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For most of this election season, the conventional wisdom in Washington has been that the Republican Party would eventually "come to its senses" and select the lackluster Mitt Romney as its presidential nominee. The GOP electorate would realize that Romney is the only candidate who can beat President Obama, hold its nose and vote for him, and that would be the end of the game. Yet we’re four weeks out from Caucus Day in Iowa, and it is Newt Gingrich, rather than Romney, who is the Republican front-runner, and by a sizeable margin.

Now a new conventional wisdom seems to be congealing: That Republican voters despise Romney so much that they can’t think rationally, and will barrel ahead in a fit of anti-establishment pique.

As I mentioned a few days ago, the assumption that underlies both of these narratives -- that Mitt Romney is the only electable Republican -- is flawed. Regardless, I think both of these thoughts also misread the mood of the Republican electorate in yet another critical way.

That group isn’t behaving the way it does because it hates Mitt Romney so much. In fact, “tepid” would probably be a better word to describe Romney’s standing with Republican voters. Consider the latest Gallup poll. It finds that 54 percent of Republicans consider Romney an acceptable nominee, while 41 percent find him unacceptable.

Drilling down further, we find that conservatives actually find Romney more acceptable than do moderates. Fully 55 percent of conservatives find Romney to be an acceptable nominee, while 51 percent of moderates say the same. At the same time, 58 percent of Tea Party supporters consider him acceptable, compared to 51 percent of non-Tea Party supporters.

So what is going on here? I think Romney’s problem isn’t that Republicans dislike him. It’s that no one loves him. Think of Molly Ringwald in any number of John Hughes movies: She’s likeable, without major flaws, but always seems to have trouble competing with other girls who set the heroes’ hearts afire. In the famous words of Jake Ryan’s friend in “Sixteen Candles”: “There’s nothing there, man. It’s not ugly. It’s just . . . void.” Likewise, Romney is a kind of bland candidate who hasn’t been able to create a spark within the party’s electorate, but who also hasn’t sent them running away screaming.

The problem for Romney is that GOP voters desperately want to fall in love with someone. They’re yearning for a confident conservative who can reasonably be expected to don the mantle of Ronald Reagan -- a mantle that has quite frankly been gathering dust since Reagan left office in 1989. It’s the type of year where a conservative candidate who might be otherwise unelectable could get into office, and create major change in the country. To get back to our Molly Ringwald analogy, Republicans sense they have a once-in-a-generation shot with the captain of the cheerleading team.

The problem is that the major candidates to fill this role of cheerleader captain didn’t make the audition. Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan, John Thune, and Marco Rubio all took passes, for a variety of reasons. That left a trail of B- and C-listers: Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain.

Viewed in this light, the succession of “anti-Romneys” who’ve risen and then fallen in the polls makes more sense. It isn’t so much that these candidates were “not-Romney.” They just appeared for a time to offer the electorate a home run, as opposed to Romney’s bunt single. Bachmann offered social conservatives a true-blue candidate they could believe in. Perry offered a resume as a successful big-state governor with conservative bona fides. Cain offered straight talk, business experience, and outsider status.

Which brings us to Gingrich. James Taranto sums up the Republican affinity for the former speaker well: