We Will Battle Obama With The Candidate We Have - Not The Candidate We Might Want (Updated with response from a senior Gingrich advisor)

Hearing the news that conservative “rising star” Florida Senator Marco Rubio has endorsed Mitt Romney, one could now say his nomination is a “slam dunk.”

That phase, you may remember, was famously attributed to CIA Director George Tenet in 2002 as he assured President Bush about the evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Now, Mitt Romney’s presumed “slam dunk” nomination reminds me of another infamous phase from that same Iraq War era.

“You go to war with the army you have—not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.”

That statement, uttered in 2004 by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was in response to a soldier’s complaints about equipment shortages.

So now it is time for a “teachable moment”.

Take Rumsfeld’s quote, revise it slightly, and apply it to Mitt Romney as the GOP 2012 nominee.

We will battle Obama with the candidate we have — not the candidate we might want or wish to have at a later time.

This statement should be the Republican Party mantra going forward.

For as Republicans, do we really have a choice?

Imagine a President Obama 2.0. His second-term sequel would be a disaster movie with the name “Unleashed.”

We only saw a glimpse of it this week with the Russian “open mike” incident and Obama is well aware that if re-elected, he will never have to face the voters again.

He will rule as much as possible by executive orders. He will find ways to do end runs around Congress, if he knows they will not go along. He will have at least one, maybe even two, Supreme Court seats to fill, and that will be his most enduring legacy.

The possibilities are endless how Obama 2.0 will find ways to trample the Constitution.

And who will stop him short of impeachment?

As a concerned American, I believe it is imperative that President Obama is defeated. Thus, Republicans must rally around Mitt Romney because he is the candidate we have – not the candidate we might want or wish to have at a later time.

Now all you disgruntled Republicans out there, repeat this quote twice in the morning and once at bedtime.

Trust me, you will feel better.

Update: In a sign that Mitt Romney’s opponents are not taking the advice I offered in this column quietly, here is an email I just received from Rick Tyler, who is the senior advisor for Newt’s PAC Winning the Future and an all-around Newt cheerleader. He wrote: