Romneylans are highly confident these days.  The ex-Massachusetts Governor’s biggest cheerleader, our dear friend Double-H, is so convinced of the efficacy of Romney’s “win early, win it all” primary strategy that he’s already written off everybody except Giuliani and continues to insist that the GOP contest is already in the finals.

The aforetitled Brother Deacon takes note of good polling news for Romney out of Iowa and New Hampshire indicating that he’s holding his big leads in both states, which is at least mildly surprising for somebody that Meringoff primly describes as “largely less flakey” than Howard Dean.  I don’t know how equivalent that is to Jim Geraghty’s off-hand description of the Mittster as being “odd,” but I rather doubt Hugh will issue a fatwa against Powerline as he did the HillarySpot.

PM’s parallel of Romney to Dean comes in current hypothetical general election polls showing Hillary consistently walloping Romney.  He postulates that just as Chairman How’s scorched-earth 2004 campaign shattered on the rocks of Iowa out of belated fears amongst Donk primary voters that the former Vermont governor would go the way of George McGovern the following November, so the perception that Romney would be the weakest GOP nominee in 2008 could cause his squeaky-clean, neurotically over-strategized, “I’ll let my lawyers deal with a nuclear Iran” campaign to collapse at the starting gate, just like Dr. Demented’s four years earlier.

I’d prefer to remain neutral on this question, personally.  On the one hand, the way the nominating process is so ludicrously frontloaded these days, you can’t knock the “win early, win it all” angle.  Particularly for a comparatively obscure national figure like Romney, who has had to put a lot more into building name recognition than either Giuliani or Fred Thompson.  If Romney wins Iowa and New Hampshire, he gets catapulted to the fore nationally as both a winner and the perceived front-runner.  For a candidate in search of name recognition, that’s not a bad way to do it.

On the other hand, a cursory check of the polls in other early primary states shows two things: (1) Romney’s not close anywhere else; and (2) Giuliani owns leads in pretty much all of them ranging from considerable to crushing (which is consistent with his diametrically opposite strategy).  Would even the other early states turn on a dime after Romney actually had Iowa and New Hampshire in the bag?  Or is it his leads in those two states that are “wobblier” than they appear?

On the third hand, we’re talking about the same party that nominated Bob Dole in 1996, so estimations of Republican concerns with “electability” may be profoundly exaggerated.

There is, of course, a “third way”.  A candidate who does not risk a party-split over social issues (and judges), and a candidate who does a lot better in the hypothetical Hillary matchups than the Mittster.  The man who Hugh Hewitt obstinately chooses to ignore, and Brother Deacon acknowledges while failing to rightly ignore non-entities like McCain and Huckawhatsis.

Fred Thompson.

If nominating a “real conservative” who can win is still a Republican priority, that is.