After Mitt What Sane Leader Saves The GOP? There is None
After Mitt, Republicans will need a sane leader to drag them back to reality. Problem is, they don't do sane
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Could the Republican Party face an impossible Catch-22 when it comes to excising the crazy from their party? This is a party, after all, that has numerous candidates who are running for office on a platform of ending the direct election of senators. It’s a party whose most prominent voice in the media goes around calling women “sluts,” and one with a Senate candidate who talks nonsense about the biology of rape. Most notably, it’s a party with a presidential candidate who simply parrots back the party’s conventional wisdom (47 percent!) — and who sounds totally out of touch and not a little insulting to most voters. So what’s next?
Indeed, with Mitt Romney falling behind in the polls, there’s been a fair amount of speculation this week about the effects of a Romney loss on the Republican Party. The Hotline’s Reid Wilsonconcluded, for example, that “the fallout from a Romney loss has the potential to reverberate through the Republican Party for a decade” by pushing the GOP further and further away from moderate, voter-friendly positions.
It’s possible, but Wilson doesn’t mention the most obvious counterexample: George W. Bush. Should Barack Obama win, 2012 won’t look all that different than 1996, after all. A Democrat is elected president in the wake of a recession. Republicans storm back with a midterm landslide. The subsequent Republican Congress turns out to be terribly unpopular. The GOP nominates for president a “next in line” candidate whom movement conservatives neither love nor respect but who appears to be more electable than those they do get excited about. And then they lose anyway.
The result in 2000 wasn’t that they turned to a “real” conservative; instead, they went with Bush, who basically ran as a moderate — or at least a moderate who supported really, really big tax cuts. That’s the side of the equation that conservative writer Dan Larison emphasizes, and I think he has a good argument.
Could the Republican Party face an impossible Catch-22 when it comes to excising the crazy from their party? This is a party, after all, that has numerous candidates who are running for office on a platform of ending the direct election of senators. It’s a party whose most prominent voice in the media goes around calling women “sluts,” and one with a Senate candidate who talks nonsense about the biology of rape. Most notably, it’s a party with a presidential candidate who simply parrots back the party’s conventional wisdom (47 percent!) — and who sounds totally out of touch and not a little insulting to most voters. So what’s next?
Indeed, with Mitt Romney falling behind in the polls, there’s been a fair amount of speculation this week about the effects of a Romney loss on the Republican Party. The Hotline’s Reid Wilsonconcluded, for example, that “the fallout from a Romney loss has the potential to reverberate through the Republican Party for a decade” by pushing the GOP further and further away from moderate, voter-friendly positions.
It’s possible, but Wilson doesn’t mention the most obvious counterexample: George W. Bush. Should Barack Obama win, 2012 won’t look all that different than 1996, after all. A Democrat is elected president in the wake of a recession. Republicans storm back with a midterm landslide. The subsequent Republican Congress turns out to be terribly unpopular. The GOP nominates for president a “next in line” candidate whom movement conservatives neither love nor respect but who appears to be more electable than those they do get excited about. And then they lose anyway.
The result in 2000 wasn’t that they turned to a “real” conservative; instead, they went with Bush, who basically ran as a moderate — or at least a moderate who supported really, really big tax cuts. That’s the side of the equation that conservative writer Dan Larison emphasizes, and I think he has a good argument.
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