Newt Gingrich is a despicable human being. He divorced his first wife by bringing legal papers to her cancer surgery, and cheated on his second wife while leading the impeachment of Bill Clinton. His presidential campaign has pandered to the worst racist tendencies of the Republican base – by calling Barack Obama a “food stamp president.” And yet, I am ecstatic he won the South Carolina primary this weekend by a 13-point landslide – crushing presumptive nominee Mitt Romney, and further complicating the GOP field. Because if Romney had come out on top, the media would have written off Gingrich’s attacks on Bain Capital as ineffective – moving on to other issues, and ignoring the widening gap between rich and poor. Obama will be re-elected in November, and with no real Democratic primary progressives were going to be sidelined through all of 2012. But now, the Republican chaos has given the Occupy movement a golden opportunity to keep hammering away at Romney’s wealth – as the protracted primary season moves from state to state.

The South Carolina primary was particularly nasty and brutal, as is all too common in the Palmetto State. Recall Bill Clinton’s racially charged comments there in 2008 on Hillary’s behalf, or Karl Rove’s robo-calls in 2000 that alleged John McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child. Newt Gingrich won South Carolina this year by assembling a coalition of evangelicals and hard-core conservatives who despise Romney – and no doubt, the state’s Republican demographics played a key role.

But Romney’s problems with conservatives have long been documented. He is a former Massachusetts Governor who has flip-flopped on every issue, and hard-core evangelical Christians have never trusted him because he’s Mormon. The news out of Gingrich’s South Carolina victory is that attacks on Romney’s wealth became a prominent issue in the Republican primary – and actually took hold with voters.

On the day after New Hampshire, a Gingrich “super-PAC” began to air devastating ads in South Carolina – focusing on companies that Bain Capital acquired and fired its workers. When I first saw those ads, I was struck at how brutal they were – in a hard-hitting manner the Obama campaign would never have dared to go. I didn’t care about the hypocrisy of Newt Gingrich supporters making these kinds of charges – I was just relieved that someone was willing to go for the jugular against Romney.

With Romney’s refusal to release his tax returns, news he had offshore tax havens in the Cayman Islands and politically tone-deaf statements like how he enjoyed firing people and was scraping by on $300,000 speaking fees, a new narrative took hold of Romney – as a vulture capitalist that will no doubt taint him in the general election.

If Romney had eked out a win in South Carolina, Newt Gingrich (who had finished a distant fourth in Iowa, and fifth in New Hampshire) had been on record saying the GOP nomination would be over. But more importantly, the press would have taken Gingrich’s defeat as a “sign” that his attacks on Romney had failed to gain traction.

As the race moves to Florida, Republicans are in a predicament that will hurt them in November. A Gingrich victory in Florida next week, wrote John Heilemann in a must-read article for New York Magazine, will be a melt-down for Republicans that “make Three Mile Island look like a marshmallow roast.”

On the one hand, Gingrich's unfavorable ratings make him not just unelectable against Obama but also mean he would likely be a ten-ton millstone around the necks of down-ballot GOP candidates across the country. On the other, Romney will have shown in two successive contests – one in a bellwether Republican state, the other in a key swing state – an inability to beat his deeply unpopular rival.

Partisan Democrats are no doubt delighted, but for progressives the goal was never about re-electing Barack Obama. After all, he has failed to be the kind of progressive President he campaigned as, and after four extremely discouraging years will accept the Democratic nomination this summer at the Bank of America Stadium in a non-union town. The Republican sideshow was supposed to just be a contest for who could be the most Neanderthal, which the Obama campaign had planned to use as a right-wing bogeyman to keep unhappy progressives in line – trembling in fear.

Never in our wildest dreams could we imagine the Republican nomination fight as an opportunity to articulate progressive ideas – by hammering away against Mitt Romney’s wealth and his legacy at Bain Capital. Democrats may feel that Newt Gingrich has given them a “gift” by further complicating the GOP field and forcing Romney to pander to the right-wing base. But what he’s done is instead given progressives a “vehicle” to continue making Romney’s greed an issue from now until November. If South Carolina (a state with high unemployment), had stuck with Romney, it would have been a sign that these attacks lack potency – before a true narrative had taken hold and embedded itself in the American political psyche.

Thank You, South Carolina. You gave us hope for the 2012 election cycle …