Whether GOP establishment exists is unclear

LEWISTON, Maine - Against all odds, against all expectations, perhaps even against all reason, the Republican presidential nomination fight was centered in Florida last week and then moves to a hopelessly complex process here in Maine this week. It is a far different contest from the one Republicans conducted a few weeks, a few miles, and a political lifetime away, in New Hampshire.

Strip the cant from the 2012 Republican nomination fight and you have a front-runner who lost two out of the first three tests and now is barely entitled to the title; a challenger in the race to be standard-bearer of a family-values party who has had three wives and has almost no allies and many blood enemies in his own party; and another contender who lost his own state, considered essential to a GOP victory, by 18 points in his Senate reelection fight.

In the old days, a formula like that would be a summons for the political establishment to do something, or anything - step in to force implausible candidates from the race, step forward with a new contender, or step up the pressure to bring order to the proceedings. But none of that is happening, or is likely to happen anytime soon.

Is it possible that in the party of the establishment there is no party establishment anymore?

This is the Republican question that dares not speak its name, one that suggests that the character of a political party more than a century and a half old has shifted - startlingly, significantly - in the past decade or two.

Right now the Republicans seem to be avoiding the question, speaking obliquely of a party establishment but never identifying its members or even its inclinations.

Indeed, Newt Gingrich, who as a former House speaker would ordinarily be regarded as a charter member of the establishment, is plainly running against the establishment. "The establishment is right to be worried about a Gingrich nomination," he said on Meet the Press. "We are going to make the establishment very uncomfortable."

But here's the secret: There is no establishment to make uncomfortable.

"The old way of doing things in the Republican Party is gone," says former GOP Sen. Warren B. Rudman of New Hampshire. "The party is full of independent contractors, following their own instincts."