A new McClatchy-Marist poll finds Newt Gingrich is the strongest Republican presidential candidate when matched head to head against President Obama.

Obama leads Gingrich by just two points, 47% to 45%. Mitt Romney is next closest, trailing Obama by 4 points, 49% to 44%. Ron Paul is the third best bet for the Republicans right now, 8 points back from Obama, 49% to 41%.

No other Republican is within single digits of the president.

Ronald Klain takes issue with “data wonks” and their forecasting models and argues that election outcomes are not just the product of underlying fundamentals.

“First, the models’ seemingly objective factors are loaded
with ambiguity and interpretation that inject political
handicapping… Second, the models cheat by capturing the performance of
the campaigns and the candidates via backdoor measures… Third, and perhaps most important, the U.S. doesn’t hold
presidential elections often enough in a given time frame to
provide sufficient data to model the drivers of an election
result.”

Factors “such as the state of the economy
and the ideology of the Republican candidate will certainly
affect the president’s chances of re-election. But in the end,
how the campaign unfolds — the messages the candidates offer,
the campaigns they run, their performance on the stump, their
get-out-the-vote efforts and their debate appearances — will
make the difference. Candidates and their campaigns will dictate
the outcome, not calculators.”

Newt Gingrich said during a GOP presidential debate last week that he earned $300,000 to advise Freddie Mac as a “historian” and warned that the mortgage company’s business model was “insane.”

However, former Freddie Mac officials tell Bloomberg that Gingrich “was asked to build bridge to Capitol Hill Republicans.” They say he never advised management that the company’s business model was at risk and that the housing market was a “bubble,” as he claimed during the debate.

Mark Halperin: “If the press decides to pursue the angles, there could be six Newt enterprise/investigative pieces a day. If the Romney campaign decides it wants to take Gingrich down, there could be eight.”

“One of the Republican weaknesses is that we rely too much on consultants and too much on talking points, and we don’t rely enough on actually knowing things.”

–Newt Gingrich, in an interview with David Brody.

Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) reiterated her previous contention
that the HPV vaccine can lead to “mental retardation,” telling a voter
in Iowa on Monday that her child shouldn’t “have to live with the
ravages of this vaccine,” according to Ben Smith.

The Hotline
notes that Elizabeth Warren, the likely Democratic nominee for the
Senate race in Massachusetts, is “the biggest rock star candidate in the
2012 Senate races” and “riding a wave of enthusiasm inside the state —
one we haven’t seen with other top Senate recruits so far this cycle.”

The
proof: “While she raised 70 percent of her third quarter haul from
outside of Massachusetts, the, her total haul was $3.14 million, meaning
that nearly $1 million was raised from donors in the state. That’s no
small sum… The Democrat drew a crowd of about 1,000 people at a
campaign rally in Roxbury on Sunday, NECNreports. And, as the Boston
Globe notes, it’s not her first campaign event to draw a large number of
people. Warren has also held volunteer events that have consistently
drawn hundreds of people… Those are numbers even the presidential
candidates wouldn’t turn up their noses at.”

New York magazine compiles a slideshow of Newt Gingrich looking at people condescendingly.

In her soon-to-be published book, Core of Conviction, Rep. Michele Bachmann accuses former President George W. Bush of “socialism” for his 2007 decision to bail out financial institutions that were near collapse, ABC News reports.

Writes Bachmann: “The Bush administration, which had always professed faith in the free-market system, was now reversing its course.”

She says Bush and then Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson were embracing a kind of “bailout socialism.”

After Herman Cain’s bumbling answer on Libya yesterday, Daniel Drezner has had enough:

“There’s a mercy rule in Little League, and I’m applying it here — unless and until Herman Cain surges back in the polls again, or manages to muster something approaching cogency in his foreign policy statements, there’s no point in blogging about him anymore. I can only pick on an ignoramus so many times before it feels sadistic.”

With Newt Gingrich the latest Republican presidential candidate to become a frontrunner, First Read notes this “leaves just Ron Paul and Rick Santorum as the only GOP presidential candidates who haven’t enjoyed being the GOP flavor of the month.”

“Good news for them: We have still have two months to go. Of course, all of this volatility underscores the extent to which GOP voters are undecided, the extent to which Mitt Romney hasn’t closed the deal with them (at least not yet), the extent to which the debates have come to matter in the modern TV era, and the extent to which things can still change before the contests begin in January. And Newt’s current rise underscores how much can change — and how much people can forget — in just a few months.”

Stu Rothenberg: “OK, I give up. I don’t know what the heck is going to happen in the Republican race.”

Mitt Romney “veered into some talk about the political chessboard” at a Florida fundraiser, the St. Petersburg Times reports.

“Romney said after airing ads in Iowa for nearly an entire year during the 2008 campaign, he has not run any spots to date. Romney told the crowd his campaign calculus was that he could spend nothing and come in fourth or spend a bit and finish second or third. He guessed that Republicans could split the first three events, which would make Florida particularly important.”

“Romney predicted a Tea Party favorite would win Iowa and that he would take New Hampshire, according to interviews with six people in the audience. Romney told the crowd he would seal the nomination by then winning Florida’s Republican contest.”

A new Bloomberg News poll in Iowa shows Herman Cain at 20%, Ron Paul at 19%, Mitt Romney at 18% and Newt Gingrich at 17% among the likely attendees with the caucuses that start the Republican presidential nominating contests seven weeks away.

Key finding: 60% of respondents say they still could be persuaded to back someone other than their top choice and 10% are still undecided.

Said pollster Ann Selzer: “In Iowa, it’s long been a two-person race between Romney and someone else. It is now a four- person race between Romney and three someone elses.”