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Just over 10 years ago, the late, great Michael Kelly penned a column that had the nation’s capital in stitches. Kelly normally wrote about weighty matters of state, but he’d spent part of the summer of 2001 at the Jersey Shore, and had been appalled by what he had seen:

“I have been for some days at the shore, in the company of many of my fellow middle-aged Americans who are wearing not a lot of clothes, and I have a report. My fellow middle-aged Americans, we are some kind of fat. I don’t mean we are getting a bit thick around the middle, or that we are pleasantly plump, or that we are zaftig, or Rubenesque or settling into our bodies. I mean we are fat, fat, fat.

“It’s true: As a people, we have never been this fat. Probably, no people has ever been this fat. We are billowing immensities of avoirdupois, great, soft bins of finest quality lard, a nation of wide loads wallowing down the highway of life. We have thighs that look like sacks of Parker House rolls.

“We have stomachs that can shelter entire kindergartens from the glare of the noonday sun. Our bottoms dwarf the seats of our poor suffering chairs as the mind of God dwarfs the mind of man. We do not walk; we shake, jiggle and roll. We are Moby-Dick, the great white whale; we are Dumbo; we are countless refutations of the claim that no man is an island.”

This is the nation that Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney want to lead, that Barack Obama does lead. Perhaps Gingrich relates better to his fellow Americans.

Initially, Beth Miller and Jennifer Lundgren had been intrigued by how Mike Huckabee stressed his weight loss during his 2008 presidential campaign. They also followed closely the rough treatment accorded New Jersey Republican Chris Christie in his 2009 gubernatorial election.

Incumbent Jon Corzine had aired attack ads with the double-entendre that accused Christie of “throwing his weight around”; Newsweek had published an article asking, “Is Chris Christie Too Fat to be Governor of New Jersey?”; and Columbia professor Marc Lamont Hill said flatly, “He can’t win, let’s be honest. I’m going to say this -- and don’t get mad -- he’s fat.”

But Christie won, of course, a result that social science all but predicted, had any of us been paying attention. Newt Gingrich certainly has a substantial waistline -- Buddy Roemer recently quipped that he looks pregnant -- but he’s no Chris Christie. Moreover, in South Carolina, Gingrich defeated three thinner men, one of whom served in uniform, and who between them have the same number of marriages (three) as Newt. But a candidate who turned a question about matrimonial hell into a positive certainly isn’t sweating the fact that he’s busting the bathroom scale.

Perhaps Gingrich is taking inspiration from Rudy Giuliani. While campaigning for Christie in 2009, he shrugged off a Jersey reporter’s comment that Christie was “a big guy” by responding, “Yeah, but New Jersey needs a big guy -- you have big problems.”

In this election, by the way, the New Jersey governor is campaigning for Romney. If social science is any guide, voters might be responding to him better if Christie were campaigning for himself. And while too many Americans, fat or thin, go around quoting Shakespeare these days, one wonders whether, as he contemplates the South Carolina results, Romney thinks of the title character’s ruminations in “Julius Caesar”:

Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men, and such as sleep o' nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.