…let’s posit a hypothetical to you.

Let’s say Gingrich falls further, Perry can’t make a comeback, nobody else gets in and the specter of Ron Paul as the Not Romney scares the Republican electorate stiff and Mitt Romney ends up the nominee.

Think it’s smooth sailing for him from there? After all, he hasn’t endured the media beatdown that Newt and Perry and Bachmann and Cain have. So obviously there isn’t much dirt on him for the Democrats and their allies in the press to dig up, right?

Yeahhhh, not really.

This is no hypothetical. This is our future, the minute Romney is the nominee….

What we see here probably helps Romney move to the center in the general election, since moderates are just as wishy-washy as he is and he can say he’s one of them. No matter; the Democrats will hammer away at Romney’s flip-floppery anyway because they know stuff like this will demoralize the Republican base which will then have to hold its nose to vote for him.

My guess would be that Romney wins anyway, because a good 45 percent of the population would vote for a rabid possum over Obama and Romney’s counterattacks on Obama might net him another six percent, and that’s good enough to win. But the idea that you’re going to build a groundswell of support and blow Obama out the way he needs to be blown out with this guy as a candidate simply doesn’t make sense.

Romney is suspect. Everybody knows he is. That’s why for all the difficulties the rest of the field has had, he can’t get above 25-30 percent. And it’s why Romney’s campaign and its affiliated Super PAC is spending a fortune on attack ads rather than building him up.

Look, if this is our guy we’ll support him. But he’s a weak candidate just like his people accuse the others in the field of being.