In my last column, which appeared right before Mitt Romney cruised to an easy victory in the New Hampshire primary, I rather confidently predicted that the GOP's political clown show was just about over and that the ever-flexible former Massachusetts governor was a lock for the nomination.

Oops! I need a redo!

In the wake of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's easy win in Saturday's South Carolina primary, it's clear that I and many other pundits underestimated the deep-seated revulsion that many in the Republican grass roots feel toward Romney. It's easy to see why they feel this way.

Here is a fat cat so wealthy and tone-deaf on the stump that he practically personifies the high-handed arrogance of the top 1 percent. He actually seems to think he can get the support of hard-pressed working people by dismissing the $374,324 he earned in speaking fees as "not much." After five years of campaigning nonstop for the presidency, he still hasn't figured out how to handle utterly predictable questions about his tax returns and his record as a swashbuckling venture capitalist. His ineptness is startling.

The simple fact is that for all of his flexibility on the issues, Romney is a stiff campaigner, who looks as if he belongs on Mount Rushmore but acts as if he's actually carved there. He does brilliantly when he sticks to the scripts that his high-priced speechwriters produce, but he fumbles when he is forced to extemporize. He can't seem to think on his feet.

He is, in other words, the perfect foil for a mudslinging, unprincipled, opportunistic, bloviating egomaniac such as Gingrich, whose new nickname could easily be "the Sleazy Warrior." Gingrich is the kind of guy who, back in elementary school, would have shaken down Romney for his lunch money.

To get their big win in the Palmetto State, Gingrich and his supporters in the nominally independent super PAC known as Winning Our Future came up with a brilliant rope-a-dope strategy. They figured that the more Romney was forced to talk about his controversial record as a corporate-takeover specialist, the more vain and out of touch he would seem.

And they were right. The centerpiece: "King of Bain: When Mitt Romney Came to Town," a lurid, 28-minute-long quasi-documentary about all the devastation and cruelty Romney supposedly inflicted on small-town Americans during his days as head of Bain Capital, a private-equity firm. Once Winning Our Future posted it on the Internet, poor Mitt was on the defensive. It didn't matter that the video was so full of errors and distortions that the Washington Post's Fact Checker column gave it four Pinocchios, its highest award for deception and plain old lying.