To the White House's delight, top Republican presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney may be cruising for a bruising fight to be the party's standard-bearer in the November 2012 elections.
"This could turn into sort of a reprise of the 2008 Democratic race, it could go on for a while," said Matt Dickinson, a political scientist at elite Middlebury College, referring to President Barack Obama's drawn-out primary fight with rival Hillary Clinton.
Democrats relish the prospect of a slug-fest between Gingrich and Romney, but Republicans say they don't worry that a protracted feud would leave the eventual winner in a weakened state to face embattled President Barack Obama.
Obama and Clinton "nearly gouged each other's eyes out" in 2008, but "the president won pretty easily," Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus told CBS television on Sunday.
Gingrich and Romney "probably agree on all the issues -- though they might not like to hear that," said John Feehery, a onetime aide to former Republican House speaker Denny Hastert.
"This is not really a philosophical brawl, it's more of a stylistic brawl," said Feehery, who is now president of Quinn Gillespie Communications. "Newt has got great ideas but he's all over the place. Romney is pretty colorless but he's very stable."
Gingrich, given up as politically dead months ago, has suddenly surged past long-time frontrunner Romney in Iowa with barely one month before the heartland state holds its first-in-the-nation nominating ballot on January 3.
The former House speaker has narrowed the former Massachusetts governor's robust edge in New Hampshire, which votes January 10, and is ahead of him in South Carolina and Florida, which vote January 21 and January 31, respectively.
"It's more serious than previous Romney, not-Romney manifestations," said Dickinson, referring to the way several conservative candidates have soared to challenge Romney only to flame out.
But Romney has the financial resources and state-by-state organization -- "money, boots on the ground, infrastructure" -- to stay in the fight through the March 6 "Super Tuesday" when voters in 10 states will apportion nearly half of the delegates needed to win the party's presidential nomination, he added.
"We're certainly flying by the seat of the pants," Gingrich told reporters in New York City.
Some Romney backers emphasize that Gingrich has missed the deadline to get on the ballot in some key states, and say their candidate is better positioned to draw independent voters who will likely decide the general election.
Still, Obama's re-election campaign has pivoted to address the new threat after months of treating Romney as the inevitable nominee and hammering him as a flip-flopper on issues like climate change or abortion.
"You're talking about the godfather of gridlock," senior strategist David Axelrod told MSNBC television.
Gingrich, a former back-bench bomb-thrower who claims the mantle of conservative intellectual, struck a soft line Monday in his first campaign television commercial in Iowa, promising to usher in an era of US renewal.
"Some people say the America we know and love is a thing of the past. I don't believe that," he says, amid images of uniformed Marines, fluttering flags, and gorgeous natural vistas. "We can and will Rebuild the America we love."
A rival Romney ad intersperses color television footage of Romney saying he has "the right answer for America" with somewhat austere black and white photographs of him at campaign events.
Analysts have pinned Gingrich's recent success on Internet appeals and strong showings in televised debates occurring with unusual frequency in this campaign cycle, enabling cash-poor candidates to get more media and public attention.
"The gamble that Newt is making is that the way politics has been done over the last 100 years is no longer valid," said Feehery.
"Romney assumes that the old assumptions are still valid, that you need to have organization to turn out votes," he added. "My guess is that Romney is right, but we'll see how it works out."
But Dickinson noted Romney has seemed stuck at 25 percent in public opinion polls, saying "people just don't seem to want to vote for him. And when that's true, all the resources in the world aren't going to get them to vote for you."
And the professor said the race remained volatile, with as many as seven in ten Republicans still not wed to one candidate.
That may offer a glimmer of hope to the other candidates, including libertarian-leaning Representative Ron Paul, who is running second in Iowa, Texas Governor Rick Perry, or a long shot like Jon Huntsman, the former US envoy to China.
"For Republicans, you want to get this right because you've got a real shot at recapturing the White House," said Dickinson.
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