Since the first President Bush's re-election defeat some nineteen years ago, the GOP has given its presidential nomination to exactly two people that were willing to admit that they knew anything about anything. Those nominees would be Bob Dole and John McCain, and both of them drove the base insane.
I admired both. Dole remains one of my heroes, but I was deeply disappointed by McCain's political cowardice, both during after the 2008 election. When he was willing to renounce everything he previously believed because he was afraid of a half-witted huckster like J.D Hayworth, I could only conclude that the right guy won that election. It turns out that Ann Coulter was right and I was wrong, although for reasons very different than she gave at the time.
Actually having a working knowledge of how the government works and a realistic sense of the politically possible is actually seen as a detriment among the Republican activist community. That's why they whip themselves into a frenzy over politicians like Pat Buchanan (who I disagreed with vehemently in the 90s, but like and think is a smart cat), Sarah Palin, Michele Bachmann and the rest of the goddamn Tea Party.
From time to time, the party's base and the establishment will agree on a candidate like George W. Bush. Bush the Younger was an idea nominee for a party overrun with supply-siders and religious enthusiasts who believe that ignorance is actually a virtue. Of course, the first president with an MBA had a long and storied history of bankrupting everything he touched, yet making himself wealthy in the process.
Look, I'd like to see President Obama beaten next year as much as anyone else. My difference with the populist movement (and populism is rarely ever conservative) is over who can do it. In my opinion, there isn't a Tea Party candidate out there smart enough to go toe to toe with the president without embarrassing him or herself. And Paul Ryan's budget doesn't help, because it's politically toxic.
Obama's probably going to raise a billion dollars, and he's going carpet bomb seniors with ads that will poison them against any politician who wants to "modernize" Medicare while passing even bigger tax cuts than Bush did. How anyone feels about the particulars of the plan is immaterial. That's just how the politics will work. Anyone who doesn't recognize that Obama is smart and politically agile are not only kidding themselves, they're doing the lion's share of the president's work for him.
I think that the only potential Republican candidate that can get anywhere Barack Obama in the Electoral College is Indiana governor Mitch Daniels. He's smart, has an impressive record in office and, most importantly, puts the Midwest in play. Because of changing demographics, the Southwest is lost to the GOP, probably forever. Therefore, so long as Obama holds Indiana and Ohio, he's invincible. Daniels would almost certainly win those, plus he'd probably put Democratic strongholds like Michigan and Pennsylvania in play. And every nickle that's spent protecting Michigan and Pennsylvania is a nickle that can't be spent on holding Virginia and North Carolina. There's a pretty daunting electoral map that the GOP has to face next year and they'd do well to think of that during the primaries.
So which Republicans are getting all the media juice? Palin, Bachmann and Donald Trump, three people who can't win much of anything, if they even run. Even if any of them did, I don't see the Tea Party getting the nomination because the establishment that actually runs the party would do everything in its power to prevent it. As it is, I think that they'll go with historical trends and all but guarantee the nomination to Mitt Romney, who will lose badly to Obama.
Daniels is somebody, in my opinion, that both the establishment and the various Tea Party factions can agree on. More importantly, he's the only Republican with a serious chance of winning a general election. His biggest problems are name recognition and opposition from parts of the base.
Name recognition isn't as big of a hurdle as one might expect. Both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were virtually unknown when they entered the Democratic primaries. If a candidate is seen as a sane alternative to an unpopular incumbent, they can be nominated and elected. It doesn't often happen in the GOP, but there's no reason than it can't. Moreover, everyone in the national media at least respects Governor Daniels and knows that he's a serious person, which can't be said of any of the current Tea Party contenders.
Republican governors in the Midwest and Northeast are currently being crushed by public opinion. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, John Kasich of Ohio, Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania and Paul LePage of Maine - all elected by fairly wide margins just last November - are all upside down in the polls, with little chance of recovering in the near future. Daniels is almost alone in having reasonably high approval numbers. As of March, he was near 70% approval in Indiana.
The base, which drives Republican primaries, is a much tougher nut to crack. They may stand on their own orthodoxy, even it almost guarantees a debacle on the scale of 1964. I've been debating those people long enough to know that there's no convincing them of anything once their minds are made up.
Taking out an incumbent is a rare phenomenon in U.S politics. In fact, only five - William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W Bush - were denied reelection in the last century. Of the five, only one was a Democrat. And four of the five were beaten because of a divisive primary challenger or a strong third party on the ballot. Only Hoover lost absent one or both of those things, and it took the Great Depression to do that. If Obama loses, it will defy a century's worth of presidential history.
Most Republicans like to laughingly compare Obama to Carter, but they overlook that there will be no Ted Kennedy softening Obama up in the primaries, nor does the GOP have anything approaching a Ronald Reagan waiting for a general election. They also overlook that Obama is a much better natural politician than Taft, Hoover, Ford, Carter or Bush and that he'll likely be the best financed candidate in American history. In all probability, the president will outspend the GOP by ten to one. The American people have also never thrown out an incumbent president during a war, and the U.S is currently involved in three. If people like John McCain, Joe Lieberman and Sarah Palin have their way, there might be thirteen different theatres of war that America is engaged in by the fall of 2012.
Even under ideal Republican conditions, replacing Barack Obama in the White House is going to be much, much tougher than anyone currently thinks it's going to be. If you're wondering why serious Republicans are waiting so long to declare their candidacies, that has a lot to do with it.
The sooner the Tea Party and the GOP base recognizes and understands that history, along with the long odds they face in a general election regardless of who they nominate, the sooner they can decide whether they want a nominee they might with, or a modern Alf Landon or Barry Goldwater.
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