... And So It Begins

When it came to favouring Republican nominees this year, I wasn't a Romney man. I was on the record as saying that I thought Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels would have been the smartest choice. Daniels is smart and has a strong record that could have been effectively deployed against an incumbent president. He was also smart enough to call for a "truce on social issues," knowing that the GOP would be hammered on them by a Democratic party that couldn't exactly run on its economic record.

Of course, Daniels didn't run. Smart Republicans tend not to when there's an incumbent Democrat in the White House. Under those circumstances, there's one likely nominee that make a general election sort of close and a cavalcade of unelectable mutants. This is what happened in '96, when Bob Dole's closest challengers were Pat Buchanan and Steve Forbes, either of whom would have lost to Clinton by at least fifteen points even if Ross Perot wasn't around to swallow 10% of the Republican vote. The last time the GOP put up a credible field of smart candidates against an incumbent Democrat was 1980, when Reagan, Bush, Dole, Howard Baker and John Connally all ran for the nomination.

Of the Republicans who did run for the nomination this year, I thought Jon Huntsman was alone in being able to beat Obama. I wasn't alone in this thinking, the President's political team thought so, too. And while Team Obama has been called any number of things, stupid generally isn't one of them. Unfortunately, Republicans aren't as smart as Obama and I, and Huntsman was ignored until he was forced to drop out.

That left Mitt Romney and a cavalcade of mutants, including Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann. As I've been saying in public for the last three years, Romney was the only acceptable potential nominee that at least kept the general election close. I never thought he was going to win or anything crazy like that, but he was pretty much the only person who would keep the GOP from suffering a testicle-crushing '64 style blowout. Romney would keep the Republicans defeat under five points and would at least allow them to hold on to the House. Sure, he would lose and everything, but he would let the party lose with some semblance of dignity.

Is the supposedly conservative Tea Party wing of the party, at this point consisting mostly of naive bloggers and idiot radio talk show hosts, grateful for this? No. No, they aren't.

We're still about five weeks from election day, and they're already rolling out the narrative on who to blame when Romney loses. Let's see what Erick Erickson had to say about this on Tuesday, shall we?

There are a lot of elitist Republicans who have spent several years telling us Mitt Romney was the only electable Republican. Because the opinion makers and news media these elitists hang out with have concluded Romney will not win, the elitists are in full on panic mode. They conspired to shut out others, tear down others, and prop up Romney with the electability argument. He is now not winning against the second coming of Jimmy Carter. They know there will be many conservatives, should Mitt Romney lose, who will not be satisfied until every bridge is burned with these jerks, hopefully with the elitist jerks tied to the bridge as it burns.

So they are in a panic. They are now throwing Romney under the bus to spare themselves. They are now doing the, “It’s not us, it’s him” routine. For years these people have gotten by knowing that they could hold the base of the GOP in contempt while holding on to their precious positions of “thought leaders” within the conservative movement and have no consequence should things go awry.

Not now. They invested too much in Mitt Romney and now they are running scared. They seem to think that if they cry and scream loud enough and point fingers at Mitt Romney, they’ll again be protected from any sort of blame. They think the conservative movement will give them a pass just as the movement did with No Child Left Behind, Medicare Part D, Harriet Miers, TARP, etc.

The staggering irony is that those of us who did not want Romney are now the ones defending him to the hilt while the elitist jerks are distancing themselves from Romney as quickly as possible — both upset at what their media friends tell them is to come and upset that Mitt Romney might not actually listen to their sweet whispers as much as they originally presumed.

I don't remember anyone who wasn't Mitt Romney saying that Romney was going to win this election. I do remember a lot of people like me saying that Romney was the only credible nominee that wouldn't be abjectly humiliated by a wildly unpopular incumbent.

I think that it's incumbent of folks like Mr. Erickson to tell us which of the GOP candidates were going to do better than Romney is now. The truth is that they can't.

