"What is it Gingrich is afraid his wife of 18 years is going to remember incorrectly?"

"And what could be so bad that it would eclipse all that many Christian conservatives have already forgiven and forgotten about his history?"

We already have Marianne Gingrich's 2010 interview with Esquire. WaPo's Melinda Henneberger summarizes them:

1. Newt actually started seeing his geometry teacher, the first Mrs. Newt Gingrich, when he was only 16....

2. Early in their marriage, she had to take over the budget "because it was too stressful for Newt."...

3. ... "You know what he hated most?” Marianne says. “When they talked about him being fat. That weight thing was personal."...

4. That after his Congressional career ended in scandal, he pretty much fell apart: "There were times... when he wasn’t functioning. He started yelling at people, which he’d never done before, and he’d get weirdly ‘overfocused’ on getting things done — manic, as if he was running out of time. He took to taking meetings while eating, slurping his food, as if he wasn’t aware or didn’t care how strange it looked."...

5. That he has lost his way and wants more than anything a lifestyle that’s “opulent” or “self-indulgent.”...

6. That he begged her to “tolerate” his affair with Callista, his third and current wife....

7. That his conversion to Catholicism "has no meaning."...

8. That he might go ahead and run for president anyway, because "he doesn’t connect things like normal people."

I've elided Henneberger's sloughing off of each of these items. She thinks Marianne will have to come up with something new and worse to destroy Newt. But I'm not so sure. Who bothered with the Esquire article back in 2010? The point is to throw this stuff right in our face now, when we're excited about judging Newt. To see the ex-wife's face as she lets this stuff out... it's titillating. We'll pay attention. We'll make clips of the juiciest seconds. The experience of receiving the tidbits will be entirely different. They don't have to be new tidbits to feel vividly new. Picture it.

Now, picture Mitt, a man with a spotless personal life. (And by "spotless," I don't mean to cause you to start thinking about that dog again. The worst thing he's ever done seems to be to have transported and cleaned his dog in a way that he believed was good but was probably not.)