Rachel Maddow recently made some telling points about the Gingrich meltdown and about-face. Quite correctly, she analyzed the situation in terms of the two stages a candidate must traverse in order to get elected. He (could be she) must first persuade the party to back him by advocating positions calculated to appeal to the Party base, and then, having garnered the nomination, must persuade the national electorate to elect him by advocating more centrist positions with broader appeal. In Gingrich’s case, he immediately resorted to a moderate, centrist position on Medicare and Social Security eschewing extreme “social engineering” from both right and left. In so doing he contradicted the extreme right position advocated by Paul Ryan and subscribed to by Republicans in the house, thereby igniting a firestorm of opposition within the Republican ranks.