Romney Has No Mandate

In his Washington Post column, Eugene Robinson says that the Iowa campaign proved what pollsters have been suggesting all along: Republicans just don't like Mitt Romney. Staunch conservatives simply do not believe he is one of them, Robinson writes.

Mitt Romney and his backers decided that to win in Iowa they had to destroy Newt Gingrich’s campaign. Now Gingrich looks eager -- and able -- to return the favor.

Romney got his victory, but it doesn’t feel much like one. It’s embarrassing that the supposed Republican front-runner managed to beat Rick Santorum by only eight votes out of about 120,000 cast in Tuesday’s caucuses. It’s troubling that Romney has spent the past five years campaigning in Iowa and still could draw just one-quarter of the vote.

And it’s downright ominous that Gingrich is threatening to do whatever he can to block Romney’s path to the nomination. If the sneering description of Romney in Gingrich’s post-caucus speech Tuesday is a preview — he called him a “Massachusetts moderate” who is “pretty good at managing the decay” — this could get ugly.

I mean uglier. Sometimes it seems as if niceness is Iowa’s state religion, but the way Romney and his crew took Gingrich apart was vicious. A pro-Romney political action committee, Restore Our Future, spent more than $4 million ensuring that Iowans couldn’t watch 10 minutes of television without being assaulted by an ad explaining why Gingrich was a scoundrel, a knave, a hack, a goon or -- shudder -- a closet liberal.

Read Eugene Robinson's entire column at the Washington Post.

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