Even as the starting bell rings for the first round of the Republican presidential free-for-all, we’ve got a couple of anonymous Mitt Romney advisors coming off the top rope, aiming elbow smashes at Sarah Palin’s back.  They said she’s “not a serious human being” and “if she’s standing up there in a debate, and the answers are more than 15 seconds long, she’s in trouble.”

This childish and incoherent nonsense does a lot more damage to Mitt Romney than Sarah Palin.  What, exactly, are the criteria for being considered a “serious human being?”  Should she just give up her half-hearted attempts at humanity and drop dead?  I would think raising a Downs-syndrome child would earn her a certain degree of automatic credit for seriousness.  It’s certainly not the kind of thing a frivolous human being would do.  Romney should begin his campaign by firing anyone who maintains a Daily Kos diary.

The crack about fifteen-second debate answers is slightly more coherent, but utterly ridiculous.  Anybody who can rock a sitting Presidential administration with Facebook posts has nothing to prove to the faceless minions of a voiceless bystander to the ObamaCare drama.

The contenders for the GOP nomination will need to take some shots at each other, but they need to do it without questioning the very humanity of prospective candidates who haven’t even declared yet.  In case the Romney machine hasn’t noticed, Palin is popular with the Tea Party folks, who will be producing much of the grassroots energy during the 2012 election.  Slouching into agreement with the laziest media caricatures of Big Mama Grizzly is not going to impress them.

Let me offer Romney, and the other GOP contenders hoping to climb into the steel cage with him and Palin, what we’re looking for in a serious candidate.

This election will not be fought over the fine details of a few specific pieces of legislation.  It will not be a contest to find someone who can escort an unpopular Barack Obama from the White House, then trot back inside and continue shoveling trillions of dollars into the deficit furnace.  We don’t need a national CPA to provide a lecture on deficit reduction during his inauguration, then return for a State of the Union speech in which he explains spending cuts are pretty much impossible, while forklifts roll in with massive new tax packages.  We have no use for someone who thinks ObamaCare is an awesome machine that just needs a new transmission and some mag wheels to reach its potential.

We are about to conduct an election about the very philosophy of our government.  It is our last chance to avoid the Great Crash which Obama has brought to our doorsteps… but which would have lurked twenty or thirty years in the future even without him.  The Obama presidency has begun a fundamental transformation of the relationship between Americans and their government.  The groundwork for this transformation was laid over many years, by politicians from both parties.  Government bloat has accumulated for decades.  The State isn’t really changing all that much under Barack Obama.  It’s working to change us.

To reverse this process, we must reach farther back than the administrations of George Bush or Bill Clinton.  We are being crushed by engines of regulation, taxation, and corruption that were designed in the first decades of the last century.  We’re approaching the end of the story that began during the New Deal.  It won’t be good enough to merely rewind the tape a few years.  Even such a half-hearted measure, simply returning us to where George Bush left us, would be the most spectacular reduction of State power in our entire history… and it wouldn’t be good enough.

The Republican candidate for president must be determined and sober about the magnitude of the change facing us, but also able to draw strength from an enduring belief in the spirit and capability of the American people.  It’s not hard to be a “happy warrior” when you stand in the front ranks of such a mighty force.  Our candidate must understand the fatal flaws of Obama’s ideology, not just the weaknesses of individual bills he has supported.  A comprehensive knowledge of America’s socialist history, from inception to its current death throes, will be required.  The Republican candidate must be able to explain why individual Americans will succeed, where the State has failed.  It will be necessary to describe the love of liberty to a people who don’t universally share it.  They must learn to celebrate freedoms judged too dangerous for their feeble minds by the Democrat Party.  They must learn to focus their will against a leviathan State that has no intention of dying quietly.  Like Sarah Palin, they must be ready for their very humanity to be questioned, through dark insinuations of greed and racism.

We certainly do need some serious people to apply for the Oval Office job that will be opening in 2013.  Mitt Romney disqualified himself when he failed to speak out against ObamaCare.  Next, please.

Cross-posted at www.doczero.org.

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