The issue: Where have you gone (fill in the blank)? The GOP turns its lonely eyes to you

Mainstream Republicans had to be dismayed by Monday’s candidate debate in Tampa, Fla.

Although Rick Santorum and Ron Paul say they’re in the GOP’s nominating race for the duration, they are increasingly nonfactors, leaving Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich to savage each other for the front-runner’s spot.

ROMNEY, WHO HAS been mapping his presidential bid for six years, seems curiously apologetic about two of his biggest achievements: becoming an enormously wealthy venture capitalist and the governor of Massachusetts, a largely Democratic state where he enacted a signature health-care plan that he should be bragging about.

For someone who is now basically a professional politician, Romney was curiously ill-prepared for the question of his tax returns, delaying their inevitable release until they had become an issue and a distraction.

When they finally became public, the returns only confirmed what everybody knew or suspected: Romney is extremely wealthy. His 2010 income was $21.6 million, on which he paid a ridiculously low (to the average taxpayer) but entirely legal tax rate of 13.9 percent. As an example of his tin ear, he claimed to have been “unemployed” in years when he was earning in excess of $20 million from investments.

Romney lacks the common touch, and wearing jeans and doing his own laundry won’t help. Maybe he should quit trying. Most Americans don’t begrudge him his money. He should, however, start aggressively defending his record as a venture capitalist because if he wins the nomination, Democrats most certainly will attack him from that quarter.

GINGRICH IS A throwback to the ’90s, a decade that did not end particularly well for him. Hilariously and implausibly, the former House speaker — who, as the saying goes, came to the capital to do good and stayed to do well — claims to be a Washington outsider. That is why Freddie Mac paid him $1.6 million.

Many of Gingrich’s fellow Republicans, especially those who served with him in Congress, think he will sooner or later become a victim of his own grandiosity and self-regard.

For the Republican establishment, this has to be a Mrs. Robinson moment: “Where have you gone, Jeb Bush — and Mike Huckabee and Mitch Daniels and Haley Barbour and Paul Ryan and Chris Christie? The GOP turns its lonely eyes to you.”

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