By all accounts, Mitt Romney is on the cusp of wrapping up the Republican nomination for president. No doubt, there is substantial resistance to this from within the Republican base. Last Saturday, 114 evangelical leaders met in Texas in an effort to unite behind some alternative to Romney. They didn’t exactly succeed, but they managed to endorse Rick Santorum over Newt Gingrich. This was probably a result less of Santorum’s electoral prospects than of Gingrich’s serial adultery. Yet, buoyed by a strong, if shameful, debate performance in South Carolina, it is Newt Gingrich who is surging in the polls and threatening to postpone Romney’s coronation. Enter one ex-Mrs. Gingrich, whose interview with ABC News will air tonight. The country will hear about how Romney’s strongest opponent requested an open marriage arrangement, and was denied.

In some ways, the timing of the airing of this interview looks like the fix is in for Romney. Why, then, did Rick Perry drop out today an endorse Gingrich? It’s highly unusual behavior, but I think it can be explained.

Republican office-holders have two competing interests. It looks like Mitt Romney will soon be the leader of the party. He’ll take over the RNC. And his performance in the presidential election will impact all other Republicans on the ballot. If he does very poorly, some Republicans will lose their jobs. And, if he wins, he’ll have a lot of jobs to hand out. He’ll also have scores to settle and favors to reciprocate. These are all powerful reasons to jump on the Romney bandwagon while they still might get some lasting gratitude for doing so.

But the other side of the coin is maintaining conservative credibility with the base. This is more important for commentators and entertainers like Bill O’Reilly or Rush Limbaugh than it is for elected officials, but it’s just very hard for a Republican to come out for Romney when there are still more conservative alternatives available. This is why Sarah Palin is playing footsie with Newt Gingrich rather than rallying her groupies toward the inevitable nominee. It’s also probably why Rick Perry endorsed Gingrich.

Another way of putting this is that conservatives, who totally dominate the GOP, still cannot stomach the idea of a Romney presidency. They can’t make the case for Romney with a straight face. It’s not so much that they seriously think Santorum or Gingrich can win either the nomination or the presidency as it is that they want to postpone having to make the case for Romney.

We kind of saw the same thing happen with McCain in 2008, and to a degree with Bob Dole in 1996, but not to this degree. It shows that a gaping chasm has opened up between the Republican Establishment in Washington and the party’s base. It’s even more severe than that because the Mighty Right-Wing Wurlitzer made up of Fox News, talk radio, the National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the conservative blogosphere, are more aligned with the base than with the Establishment. The explanation is that they all have more of an interest in maintaining their credibility with their audiences than they do with helping Mitt Romney.

I believe this split would be more obvious if any of Romney’s opponents were credible opponents for the president. As it stands, anyone with half a brain in their head knows that the GOP cannot send Gingrich or Santorum into the arena against Obama. But they’re not allowed to say so. If they say so, they will incur a significant cost.

Imagine if the Democrats were running against a fairly popular Republican incumbent with the following list of candidates: Dennis Kucinich, James Trafficant, Maxine Waters, and Evan Bayh. Imagine how progressive opinion leaders would feel about having to argue to their progressive audiences that Evan Bayh was the only one with half a chance. That’s roughly analogous to what we have here, except that Newt Gingrich has never been to jail and Maxine Waters is a lot less abrasive than Rick Santorum. In this hypothetical scenario, a lot of progressive pundits would just refuse to get behind Bayh because doing so would require them to go back on everything they’d been saying about the Democratic Party for years. No one wants to be accused of selling-out, even if what you’re really doing is giving your honest assessment about the prospects for keeping the White House out of Republican hands.

So, on we go, with Republican groups throwing in with Santorum or Gingrich, with ABC News trying to wrap it up for Romney, and with the Establishment praying that it all ends soon before Romney is cut into ribbons and enters the general campaign as a political quadriplegic.

May the Democratic Party never become this dysfunctional.