George Kennan wrote two hugely influential documents.

The first was the so-called Long Telegram and the second was technically called Sources of Soviet Conduct but is better known as X, the nom de plume he used when publishing the article.

Here’s X.

Commentators are acting surprised that Mitt’s supposed strength among GOP moderates is not as strong as they had believed (and as Mitt had hoped) and that Newt is doing well with them. I don’t see why.

Since his fall from grace, Newt has worked hard to reinvent himself as an intellectual – the GOP ideas man. Like that other GOP intellectual, Paul Ryan, you can rightfully ask yourself, ‘What ideas have they actually had? Seriously?’ However, many folks believe it to be true.

I would suggest that is Newt’s presentation of himself as an intellect, someone able to go head to head with the brainy Obama on, is giving him much of that surprising strength among moderates Republicans who still feel a little burnt by the after effects of eight years of Bush’s intellectual uncuriousity.

As a corollary, I would say that it is probably too late for Romney to effectively challenge that assertion before Florida’s primary (if it drags on past that, he might be able to challenge it, though).

It turns out I was very wrong about the structure of the Iowa Republican Caucuses.

On the Democratic side, they are some fine points that tend to lead to extensive debate and several rounds of voting at caucus locations. Because it is a more involved process, a strong organization makes a huge difference for candidates.

But on the Republican, it is more like a straw poll. Maybe there are some impassioned speeches by supporters, but basically you drop your vote in the bowl and go home. You don’t need as much organization to make this work.

The point being that the advantage I previously Romney as having in his organizational capacity (he doesn’t have a big organization in Iowa, but he has more overall organizational capacity than anyone else) is a much smaller advantage than I had believed.

Consequently, Newt, for better or worse (and a number of Democratic strategists seem to be worried about a Newt candidacy), has a much bigger advantage going into the caucuses as the front runner.

He’s improved his fundraising and it running ads in Iowa. And if you watched the last Republican debate, the closing statements were telling.

Newt delivered the closing statement of a clear front runner. He spoke in a grand ‘we,’ the sort of ‘we’ used by a front runner who is already practically the nominee elect. It was a good bit o’ stagecraft.

Poor Mitt was uncomfortable (and my niece pointed out that it looked like he’d recently been to a tanning salon) and gave the closing remarks of a man fumbling for a strategy and trying desperately to convince folks of his ideological center (his theme was ‘free’ – as in ‘free enterprise’).

Don’t quite know what to think myself, but things just got a whole lot more interesting.

In another episode of  ‘a day late and a dollar short’ or ‘things I missed yesterday,’ I failed to remember and note that yesterday was the 56th anniversary of fateful Rosa Parks arrest on Montgomery, Alabama public bus for refusing to give up her seat.

This action (which was planned in advance by a group of Montgomery activists) set in motion the events of the Montgomery bus boycott, which also helped launch the Rev. Dr. King into national prominence.

Mitt Romney’s campaign is watching as their worst case scenario comes closer and closer to reality.

I can’t remember where I read it, but there was an opinion piece comparing Mitt Romney’s campaign to how his old, slash and burn takeover firm, Bain Capital, used to function. At Bain, Romney understand that in order to take over and loot a company, you didn’t need a majority share, you just needed a controlling share. While sometimes, that was one and the same, often it was not.

For months and months, it appeared that a ‘controlling share’ of the GOP primary could be had for much less than 50% of the vote. In fact, despite hanging around 20-25% nationally among Republican voters, Romney’s consistently had a pretty clear path to the nomination based on consistently getting one vote more than the guy in second place.

Of course, the cornerstone of this strategy was the fractured nature of the field. No one serious ever sufficiently cornered the market on the ‘anyone but Mitt’ vote to pose a challenge requiring Mitt’s team to reassess their primary election strategy.

Mitt’s handlers liked Cain because he was never a serious enough prospect to steal enough votes from Bachmann/Perry/Gingrich (Ron Paul is probably a unique case) to truly corner the anti-Mitt market.

They probably never really thought Gingrich would pick steam like he did. My guess is that they counted on Rick Perry unleashing his war chest to compete with Cain to get that anti-Mitt market for himself. They probably also counted on this not working, which wasn’t a bad bet. It’s a hard road from being a front runner who fell to fourth place back up to first or second. Not mention the fact that Perry’s campaign has consistently failed to seize any moment and there was no reason to expect things to be any different.

Instead, Cain has absolutely imploded (and is apparently talking to his staff about dropping out), Perry failed (as usual) to do anything useful for his candidacy and now Gingrich is getting very close to having the ‘not Mitt’ market all to himself.

Whatever you think about Newt, there is no way you can argue that Mitt benefits from having a mano y mano contest with a single Republican challenger. Not a poll in the world has shown Mitt looking particularly strong in that position. Instead, he was counting on never coming close to that scenario until he’d won enough early victories to already appear to be the de facto nominee.

Again, whatever you may think about Newt, the fact that he can make a legitimate play for New Hampshire, Mitt’s firewall, is terrifying to them in a way that even a Perry/Bachmann/Cain victory was not. And Newt doesn’t even need to win New Hampshire. Just a closer than expected second would cause a lot of the smoke and mirrors the Mitt campaign has erected to maintain that ‘controlling share’ to vanish in the morning sun.

Right now, Mitt’s team is huddled in their office, praying to Aqua Buddha that Rick Perry makes some sort of comeback and goes after Newt.

When I read this, not only did I feel some sense of relief reading (and believing what I read – it fits with what I understand of regional politics) about the long term geographic limitations of the Tea Party, it also struck a chord with some of my old studies in American history.

Professor Doenecke assigned a book called Albion’s Seed by a David Hackett Fisher which viewed colonial America through the lens of four different regions of Great Britain and how immigrants to America from each of these regions tended to cluster regionally in America, as well.