Rick Perry spent most of the primaries seemingly not knowing where he was or why he was there. Fact checkers had to actually lay off Bachmann because they were afraid that focusing on every crazy thing that popped out of her mouth would give the appearance of explicit bias. I'm amazed that they didn't extend the same self-protective courtesy to Cain, who was similarly delusional. Gingrich is almost mythologically sleazy and famous for inventing "life-long principles" on the spot, only to renounce them ten minutes later. And Santorum was defeated for reelection to the Senate by one of the losingest politicians in the history of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania by a fantastic margin.

Once people like Erickson essentially disqualified Jon Huntsman from even being a Republican, they were pretty much stuck with Romney. I'm also leaving aside, for the moment, six decades of GOP nominating history that dictated that it was Mitt's turn. Look at the biography of every Republican nominee since Nixon in 1960. One thing you'll notice is that, with the exception of Goldwater and the second Bush, they had all run at least once before winning the prize.

Erick is being shockingly dishonest when he says that "There are a lot of elitist Republicans who have spent several years telling us Mitt Romney was the only electable Republican."

History tells us something a little different. The first people that made the electability argument about Romney were in fact folks a lot like Erickson himself, who championed Mitt Romney as "the conservative alternative to John McCain" way back in 2008. Way back when, Romney was the boy of the self-styled "voices of conservatism," ignoring entirely that he was only running for president because his running for reelection in Massachusetts was almost a mathematical impossibility and that his reversals of principle were a lot fresher then than they are now.

It doesn't matter that these people are consciously lying about their role in creating Mitt Romney as a national figure, they're very deliberately establishing a narrative involving imaginary "Republican elites" as being to blame for everything. The self-declared "party of personal responsibility" is very deliberately creating a fantasy that absolves them of any responsibility at all.

I don't know if I've said this in public before, but in a perfect world Mitt Romney wouldn't have been the nominee this year: Sarah Palin would have been. The Tea Party types would have their dream nominee and Barack Obama would have kicked her sexy little ass from one of the country to the other and back again. Sure, it would've looked like the original cover of Appetite for Destruction, but it would have left these people with no excuses.

In all honesty, I don't think that "elitist Republicans" (which, loosely translated, means "sane people") are going to have the juice to stop the Tea Party true believers in the 2016 primaries. I can very easily see the jihadi wing of the party punishing the credible candidates who stayed out this year, like Daniels, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie (assuming that Christie doesn't get killed off by Cory Booker next year) for leaving them no other option than Romney. It took Bob Dole twenty years to go from being a losing vice-presidential candidate to winning the presidential nomination, so you can effectively count Paul Ryan out in '16, even if the GOP doesn't lose the House in 2014.

It's not at all outside the realm of possibility that they exploit the "My Turn" tradition of the Republican nomination to push a psychopathic zealot like Santorum over the top. And Santorum will lose a minimum of 35 states to a politically inept plagiarist like Joe Biden, assuming that Hillary Clinton doesn't run and win 40. I actually think that's the likely scenario three and a half years from now.

And you know what? I hope that happens.

The longer it takes for these people to be discredited forever, the more the GOP marginalizes itself nationally. They singularly refuse to recognize that it was the Bush policies that they liked, such as Iraq and the deficit-creating tax cuts,  that were directly responsible for the party's near-death experiences in 2006 and '08. But for those policies, and the party's insane defence of them, Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina and Colorado would probably be fairly solid Republican states today.

Of the real swing-states in this election (as opposed to fantasies like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which Obama will win by at least five points and maybe ten) all but New Hampshire were states that Bush won in 2004. They started slipping away in '06 and were gone in '08. If the polls are even close to being right - and I believe they are -  Obama is going to win the majority of them this year.

Did John McCain run a terrible campaign four years ago? Sure. But that doesn't go even half the way in explaining how dramatically the electoral map has shrunk for Republicans in the last decade.

As I write this, Obama is seriously considering contesting Arizona and if he comes anywhere close to winning there, the bottom is going to fall out of the GOP's electoral prospects in a landslide.

To the extent that they exist at all, "the Republican elites" should take the next four years off and let the jihadis have it their way. To use an economic term, the "creative destruction of the marketplace" will take care of them - and their droolingly crazy nominee - in short order. At that point, the party can rebuild.

But if this nonsense carries on too much longer, there won't be a map left to rebuild with.