JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The revenge of the Republican establishment is a sight to behold. From one corner to another, those who have tangled with Newt Gingrich, who feel aggrieved toward Newt Gingrich or who fear Newt Gingrich have amassed to stop him.

They know how much harder it will be to do so if the former House speaker wins Florida on Tuesday.

The quintessential example of establishment angst came Thursday from Bob Dole, the former Senate majority leader and 1996 Republican presidential nominee. Hours before Thursday’s GOP debate, he released a letter, circulated by Mitt Romney’s campaign, attacking Gingrich and pleading with Republican voters not to make him the party’s nominee.

Chorus of critics

Dole is just one voice in a chorus of critics who have spoken out. Fear of Newt has displaced lack of love for Romney as the dominant emotion among these Republicans.

In recent days, the group has included former House Majority Leader Tom Delay, R-Texas, and the caustic Ann Coulter.

In his letter, Dole, who endorsed Romney in December, mentioned the former Massachusetts governor in the last of five paragraphs. The rest of the letter was an attack on Gingrich and a warning of a Republican debacle in November if the former speaker were to win the nomination.

“If Gingrich is the nominee it will have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state, and federal offices,” Dole wrote. “Hardly anyone who served with Newt in Congress has endorsed him and that fact speaks for itself. He was a one-man-band who rarely took advice. It was his way or the highway.”

1996 campaign

Dole lost the presidency in 1996 to Bill Clinton for many reasons, some of them of his own making. But among the reasons was the damage that Gingrich, as speaker, did to Dole and the party’s image in the formative stages of that election.

Harvard’s Institute of Politics holds a quadrennial conference at which top advisers to presidential candidates discuss the just-concluded election. At the conference in December 1996, Dole’s advisers talked openly about their feelings of near helplessness as they watched Gingrich steer the Republicans into a confrontation with Clinton, which led to a government shutdown, which damaged the party and cost Dole dearly.

“In my run for the presidency in 1996 the Democrats greeted me with a number of negative TV ads and in every one of them Newt was in the ad,” Dole wrote Thursday. “He was very unpopular, and I am not only certain that this did not help me, but that it also cost House seats that year.”

Friends and foes

Dole’s relationship with Gingrich, like those of many in the party, is not one-dimensional. He and Gingrich were able to work together on many things. When Gingrich was reprimanded by the House and fined $300,000, Dole stepped forward to offer to lend the money to Gingrich, who ended up paying the fine with other funds.

What is fascinating about the Republican race is that, in a matter of weeks, it has turned from the question of whether a stop-Romney movement would materialize to the reality that a stop-Gingrich movement has formed.

Those who underestimate Gingrich today were many of the same people who underestimated him as he crashed his way into the upper ranks of the party more than two decades ago. He may resent what the establishment is doing to him now, but he also may welcome the attacks as ratification that he remains a threat to established order.

Gingrich may lose this battle, and he could damage himself in the process. But he will not go quietly, and his old friends and enemies in the party know it.